“I never expected to be the poster child for sterilization,” Rachel Daimond told Suzy Weiss in a recent article titled, “First Comes Love, Then Comes Sterilization” focusing on a troubling trend among American young adults. For several months, Diamond has been using social media, especially Tick Tock, to document her decision to undergo sterilization to guarantee that she would never have children. Diamond, like a growing number of young adults, is part of the “intentionally child free” or anti-natalist movement. Weiss notes that many of the young adults embracing this movement cite concerns about climate change, with one study finding that 39% of Generation Z does not want children because they are concerned about the environment. But as Weiss’s article shows, there is more to the story. Many young adults who are choosing not to have children and even sterilizing themselves to make sure they remain child-free also express a hostility toward the very idea of family.
One young woman, Isabel, told Weiss that she is planning a “sterilization celebration” at a local sushi joint, explaining that she believes it is morally wrong to bring children into the world because “no matter how good someone has it, they will suffer” and because she hopes to retire in her fifties or earlier.
In response the Dobbs v. Jackson,the upcoming Supreme Court case challenging Roe v. Wade, Dr. Jon Shields of Claremont McKenna is arguing that the case should serve as a catalyst for the pro-life movement to compromise with the abortion movement. Pointing to research that shows a large number of abortionists dislike and even refuse to practice late second-trimester and third trimester abortions when an unborn child “becomes more recognizably human,” along with the fact that most Americans support restrictions on later abortions, Shields argues that pro-lifers and abortion proponents should reach a compromise. “Since pro-choice and pro-life philosophers respect the reasonableness of their intellectual foes, perhaps they, too, have rational grounds to accept a liberal compromise on abortion,” he concludes.
What Shields fails to grasp is that there is no room for a “compromise” in which pro-lifers are expected to be fine with baby-killing. This is not a question of “reasonableness.” Abortion, at any stage, is radical by its very nature because abortion takes an innocent human life—there is nothing “reasonable” about advocating for or accepting this practice.
The compromise that Shields proposes could be described as the Abortion Doctor Compromise — as Shields relates, most abortion doctors positively refuse to perform late-term abortions because they personally find them horrific, but will end the lives of 12-week-old babies all day every day. So in Shields’s compromise, the slightly less radical wing of the abortion lobby will accept restrictions on the forms of abortion that they already find too horrific to practice and defend while asking that pro-lifers accept these restrictions and absolutely nothing more. Those advocating for this so-called “compromise” would not change their position at all, they would simply demand that pro-lifers accept their terms. Doesn’t sound like much of a compromise.
In many ways, the decision to terminate a pregnancy is not unlike the decision to go through transition: It is a fundamentally private choice that can be made only by the individual in question — a person who alone knows the truth of their heart, who alone can understand what the consequences of their choices will be in the years to come.
While Boylan is incorrect in how the two movements are two sides of the same coin, it is true that abortion and transgenderism are rooted in the same set of ideas. Both rest on the assumption that one’s “true self” or personhood can be separated from biological realities and both have a distorted understanding of the purpose of medicine.
Just as the abortion movement insists that an unborn child is not a person even though science has proven that life begins at conception,the transgender movement insists that a person’s “true self” can be separate from his or her physical body. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Justice Anthony Kennedy infamouslystated, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." In that statement, he captures the mindsetthat is behind both abortion and transgenderism — the idea that each of us has the “right” to define our own concept of existence.
Ahead of last weekend’sWomen’s March in Washington, D.C., marchers were offered a reminder of what to bring and what not to bring. On the “to bring” list was “Your feminist spirit, bring your defiance to injustice bring your demands for abortion justice.” The “don’t bring” list included weapons and illegal substances, as well as a note reminding abortion activistsnot to use “coat-hanger imagery” saying, “We do not want to accidentally reinforce the right wing talking points that self-managed abortions are dangerous, scary and harmful.”
Abortion is never safe. Over the years, whether or not the abortion industry is willing to acknowledge the danger of abortion has depended entirely on what is most convenient for them at any given time. Only a few years ago,abortion activists used coat-hangers as a symbol of their claim that the abortion movement used coat-hangers as part of a narrative claiming that banning abortion will lead to a dangerous, dystopian future full of “back alley” abortions and to insist that banning abortion will not end abortion, it will only make it less safe, even though the evidence shows that abortion bans really do save lives by decreasing abortion rates.
This week is Banned Books Week,a week that the American Library Association claims “brings together the entire book community — librarians, booksellers, publishers, journalists, teachers, and readers of all types — in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas, even those some consider unorthodox or unpopular.” However, in a year that saw major corporations engaging in viewpoint discrimination, two books that faced bans this year for daring to question the transgender agenda, When Harry Became Sally by Ryan T. Anderson and Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier, were notably absent from this year’s “Challenged book list.” As Thomas Spence, President of Regnery Publishing noted, Banned Books Week is proving itself to be nothing more than a “gimmicky promotion [that] caters primarily to those who believe that schoolchildren should have access to anything bound between two covers without the interference of those busybodies we call parents.”
Earlier this year, Amazon removed Anderson’s book on transgenderism without any warning or explanation. When they finally broke their silence, they doubled down, insisting that When Harry Became Sally, which had been listed on their website for three years without any issues, violated their standards.
