There’s nothing wrong with wanting to feel fit and beautiful during the summer, but are you willing to kill a baby to shed some extra pounds? Rebecca Reid, writing in her column for the Daily Telegraph, says yes — that it’s perfectly valid to abort your child for that perfect “beach bod.”
This was the response given to a woman who went undercover at an abortion facility to expose how easy it was to get abortion drugs with the reason of not wanting “to worry about looking pregnant on the beach.” When the story broke, Ried responded, defending the abortionists.
“If you do not want to be pregnant, you do not have to be pregnant, and you can choose not to be,” Reid wrote. “Abortions happen for a litany of reasons, and all of them, whatever they are, are valid.”
This is one of the most radical positions anyone can take — to kill your child for as selfish a reason as to look good in a swimsuit. But what’s uniquely tragic is how our culture has managed to convince women like Reid that being pregnant is ugly and unattractive. What’s attractive about pregnancy, however, is not what’s on the outside, but what’s on the inside: both the heart of the mother and her unborn baby.
That’s, of course, not to say that pregnant women aren’t attractive, but your beauty expresses itself in different ways at different points in your life. For a pregnant mother, her beauty is in carrying her baby — a constant act of self-sacrifice — one which she expresses to the world by who she carries in her womb.
She shouldn’t feel like she has to hide this — let alone kill her baby! She should be celebrated for her selflessness, shining against a culture that tries to shame her for finding fulfillment in exercising her body’s natural ability to bring new life into the world.
As she holds her preborn baby in her womb, she could not be more tender or affectionate. This kind of pure love is condemned in our culture as an obstacle to the perfect life as defined by tabloids.
But we should feel sorry for Reid. If the body-positivity movement has exposed anything, it’s that models these days are meant to fit a certain look that’s often air-brushed and digitally altered, thereby unattainable and unhealthy. Young women often fall for the marketing, desperate to look like someone else. But the solution isn’t butchering your baby — it’s realizing the inner beauty you exude from choosing life, from caring for your child and from the child herself.
