As I sat at my desk reading a recent Teen Vogue article titled, “Lady Parts Justice League Fights Anti-Abortion Stigma with Humor,” my eyes fill with tears of frustration. Anger courses through my veins as I force myself to finish reading this ridiculous piece by Solange Azor.
I want to understand: What is the purpose and goal of the Lady Parts Justice League, or LPJL?
My conclusion: The goal is to normalize abortion at any stage and for any reason by using humor to ease the tension and emotional trauma that comes hand in hand with the hardest decision of a woman’s life. But there’s a reason abortion jokes aren’t funny. The taking of nascent human life is no laughing matter.
In 1997, my mother was 19 years old, on a path to throwing her life away. She found herself impregnated by a man she barely knew, who denied paternity. Her parents shunned her in extreme disappointment and urged her to have an abortion, because she would be unable to care for me.
My mom thought her mind was made up. She thought abortion was her only option. Our nation has made it so easy for vulnerable and hurting women to walk into an abortion clinic without knowing their options.
As it happened, a good Samaritan brought the truth into my mom’s life and helped save me, so that I’m here writing this today. But the reality of how close I was to never experiencing life outside the womb is something with which I still wrestle.
Coming from my perspective, the Lady Parts Justice League represents a rather transparent attempt to make the murder of an unborn, innocent child into a casual joke. Azor informs us that the LPJL not only believes that abortion should be legal but that it should also be widely socially accepted, regardless of the reason behind it. But abortion is not socially accepted in this way, despite decades of strenuous efforts by its biggest advocates to make it so. And there’s a good reason for that.
One of the most common pro-choice opinions is what I refer to as the “cosmic shrug.” This is when a woman says she is “socially pro-choice and personally pro-life.” That isn’t good enough for LPJL. They want abortion to be seen as just another routine medical procedure, like having your tonsils removed. LPJL uses tactics such as throwing barbecues and parties to celebrate abortion and creating fake abortion clinics to draw in protesters. They use memes to promote their “Vagical Mystery Tour,” which went to 16 U.S. cities last summer. It’s all very sad.
Abortion kills an actual human being who has rights and potential. This is why even most advocates of legal abortion view it as a necessary evil, not as something good or fun or humorous.
Abortion isn’t a joke. To refer to it as a laughing matter disrespects not only women but all human life. We wouldn’t dare laugh at a woman who miscarried when six months pregnant. So why are we making light of an unborn child’s life being taken away for any reason?
It would have been very easy for my mother to go to an abortion clinic and make the decision to end my life just because hers had become hard. My mom’s mind was made up, because she didn’t know that there was any other option for her. It took one phone call from one person to give my mom the strength she needed to choose life and to raise me. Here I am, 20 years later, and I couldn’t be more thankful.
If you ask my mom, saving my life saved hers. My birth is the reason she turned her life around and became a loving mother, kind daughter, and contributing member of society.
With all the joy that my birth brought her, my mom always carried the guilt that she almost ended my life before I even got a chance to see the world. When I found out three years ago, it changed my entire perspective on the topic of abortion. It opened my eyes to the suddenly real and painful repercussions of abortion and how so many people’s lives would look completely different if I wasn’t born.
For 17 years, my mom struggled to forgive herself for almost aborting me. My self-confidence suffered because of it for a prolonged time. I felt that my life wasn’t worth anything to the most important people in my life. The long-term mental impact is something my mom and I are still working through today.
It was not a blessing or a gift that my mother was offered an easy, no-strings option to end my life. It is not a joke that some people believed that I should not be born. It is not comical that unborn children are being denied that right every day.
The second line of Azor’s article reads, “Yes, abortion can be funny.” As a pro-life woman and a survivor of the abortion epidemic plaguing our country, I am here to inform you that no one is laughing.
Lillian Knight serves as president for Young Women for America of Louisiana State University.
