It’s Time to Stop Responding to Violence with more Violence

In response to a horrific shooting, one feminist recently responded by demanding even more killing. Although she didn’t frame it this way, Christina Cauterucci, writer for the news outlet Slate, expressed her outrage that “… in Georgia, it is easier for a man to gain the capacity to maim and kill other people’s bodies than for a woman to obtain medical care for her own.”

By this “medical care,” she means abortion, and in this statement Cauterucci is responding to killing by demanding more killing: she’s claiming that since it’s so easy for some people to gain access to fatal devices, it should be even easier for others to get access to their devices, or “healthcare,” which also allows them to kill.

She continues, reasoning that “They [the state] do not have the same confidence in pregnant women. In Georgia, abortion-seeking patients are required to undergo counseling that, according to the Guttmacher Institute, ‘includes information designed to discourage the patient from having an abortion.’ Then they must wait 24 hours before they can receive the procedure.”

This statement includes flawed logic in multiple ways. Firstly, Cauterucci is discouraging counseling for pregnant women before undergoing an abortion. Regardless of a person’s political or moral stance on abortion, it is almost undeniable that counseling before an abortion will be for the good of the woman. 

To say that counseling is not necessary, or should even be avoided, is denying women of the option, the so-called “choice,” on whether or not to have an abortion. This is further proven in the “Turnaway Study,”  which found that the farther removed the woman is from her abortion, or her option to get an abortion, the less likely she is to want that abortion. 

For example, one week after a woman is denied an abortion, she is 65% less likely to want that abortion. Fast forward to four years down the line, and only 4% of the woman turned away still wish they had had an abortion!

These numbers are shocking and, if anything, should lead us to looking closer at the women getting abortions and the waiting time required. Are these women really making an informed, educated, reasonable choice, or are they doing it on a whim? 

Have these women been told both sides of the story: the consequences of abortion on their mental health as well as if it would be at all beneficial, the stories of women who regret their abortion as well as the stories of the women who don’t?

To shove these haunting questions away and ignore the gravity of abortion, not only in regards to killing the child but also the drastic mental health damage it causes to a woman, is at best naïve and at worst evil. 

Killing is never justified with more killing, and easy access to guns should not guarantee easy access to abortion. It should, on the other hand, raise awareness for the abominable amount of unjust killing that is happening in our nation and raise a synonymous cry among all Americans for an end to the killing of innocent humans in this country.