If a woman talks about abortion being a woman’s right to choose, while we disagree with her, we don’t usually doubt her sincerity in believing it.

We are a bit more sceptical, however, when a man is found pushing abortion in the name of this “right.”

When it is a male politician who affirms such a right we are inclined to believe – if you’ll pardon our cynicism about pro-abortion politicians – that it is a mere platitude with which he hopes to impress the female voters in his constituency.

Other male pro-abortion advocates may feel that supporting a “woman’s right to choose” makes them appear altruistic, even chivalrous.

But how chivalrous are such men?

Is supporting a “woman’s right to choose” to kill her own baby really liberating her from the oppressive mores of society, as the pro-abortion lobby would have us believe?

Or does it impose undue responsibility for the death of the unborn child on the mother, along with all the consequences of that burden?

Rather than providing the much needed support for a woman with a difficult pregnancy, giving her “the right to choose” absolves men – at least in their own imagination – from any moral responsibility for killing the unborn child.

It is no wonder that men proclaim this particular women’s “right” more often than women do.

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Meanwhile this supposed right to choose abandons women to face the difficult situation alone.

We are not suggesting that women are completely abandoned to make the decision in lonely isolation. But men, by imposing the burden of “choice” on them, do condemn them to live in lonely isolation with the consequences of abortion.

It is women who suffer the terrible side effects of abortion. Women are hurt by abortion, both psychologically and physically. Abortion is one of the most common causes of maternal mortality (http://www.theunchoice.com/unsafedeath.htm).

It is a notorious fact that many men keep their options open on the decision, even while professing their belief in a woman’s right to choose. Men can coerce women into having an abortion and then, like Pontius Pilate, wash their hands of any culpability.

Does this really happen?

An article on the website of the Population Research Institute (https://www.pop.org/many-american-women-felt-pressured-abortions-study-finds/) cites a recent study published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons that claims over 70% of American women who have had abortions felt pressured into aborting their unborn child.

Various forms of pressure were referenced in the study, including feeling the need to make others happy, and the fear that their partner would abandon them. The latter fear was involved in 30% of the abortions covered by the survey.

These claims are supported by anecdotal evidence.

For example, in his essay: The Frivolity of Evil, Theodore Dalrymple gives an insight into a phenomenon he encountered regularly as a medical doctor in England.

Referring to the father of the third child of one of his patients Dr Dalrymple wrote that: “a week after their child was born he decided he no longer wished to live with her. (The discovery of incompatibility a week after the birth of a child is now so common as to be statistically normal.)” (1)

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Dr Dalrymple writes elsewhere of the many cases in which the reaction of a man to a pregnancy in his girlfriend is to beat her up, which “occasionally produces a miscarriage,” (2) suggesting that frequently the man’s principal contribution to an unwanted pregnancy is the “unwanted” part.

The mainstream media under-report this problem, except in highly sensational cases, giving the impression that it is much less common than it is.

Men frequently bully women into “choosing” abortion and then hypocritically trumpet their support for a “woman’s right to choose.” They might even sleep with an easy conscience afterwards. It is, after all, the women who elect to have abortions. Isn’t it?

Is there any other circumstance in which we are expected to take self-declared altruism at face value? If a politician or a rich business owner claims to care for the poor, wouldn’t we examine his claim closely before accepting it?

Let’s be equally circumspect about men who claim to support a woman’s right to choose.

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1. Dalrymple, T., Our Culture, What’s Left of It, p 10
2. Ibid., p 235-236