We've all heard the argument that abortion is about women's rights, a conversation in which men simply do not belong. On this, National Women's Equality Day, we must ask ourselves, why did Esquire—a magazine intended for men—run a pro-abortion article last summer about the only abortionist in Mississippi?
The male subject of the article, "The Abortion Ministry of Dr. Willie Parker," is portrayed as the savior of women, the champion of their rights to choose abortion, all while calling himself a Christian. He even employs a pastor's wife—an missionary of sorts for the gospel of cheap grace—to council newly post-abortive women on how Jesus forgives them for the same "mistake" they have just paid Dr. Parker for the privilege of making.
The article includes a mini-chronicle of some of Dr. Parker's pre-abortion conversations with his clients. One women asks a question about wearing a tampon after her abortion. She says, "I know this sounds so selfish and everything, but I'm going to the beach next week—don't think I'm a selfish person!"
Dr. Parker doesn't think she's selfish.
Later in the article, Dr. Parker is performing the Mississippi state-required ultrasound and asks his patient, "Do you want to know if there is more than one?"
To which the woman replied, "No."
When the she leaves, he shows the interviewer the screen. The patient is pregnant with triplets.
After her next visit with Dr. Parker, she is no longer.
Tweet This: #WomensEqualityDay Is #abortion what equality looks like? #DefundPP #PPSellsBabyParts
Next, he takes the reporter into the area where he examines the fetal parts and pieces left after an abortion. As he looks into the Petri dish filled with the limbs and head of a nine-week old fetus, he says, "The reality is we've disrupted a life process. There are recognizable fetal parts, right? The capacity for this development is always there. After five weeks, you just have the sac. At six weeks, you have a fetal pole with cardiac activity. At seven to eight weeks, it's just a larger fetal pole. By nine, it's differentiated."
So there you have it. Dr. Parker himself recognizes that the babies he is aborting, are in fact not just clumps of tissue, but lives.
So the question remains, why does Dr. Parker even do abortions if he knows he is taking lives? Because he likens himself after the Good Samaritan in the Bible. He believes he is doing good by performing abortions, when other doctors will not. He said he asked himself this question, "What happens to these women when abortion is not available?"
Well, we can answer that for Dr. Parker. Those women become mothers.
In a magazine geared to men, the article's tone is one of applause and admiration for Dr. Parker's work. He even says—"beaming", as the author points out—that, "if men were able to get pregnant, abortion would be free and they'd pass out free Super Bowl tickets and have public ceremonies to celebrate our brothers who went through the tough decision."
But when a woman tell him she hasn't told her husband that their daughter is pregnant because he would get angry about it and that "he comes from one of those really strict Catholic backgrounds," Dr. Parker doesn't even blink. It's no problem to him that the father doesn't know.
This makes me wonder how the mostly male readers of Esquire felt about Dr. Parker's stance on this secrecy. Would they want to be kept in the dark if it was their daughter or wife at the abortion clinic? Would they want their triplets aborted without so much as a nod to their part in their babies' creation?
If some in society want to argue that abortion is really about women's rights, then why on earth did this article appear in a well-known men's magazine?
Tweet This: If #abortion is all about #WomensEqualityDay, what role does @esquire play?
I have no answer other than to guess that Esquire wants its male readership to be convinced that abortion is a good thing. That they will now have a reference to go to when their wives or girlfriends confront them with the news of an unexpected pregnancy. While sitting in the abortion clinic, thumbing the pages of Esquire while his female counterparts undergo an abortion, a man can applauded himself in the knowledge he isn't merely dodging the bullet of an unexpected pregnancy, he's championing women's rights.
On this day, which marks the 95th anniversary of women's suffrage in the U.S., we have to wonder—is this what it means to be equal?
