A recent essay by Alison Piepmeier of the College of Charleston provides some of the best examples of the cruelty, heartlessness, and utter self-absorption embodied in the modern feminist movement. Aptly titled, “Choosing Us,” the essay shows that, for feminists, abortion is a device to prevent one thing: Feminist inconvenience.

Alison begins her abortion story by informing her readers that her unwanted pregnancy began with an “ecstatic, hushed fling on the cold tiles of the bathroom floor a few weeks earlier” while her brother and his girlfriend were in the other room. She had used contraception, but the contraception had failed. After crying for a few hours, she confessed that she made up her mind to abort fairly quickly: “…unlike those after-school special girls, who always decide to either keep the baby or give it up for adoption, I wanted an abortion.”

What is odd about her quick decision to abort is that she was no teenager. She was 31 years old when she got pregnant and was in a “stable relationship.” In fact, the man who got her pregnant was “Walter,” her husband of five years. She had kept several hundred dollars tucked away in case she ever needed to terminate an unplanned pregnancy - a habit she did not terminate even after years of marriage.

Alison confessed in her essay that she was part of a happily married couple, that she and her husband were in good physical health, and that they both had jobs and health insurance. She even said, “Walter and I were pretty good candidates for parenthood.” Midway through her essay she almost sounded as if she knew the decision to abort was wrong for a woman in her circumstances:

“But we didn’t want a baby, a state of affairs that made us feel a bit ungrateful, as if the universe had shown up at our door with a gift—a package full of possibilities—and we were slamming the door shut without even taking a look. I had girlfriends who had gone through agony in a quest for children, had miscarriages and invasive, crazy-making fertility treatments, and here we were, experiencing effortless fertility and then planning to toss it. Magical thinking kicked in, and I wondered, are you even allowed to reject a gift like that without disastrous consequences?”

So Alison and her husband decided to rethink the decision to abort. She postponed her first clinic appointment and made another for a few weeks later. Together, she and Walter asked a few questions to help them decide whether to abort the baby. For example:

Q: How would we feel about having a baby right now?

A: Scared out of our minds.

Q: Do we want a baby now?

A: No.

Q: Could we afford it?

A: No, but who ever can?

Q: Would Walter have to drop out of graduate school?

A: Probably.

Alison admitted in her essay that, in making her decision, she “thought about all the selfish reasons (she) wasn’t ready for a child—(she) want(ed) to write another book, (she and Walter) might need to move for (her) job—and wondered whether it was okay for (her) to decide based on (her) own desires.”

But she and Walter did talk about adoption before making this conclusive decision: “but I knew we couldn’t do it—we can’t even walk by a pet store without getting attached, so I knew if we spent nine months with this being, it would be ours for life.” Continued...