No, It’s Not ‘Forced Pregnancy’

Progressives love to abuse language. They employ euphemisms all the time to mask ideas and policies the public would otherwise find unpalatable. The more depraved an idea, the more necessary it is to coat it in seemingly righteous terms.

Global Communism, the destruction of Christian values, and mass murder would prove a difficult sell if they weren’t cloaked in the language of social justice. That’s why we’re not debating Marxism, but seemingly ‘novel’ ideas, such as Climate Change, Black Lives Matter, Equality, Pro-Choice, and Euthanasia.

The latest favourite in the Progressive dictionary of language abuse is “forced pregnancy.” Since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, the slogan has been used to malign anti-abortionists and any legislation that seemingly threatens to undermine existing abortion laws. In effect, pro-aborts are accusing their opponents of violating a woman’s bodily autonomy by intruding into her personal medical choices.

“Forced pregnancy is a crime against humanity,” tweeted Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

But here’s the thing, nobody in this space is in favour of forced pregnancies. And these Progressive types know it. True to form, they’ve dishonestly reframed their position in terms we all generally agree on. Nobody believes a woman should be forcibly impregnated. We have a name for that sort of thing, rape. What’s more, rape is already a crime, and no one has suggested anything about repealing laws prohibiting the forceful impregnation of women.

Of course, this is not what they mean by “forced pregnancy.” Most people understand that when a man rapes a woman, and she becomes pregnant as a result, it is the rapist who has “forced” pregnancy on his first victim. I say, “first victim” because in the case of “forced pregnancies,” there are always two victims. The first victim is the innocent woman. The second is the innocent child.

As such, it’s not just the sexual act the rapist has forced onto the woman, but motherhood. From this point on, his victim will be the mother of a child, whether that child is living or dead. What pro-aborts are in fact arguing in favour of is the right of the first victim to kill the second for the crimes of an entirely different human being.

What the debate comes down to is whether a woman’s supposed “right” not to be pregnant trumps another person’s right not to be murdered. I say supposed “right” because rights are conferred by God, to be recognized by the civil government. They are not created by the civil government, nor should we want them to be. If the government grants our rights, the government can remove our rights.

As Doug Wilson explained:

Our rights come to us from God, and not from the government. When a government is behaving wisely, they recognize the rights that God has given, and they do their part in protecting them. But they do not originate those rights. They do not bestow those rights. Rights are from God.

What this means is that SCOTUS in Dobbs did not just now “take away” the constitutional right to an abortion. Rather, the effect of this decision is to say that Roe was wrongly decided in the first place, and that nobody ever did have the constitutional right to an abortion. This is exactly right. In order for abortion to be a right, God would have to be the one who gave it. But He did not give it because He is the one who said, “Thou shalt not murder.”

There is no right to an abortion that comes from God, and therefore there is no right to an abortion.

The only person who forces pregnancy on a woman is a rapist, not the pro-lifer who argues that the mother should not forcibly end the life of another. If his victims want blood, then perhaps we ought to discuss whether capital punishment would be an appropriate sentence for convicted rapists. But the discussion rarely, if ever, goes there. We’re fixed, rather, on whether one of the rapist’s victims deserves to die in his place.

But children of rape are victims too, and as such, they deserve justice. They don’t deserve to be doubly wronged. Of course, none of this is to downplay the trauma the first victim suffers. But we only compound the injustice when we tell her the solution to having her rights violated is in violating the rights of another. That just turns the victim into a perpetrator, into a killer, and that, with a false idea that a second injustice will somehow bring healing to the first.