David QuinnThe pro-life movement is much more fully on the side of women than the pro-choicers, writes David Quinn
Nicki Minaj is an American singer of some renown. She’s well known enough to have been featured on the front of the latest issue of Rolling Stone, America’s bestselling music magazine. Minaj’s interview made a few headlines because she spoke about an abortion she had as a teenager.
She clearly struggles with the impact of that on her life. It is obvious that at some level, she regrets the abortion. Nonetheless, she still declares herself to be “pro-choice” and, it is this fact rather than her regrets, that a lot of the media choose to highlight. No surprise there.
However, her reasoning and her feelings about her abortion provide us with a very real insight into how very many women who have had abortions probably think about the matter.
If the pro-life movement could only find a way to show women like Nicki Minaj (real name Onika Tanya Maraj) that it is much more on their side than the pro-choice movement, we would then make real progress towards creating a culture that is truly pro-life and pro-woman.
Decision
Here is what Minaj had to tell Rolling Stone about her abortion: “I thought I was going to die. I was a teenager. It was the hardest thing I’d ever gone through.” She admits her decision to have an abortion has “haunted me all my life,” though she believes it was the ‘right’ choice for her at the time.
She declares: “It’d be contradictory if I said I wasn’t pro-choice. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t have anything to offer a child.”
These few words tell a big story. She clearly did not want to have a baby but, at the same time, deciding to have an abortion was very tough. How could it not be?
Deciding to end a pregnancy is no trivial thing, despite the best attempts of some pro-choice advocates to pretend that ending the life of an unborn child is no different, morally and emotionally speaking, than having a sore tooth pulled.
Minaj is honest enough to admit that the abortion has “haunted” her ever since. Nonetheless, she is glad the option of abortion was available.
In her song Autobiography, Minaj goes deeper into the circumstances of her abortion:
“Please baby forgive me, mommy was young, mommy was too busy tryna have fun and now I don’t pat myself on the back for sending you back ‘cause God knows I was better than that to conceive then leave you. The concept alone seems evil I’m trapped in my conscience
“I adhere to the nonsense listened to people who told me I wasn’t ready for you
“But how the f**k would they know what I was ready to do
“And of course it wasn’t your fault
“It’s like I feel it in the air, I hear you saying mommy don’t cry
“can’t you see I’m right here I gotta let you know what you mean to me
“when I’m sleeping I see you in my dreams with me wish I could touch your little face
“or just hold your little hand if it’s part of Gods [sic] plan, maybe we can meet again.”
Three things emerge very clearly from these lines. The first is that the abortion weighs heavily on her mind to this day; the second is that she felt pressured by the people around her into having the abortion; and the third is that she regards the child she never had as very real, as a person she can relate to, even today, and not as a ‘thing’.
However, when Minaj thinks about the pro-life movement, she probably regards it as her enemy because it ‘judges’ women like her and wants to take away their ‘choices’, even though, to judge from her song, she was pressured into having the abortion, something that must happen in very many cases. (If the pro-choice movement was sincerely pro-choice, it would go out of its way to ensure that women having abortions did not feel in any way pressured by other people into doing so.)
In fact, the pro-life movement is much more fully on the side of women like Minaj than the pro-choice movement.
The pro-choice movement is an adjunct of the sex revolution. The sex revolution preaches no-strings-attached sex. This tells both men and women that they can have sex without consequences. But of course, there are consequences, as Minaj found out as a teenager.
Evidently, she had no-one willing to stand by her if she wanted to keep the baby. Where was the father, for example?
Millions of women in Minaj’s situation have opted for abortion. But millions more who have opted to keep their babies have had to raise them alone because the fathers believed so strongly in the sex revolution’s message of no-strings-attached sex and therefore took off.
In a world where commitment mattered more than it does, Minaj would have been encouraged by society and by all those around her to wait at least until she was in a committed relationship before having sex. Then, if an unplanned pregnancy resulted, she would have been in a much better position to look after the baby because her partner would have been much more likely to stand by her.
As a result, Minaj would not be faced today with the deeply conflicted feelings she plainly has about her abortion.
This would be win-win. The baby would be alive. Minaj would be more content in her mind. She might still be with the father of her child.
Irony
The irony, of course, is that Minaj works in an industry that possibly more than any other preaches no-strings-attached sex of exactly the sort that resulted in her plight as a teenager.
If she could see this more clearly, she might even begin to write songs that would tell her millions of fans to reject no-strings-attached sex and opt for love instead and to realise that you can’t have the two.
No-strings-attached sex is, in fact, the direct antithesis of love and has maimed very many lives.