By Dave Andrusko
Pro-abortionists, particularly the kind that lecture the rest of us mere mortals for being insufficient woke, are not big on irony or introspection or maybe even reading their own musings.
Enter Kate Cohen, described as a “contributing columnist for the Washington Post.” Her own description kind of tells you where she might just come down on television being insufficiently monomaniacally pro-abortion.
She is “Writer, editor, parent, atheist, leftie (both kinds), obsessive cook, highly opinionated human. She/her/hers.” Elsewhere we read Cohen is “writing a book about raising my [three] children as atheists.”
Ok. Got it.
So what is the gist of “On TV, abortion is the road less traveled. Life’s not like that”? Other pro-life writers understandably focus on the beginning—which I will quote as well—but there is much, much more to her militant, zealous embrace of abortion:
After the sixth episode of “Atypical,” I stormed into my daughter’s room.
“Please tell me the therapist is not going to have that baby.”
She paused to remember which show she had told me to watch, and then she shrugged sympathetically. “Sorry, Mom.”
Dammit! I was hoping that the young, professional woman, upon learning she was pregnant right after her jerky boyfriend left her, might decide to have an abortion. Instead, it turns out, she doesn’t even consider it.
I’m so tired of this.
Tired of what?
Over and over again in TV shows and movies, female characters discover they are unintentionally pregnant and then make the choice that most women in that situation don’t make. Or worse: They don’t seem to remember that they even have a choice.
Reading her overwrought and under-thought opinion piece, you’d conclude, from the pro-abortion vantage point at least, that Hollywood is a veritable oasis, overflowing with pro-life storylines. Pro-abortion plot lines are consigned to the desert.
This is utter nonsense as other pro-abortion scribes (to their great joy) tell us.
It’s noticeable, but hardly surprising, that to paint her one-sided portrait of movies and television programs she goes back a decade or more. From the pro-abortion vantage point, many recent movies and television programs matter-of-factly treat abortion (to borrow from Cohen) as “freedom care.”
But here are three additional points made later in her opinion piece that are also worth considering.
They tell us what we knew four paragraphs in. While Cohen grinds her teeth and says it’s (kind of) okay not to abort, abortion is the road usually traveled…and rightly so.
#1. “Any particular choosing-to-have-a-baby storyline could make sense,” she writes. “It’s all of them together that make me crazy.”
Of course we would respond that if you look at Cohen’s examples later in her piece (which are more contemporary examples), the reflexive response is not to carry the baby to term but to abort. You could say that this makes us crazy.
#2. Abortion, Cohen writes, is “at least health care, but it’s not only health care. The ability to put a stop to an unwanted pregnancy is part of a kit of tools women have that allow us to determine the course of our own lives. It’s freedom care.” (Her italics.)
“Kit of tools”? “Freedom care”?
I’m guessing that if you were to ask Cohen what if she had used her “kit of tools” to eliminate any or all of her three living children,” she’d retreat to the usual babble. It was Cohen’s choice to let them live.
Allow them to live, take their lives, six of one, half dozen of the other. Either way it’s “Freedom care.”
And #3. The examples she uses in the beginning—her poor daughter having to listen to her mom’s harangue—and in the tasteless ending are extremely illuminating.
In the penultimate paragraph Cohen is talking about recent productions which “have featured women choosing to end their pregnancies.”
My personal favorite is “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” in which we find out what Paula decided to do about the pregnancy that threatened her law school plans when the doorbell rings and her son calls out, “Mom, I’ll get it, since you just had an abortion.”
In the crazy, morally inverted world of abortion fanaticism, the ideal outcome is for the kid you didn’t abort to go out of his way to assure his mom that it is absolutely no big deal—or any deal at all—that she just aborted his sibling.
It’s the ultimate validation (not, I hasten to add, that Cohen would ever suggest the decision to off an unborn child needs to be validated) when your own (living) kid is so blasé about abortion they offer to open the door so his just-aborted mom can take it easy.
Only a true fanatic would find that comforting.