What do normal people think about abortion? We know what legacy media think: that abortion should be safe, legal, and on-demand. But most Americans don’t believe you should shout your third-trimester abortion. Most would say that a first-trimester abortion is fine, but not a second- or third-trimester one. “At that point, people have a nursery, they have binkies, they have blankets, they have names picked out,” as even Democrat Tim Ryan admits.
This middle ground may not be what most pro-lifers want, but it signals that many people are persuadable, willing to recognize the humanity of the unborn at all stages. A great example of this just came from an unlikely source: the Netflix reality show Love is Blind.
ANNE HATHAWAY’S ABORTION RAMBLINGS ARE UNORIGINAL AND UNSERIOUS
This isn’t the first time the show has aired a tough conversation about abortion. In season one, one contestant admitted that she had an abortion — and the aftermath sent her into a depression that her boyfriend didn’t understand.
“It was really the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through in my life,” she says. “It’s not exactly something that’s like — I’m proud of.”
Now on season three, the show is still setting up potential couples on blind dates — they don’t see each other until they’ve chosen to get married — and capturing some surprisingly serious conversations.
Nancy and Bartise, one such couple, are back to their real lives and having conversations about children (a little late, perhaps, but this is reality TV). Nancy says that she can’t wait too long: At age 31, she runs an increased risk of pregnancy complications as time goes by. In light of this very real possibility, she asks her fiance, “What would you do if you found out that, like, your child had a birth defect and you could abort the pregnancy?”
Bartise is immediately horrified. “F*** no, yeah, keep the baby, what the f***,” he says. “Yeah, I could not. F*** no.” Whether the baby was a boy, a girl, or transgender, he says, “I just want to love that kid no matter what.”
But when Nancy asks for his opinion on unplanned pregnancies, Bartise’s line in the sand gets a little blurred. If you’re young and not financially ready and it’s going to be a “terrible situation,” he says, you get one pass. “But you can’t do it again.”
Bartise might fall among a group that the Institute for Pro-Life Advancement refers to as “the moveable middle men.” These men’s positions on abortion are moderate, characterized by a desire to avoid the conflict of both extremes on the abortion issue. The institute, which is an initiative of Students for Life of America, studied centrist men aged 20-34 over the past couple of years to peel back their opinions on abortion.
The survey found that these men would use phrases such as “necessary evil” to describe abortion, seeing it sometimes as a solution but not as an unmitigated good. “There were certain points,” the study found, “such as having multiple abortions or late-term abortions, when these men found abortion to be inexcusable.”
This portion of the population isn’t going to be swayed by rhetoric about “baby killers.” But they might be pushed further toward the pro-life side by positive appeals that focus on duty and protection, according to the study. While Bartise’s perspective on abortion may not be exactly consistent, it does come from a heartfelt place — one that’s much easier to argue with than the pro-abortion extreme.
During their conversation on abortion, Nancy acknowledges, rightly, that “I don’t think there’s just like a number that you can just say, like, ‘Oh, one time to f*** up.’” But her reasoning is wrong: “I think I have no say in, like, anyone’s body. If you need to have an abortion for whatever XYZ reason, have it.”
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She represents the pro-abortion extreme held by the legacy media and most Democratic politicians. To say that there are times when abortion would be wrong — in the third trimester, because the baby might have a disability, or simply because the baby wasn’t planned — would be to restrict women’s autonomy, and as we know from the moral philosopher Anne Hathaway, flexibility “is what we need in order to be human.”
It may be very difficult to persuade people who are wrapped up in the mainstream narrative that abortion at all points and for all reasons is fine. But most people don’t believe that. Most people have enough common sense to recognize that a baby is a baby, a unique person with a heartbeat and rights, and an appeal to the nebulous idea of “women’s autonomy” just doesn’t hold up when a child’s life is on the line.
