Oscar host Chris Rock made news the other day when he let loose with this line during a club routine: “Abortion, it’s beautiful, it’s beautiful abortion is legal. I love going to an abortion rally to pick up women, cause you know they are f*!@*%g,”
Rock is crass and vulgar, clearly, but according to
Whether Rock is pro-life or pro-choice, whether he intended to use satire or really believes what he said, is beside the point. What’s “beautiful” is that Chris Rock has exposed a profound side effect of legalized abortion — the sexual mistreatment of women.
It’s been over 30 years since the United States Supreme Court began our nation’s social experiment in legalized abortion. Millions of post-abortive women and their tragic stories prove that Alice Paul was right when she said “abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women.”
Who was Alice Paul, you ask? She was the original drafter of the
Equal Rights Amendment before it was hijacked by radical feminists. Alice Paul was one of our lead suffragette foremothers who fought along side Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to establish women’s right to vote.As Harvard Law Professor Mary Ann Glendon has noted, “to earlier feminists who had fought for the vote and for fair treatment in the workplace, it had seemed obvious that the ready availability of abortion would facilitate the sexual exploitation of women.”
So here we are, five years into the new millennium, and a comedian has the nerve to say out loud what men across America know full well: that legalized abortion is great for their sex lives; that abortion on demand makes women into sex objects with the full consent of the highest court in the land; and that if their sexual use of a woman results in the unfortunate side effect of a pregnancy, then $300 and their “kindhearted” support of the woman’s “right to choose” will take
care of the problem.The real problem is that women have gotten the raw end of this deal. Roe has ruined romance. Every woman’s deepest desire to love and be loved has been distorted into a license to use and be used. Women have paid with their bodies and their souls. Abandoned emotionally and financially by the men they loved, and moved by profound grief at the loss of their children, they stand in front of crowds with signs that say “I regret my abortion.”
Comedic satire may seem at first blush to be a harsh way to draw attention to the fact that legalized abortion allows men to sexually prey on women. But in our culture of entertainment it makes the point well.
We need not throw rocks at Chris Rock for having the audacity to expose how abortion has impacted men’s view of women. He’s crass, he’s
crude, he’s vulgar — but he has hit the mark.