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The Terror Of Pregnancy

Mollie Hemingway sent me a link to a transcript of Tristyn Bloom’s thought-provoking remarks at a recent Yale pro-life conference.  Bloom, who is a Millennial, says that many pro-lifers — and she is one — have the psychology of abortion all wrong. Excerpt: I think the actual problem here, I think the reason people continue to […]

Mollie Hemingway sent me a link to a transcript of Tristyn Bloom’s thought-provoking remarks at a recent Yale pro-life conference.  Bloom, who is a Millennial, says that many pro-lifers — and she is one — have the psychology of abortion all wrong. Excerpt:

I think the actual problem here, I think the reason people continue to defend abortion is because, essentially, of existential terror: fear of what will happen when something unexpected, uninvited, unplanned bursts into our lives demanding action. I think that is a crippling psychological problem that doesn’t even rise to the level of morality, that we can’t just tell people to suck up and get over.

We often hear that a problem with young people today is that we are irresponsible. We don’t have a sense of duty. We don’t have a sense of order. We’re immature. I think that the problem is actually the opposite.

I think that we are pathologically terrified of risk and I think that we have this enslavement to our own ideas of respectability, our own ideas of our life plan, our commitments, our existing duties such that something as radically changing as a new life doesn’t fit in with those existing duties. To accept that life would be the irresponsible choice, and that’s the framework from which a lot of people are operating. They see themselves as accepting consequences, as responsible. They have a semblance of a moral framework and we can’t ignore that just because it’s completely the opposite of our own. And this isn’t just about whether or not you accept a child. I think that we are so enslaved to a plan, and a routine, and a vision of our lives, we can’t embrace the unsettledness, openness, flexibility, and folly it takes to have an actually pro-life culture in every instance.

I won’t quote any more because I really want you to read the whole thing. I hadn’t thought of the pro-life issue this way — that a culture of life can’t take root in a culture that is terrified of making a single mistake that would ostensibly ruin one’s life.

On the other hand, it can’t be denied that having a baby out of wedlock really does, in most cases, have a significant impact on the economic prospects of their mothers. What is the difference? A middle-class support system? What?

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