Pro-abortion Washington Post columnist Kate Cohen published an op-ed Wednesday titled “‘How would you feel if your mother had aborted you?’ Easy. I’d feel nothing.” In the piece, Cohen, who is an atheist, refuted the “fantastical” and “scary” idea that unborn children have souls and claimed she would, “every time,” choose her mother’s freedom over her “potential existence.”
In the op-ed, Cohen opened by discussing a separate, in her words, “thoughtful” op-ed this month from The New York Times, where writer Elizabeth Spiers, who was adopted, said that “abortion is a traumatic experience for women” but that “adoption is often just as traumatic as the right thinks abortion is, if not more so[.]”
“She received a cascade of responses along the lines of: If your mother felt she had a choice and chose differently you’d be fine with it?” Cohen wrote.
“I’ve got the answer! She wouldn’t be anything – fine or not fine – because she wouldn’t be,” Cohen added. “But not being is a difficult concept for human beings to grasp, much less accept. It makes perfect sense that ancient peoples came up with stories to explain, all evidence to the contrary, that we continue to exist even after we don’t…and that somehow we existed before we did.”
Cohen then ripped into biblical examples that show that humans have a “beforelife,” similar to how we believe in an afterlife. She cited “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,” (Jeremiah 1:5) and “Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be,” (Psalm 139:16).
“What does that have to do with abortion?” Cohen then asked. “Well, if you believe that people exist before they exist, that they’re waiting out there with God somewhere before they are ‘heaven sent’ into someone’s womb, then of course you’re going to put the needs of that (still pure and precious) person ahead of the needs of the (sinful) womb-holder.”
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Next, Cohen attacked pro-life politicians, namely, Rep. Madison Cawthern (R-NC) and Rep. Kat Cammack (R-FL). As I covered, Cammack delivered a testimony in a September congressional hearing about how her mother chose life.
“That wasn’t an easy decision for a single mom, for a working-class mom. Someone herself, who had lived a life of disappointments, of struggle, addiction, and yet, despite everything she chose life,” Cammack said in her testimony. “My mom survived. I survived. I am a living, breathing witness of the power of life and the incredible choice that my own mother made.”
Cohen attacked Cammack, specifically, her comment in her testimony, “all the little girls that never had a shot. Where was their choice?”
“She doesn’t mean 13-year-olds pregnant through ignorance or rape who lived in a state with abortion laws so restrictivce they couldn’t end their pregnancies and get on with their lives. She doesn't mean living, breathing, actual girls who needed help. She means little unborn girls,” Cohen wrote.
“How we feel about that clump is not the same as how it feels,” she continued. “Cammack, Cawthorn and others who believe in the beforelife seem to think of embryos with the potential to become people as beings (“eternal souls,” “little girls”) who should have choice and do have feelings.They — and indeed everyone who asks how abortion advocates would feel if they had been aborted, as if unborn people hover about ruing their nonexistence — remind us that religion is driving our abortion debate. Religion — not reason and not compassion for people who already exist in this earthly realm.”
Cohen abruptly wrapped up the piece, saying that “actual people” who “wish to control the course of their lives” will jump through “bureaucratic hoops” and other things to obtain an abortion.
“If I had to choose between my potential existence and my actual mother’s freedom? That’s easy,” Cohen concluded. “I’d choose my mother’s freedom every time.”
Cohen’s op-ed came in the midst of the Supreme Court abortion case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Dobbs surrounds a 15-abortion ban in Mississippi and could overturn landmark case Roe v. Wade. Oral arguments for the case were heard Dec. 1, and a ruling is expected next summer.
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