Sunday night’s episode of American Crime, “Season Three: Episode 5” took an interesting turn in the ongoing pregnancy/abortion storyline of former prostitute Shae (Ana Mulvoy Ten), who is on her second pregnancy and heading towards her second abortion.
Last week, Shae was annoyed at North Carolina’s abortion laws, particularly informed consent. This week, those laws, as well as peaceful protestors outside of the abortion clinic she entered, saved the life of her preborn child.
Volunteer: Please consider adoption. There are so many families who are looking for a child to love.
Volunteer #2: If it's an option for you, please call us at this number. We'll do everything we can to help. We're happy to talk if you choose to.
Shae: I don't want to do this.
Kimara: You don't want to...do...
Shae: I don't want to do this.
Kimara: If you have the baby, how are you gonna take care of it? What are you gonna do for food, for...clothes?
Shae: I have the right to have a baby.
Kimara: I'm not saying you don't have the right. I'm just asking, how are you gonna provide? If you go past 20 weeks, you can't have the abortion.
Shae: It's not your business what I do.
Kimara: It's not. If you want me to take you to the shelter, I will.
Despite this positive turn of events, Shae sadly turns back to selling her body for money, this time in the form of online pornography, rather than return to the shelter her counselor Kimara (Regina King) brought her to for help with reforming her life. Let’s hope this doesn’t turn into a “you better choose abortion unless you want to end up being an online prostitute with no hope for a real future” lesson.
As I mentioned in a story I wrote for Newsbusters on the show Girls, there are 162 abortion clinics in this country that perform abortions after 20 weeks, and the loose definition of health makes abortion legal through all nine months. So, unfortunately, Kimara is wrong when she tells Shae that she won’t be able to get an abortion after 20 weeks.
The show did get it right when it comes to abortion clinic protesters, however. Most are peaceful, compassionate, prayerful and eager to help both the mother and her baby. It’s a shame American Crime didn’t have Shae reach out to a protestor for help and show that by doing so, they would have helped her to learn that she need not lead a life of prostitution in order to support herself and her baby.
But thank God they accurately depicted the power of North Carolina’s informed consent laws. Shae may have felt annoyance towards the state for forcing her to see her baby on the sonogram screen before she could have an abortion. But in the end, it saved her from making a mistake she may have regretted the rest of her life if she had found out the truth after having an abortion.
After all, women who rely on abortion clinics like Planned Parenthood for the truth on their baby’s development are told their baby is no more than a white dot. I once met a woman who had relied on Planned Parenthood for counseling, only to have the counselor draw a dot with a pencil on a piece of paper to show her what her baby supposedly looked like.
When she learned years later what her baby really looked like in a human development class in college, after she already made the choice to abort that day at Planned Parenthood based on falsehoods, she had a nervous breakdown. I met her at a pro-life meeting where she was speaking out to try to save other women in crisis pregnancies from making the same mistake that she did.
Abortion is a business. Period. When a business has something to gain from the choice we make, we consider them biased and would never trust them to guide us. Would we rely solely on an internet service provider such as Verizon to tell us our best internet provider options? Obviously not.
Abortion is no different, yet thousands of women receive biased counseling every day from abortion clinics such as Planned Parenthood and are told it’s impartial and truthful advice. We need more informed consent for every woman seeking an abortion so that she can make a fully informed choice without interference from abortion clinics who stand to profit from the choice of abortion.
It may seem like an annoyance at first, as it did to main character Shae. But in the end, it’s worth making sure women have all the information they need to make a fully informed choice, before it’s too late, for themselves and their children.
When it comes to life and death decisions like abortion, we can never be too careful. Women and their children absolutely deserve to be protected. Not from peaceful protestors who want to help women in crisis pregnancies, but from abortion clinics that stand to make a killing (pun intended) off of the violent and deadly choice of abortion.
