Abortion Culture Enables Abuse: Normalization of Abortion Facilitates Coercion and Harm Against Women
Source: Jordan Boyd. "An Abortion-Obsessed Culture Guarantees Is Abuse And Suffering." September 23, 2026. thefederalist.com
The Gist
The author argues that a culture that makes abortion easy and normalized doesn't actually help women—it gives abusive men a tool to coerce and hurt them into ending pregnancies against their will. She uses specific cases of assault and forced abortion pill use to argue that the real problem is our society's embrace of abortion, not laws restricting it.
Conclusion
A culture that normalizes and prioritizes abortion access, rather than treating it with skepticism, ultimately guarantees more abuse, coercion, and physical suffering for women, rather than empowering them.
Premises
- Abortion is used as a tool by cowardly men, predators, abusers, and traffickers to escape responsibility, as evidenced by cases like Carmello Brooks allegedly assaulting his pregnant girlfriend after she refused to abort.
- Mail-order abortion pills make coercion easier by allowing men to unilaterally end pregnancies, sometimes without the mother's knowledge or consent, even in states where such pills are illegal.
- A significant proportion of abortions (cited as 70 percent in one study) are unwanted, coerced, or inconsistent with the mother's own values and desires.
- Women who resist pressure to abort face punishment through coercion, poisoning, assault, or murder, as illustrated by the case of Jona Affholder being force-fed abortion drugs by her boyfriend.
- Abortion pills like mifepristone carry serious physical risks to women themselves, including hemorrhage and infection at rates higher than officially reported, and manufacturers prioritize profit over safety.
- Democrats and corporate media obscure these harms through euphemisms like 'choice' and misdirect blame onto pro-life laws rather than the actual perpetrators of abuse.
- It is the normalization of abortion and devaluation of unborn life—not restrictions on abortion—that creates the conditions enabling bad actors to exploit and harm women.
Assumptions
- The cited anecdotes (Brooks, Abbas/Affholder) are representative of a broader systemic pattern rather than isolated incidents.
- The statistics referenced (70% unwanted abortions, complication rates, risk multipliers) are accurate, methodologically sound, and generalizable.
- Reducing or restricting abortion access would decrease coercion and abuse rather than potentially increasing other forms of harm (e.g., unsafe illegal abortions, escalated violence from partners with fewer options).
- Pro-abortion political and media figures are motivated by ideology or dishonesty rather than genuine concern for women's autonomy.
- Unborn life should be legally and morally valued in a way that constrains abortion access as a policy matter.
- The framing of abortion as 'choice' is inherently a euphemism that conceals coercion, rather than reflecting genuine bodily autonomy in most cases.