If you asked me several years ago for my opinion on abortion, I would have said something equivocal like: “A safe abortion is the last option a pregnant woman should take.” I was mainly concerned for rape victims, sexually abused girls, or a life-threatening condition for either the fetus or the mother. Starting in the Covid years, however, I’ve had to challenge my thinking on many previously held beliefs, including how we talk about abortion.
I was especially surprised that the women who had carried the banner for “My body, My choice” applied it only to keeping abortion legal and not to a woman’s choice to accept or decline the vaccine and boosters. The sanctity of our bodies was kicked to the curb along with a host of other falsehoods that have become signatures of that time. The refusal to take what they called a vaccine was a heavy price many Americans paid – financially, socially, and emotionally.
While I still want to thank the suffragettes back in the day for the vote, I have closed the door on the rest of the current women’s movement. If the present batch of feminism boils down to lobbying for trans athletes, men in women and girls locker rooms, and more than two sexes as their battle cry, count me out.
My reconsideration of abortion also came from reading an essay by Walker Percy in Sign Posts In A Strange Land. He was a fine novelist: author of the 1961 National Book Award novel The Moviegoer, and a practicing M.D. until he left medicine for the writer’s life. In his essay “A View of Abortion, With Something To Offend Everyone,” he wrote on the subject from his informed view of the world and his medical knowledge. This post will probably do the same.
Because Percy converted to Catholicism late in life, his essay has often been attributed solely to his religious conversion. But when you read it, you know that isn’t the case.
Walker Percy
Percy begins the short essay with a look at how abortion in 1981 is “Yet another banal atrocity in a century where atrocities have become commonplace.” He cites how “pro-life” became a mockery, giving the example of the Reagan administration’s strong anti-abortion position. And yet, Reagan continued his infant formula “hard sell in the Third World despite thousands of deaths from bottle feeding.” I witnessed this in Kenya that same year.
Percy objects as both a novelist and a doctor to what he calls “double-speak” as a symptom of the verbal war. “Pro-choice” he says, “seems to have hit on the current rhetoric since there is no agreement about the beginning of human life. This is a con.”
To prove the con, Percy writes: “Commonplace of modern biology, known to every high-school student is that the life of every individual organism, human or not, begins when the chromosomes of the sperm fuse with the chromosomes of the ovum to form a new DNA complex that henceforth directs the ontogenesis of the organism. The onset of individual life of every individual is not a dogma of the Church but a fact of science.” Percy concludes his essay with this: “To pro-abortionists: According to the opinion polls it looks as if you may get your way. But you’re not going to have it both ways. You’re going to be told what you’re doing.”
In the first six months of 2025, there were approximately 591,770 clinician-provided abortions in the U.S. according to the Society of Family Planning’s #WeCount report, with Telehealth (mailed termination medication) accounting for 27%.
Two other population considerations have recently taken center stage in the U.S. There is solid data to show that in 2024, the U.S. recorded its lowest ever fertility rate of 1.6 births per woman, following a downward trend starting in the early 2000s. Current factors include the cost of child care, health insurance, housing costs, and low wages. Also included are increased access to birth control and abortion, the assumed economic need for two members of the household to be in the workforce, pursuit of higher education, and simply choosing to not have children.
A second concern was featured in The Pfizer Papers edited by Naomi Wolff with Julie Kelly and research volunteers. The book is based on primary source Pfizer’s own clinical trial documents released under court order as well as related medical literature. The book shows that Pfizer’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial was deeply flawed and that the pharmaceutical company knew by November 2020 that its vaccine was neither safe nor effective. The reports detail vaccine-induced harms throughout the human body, including to the reproductive system; showing that women suffer vaccine-related adverse events at a 3:1 ratio.
I still believe that a pregnancy termination should be between a female and her doctor. But I agree with Percy – a life has begun. I also know from my own experience that after carrying a living being inside you for about nine months, that finally holding that being in your arms is one of the most profound experiences ever. That first eye contact is never to be forgotten.
Maybe we should go back to basics teaching girls and boys before puberty the way to tell if you’re ovulating and why that is valuable body knowledge. Maybe we’d be better off and more honest if we dropped the language cons (termination for example of what? A life.) Telemedicine is making it even more anonymous. And finally acknowledge that abortions should be given much more thought and vastly more supportive services hen the life is being saved.
“The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.” ~Thomas Jefferson
Photo credits: Question marks – planet volumes, Students in class – museums of history.
Thank you for comment Minda Rae. I think that Walker Percy would put “fertilized eggs” onto his “con” list. It could be a chicken or a human. Here’s something I read today in The Reluctant Fundamentalist: Perhaps it is in our nature to recognize subconsciously the link between mortality and procreation – between, that is to say, the finite and the infinite – and we are in fact driven by reminders of the one to seek out the other.”
It seems to me that what is important is that children born into the world should be wanted, loved, properly fed and cared for. If women who may have been forced into intercourse in the first place are forced to bring children into the world unwanted and uncared-for, that’s bad for everyone. If contraception fails married people who can’t support another child, there should be a way to abort that pregnancy. I care much more about actual living children than about fertilized eggs.