Pro-abortion news flops

“An abortion ban made them teen parents,” reads the title of a recent Washington Post story about a young couple raising unplanned twins in the wake of a Texas abortion ban. It’s a catchy headline, even if the causal mechanism around the word “made” is rather fuzzy.

This is the second long read the paper has published on Brooke and Billy High, two working-class kids for whom life would have been so much easier had their two little girls never been born—or so we’re meant to feel. The state’s abortion ban went into effect on Sept. 1, 2021, just after Brooke had discovered she was pregnant. Seeking an ultrasound on short notice, she and her mother had found their way to a crisis pregnancy clinic. This clearly annoys reporter Caroline Kitchener, who casts a suspicious eye over the clinic in her first story about the couple. Unsuspecting young Brooke “had no idea she’d walked into a facility designed to dissuade people from getting abortions.” That’s ominous?

And yet, Kitchener can’t deny that parenthood has brought the couple real joy amidst their struggles. Billy, who works hard to provide through his job as an Air Force mechanic, has the girls’ names discreetly tattooed on his chest. He tells the paper he loves being a father. Brooke admits she can’t imagine going back and aborting the twins when she looks at them now. “I can’t even think of it that way now. Those are our babies, and they’re people.”

But the story still provides an intimate window on the couple’s ups and downs, including their marital problems. Between Billy’s wandering eye and the grind of parenthood, their relationship has been strained to the point that they’ve sometimes considered divorce. Yet they always recommit, for the girls’ sake. As a child of divorce herself, Brooke vows that she will never put them through what she went through.

How should pro-lifers respond to this story? Certainly, we can pray for, love, and admire Brooke and Billy as they persevere together. But we should also ask just why their particular, private struggles are being brought into such vivid public focus by the national media. It’s clearly useful to the pro-choice reporter that they still provide her with quotes she can use against pro-life legislation. Brooke doesn’t think other girls like her should be “forced” to carry unplanned pregnancies. Billy reflects that the laws “create not a good situation to be in.” But then, thinking about his own children, he shakes his head. “I don’t know. I’m tired.”

In other words, Brooke and Billy’s thoughts on abortion are what you would expect from two vulnerable teenagers who were clearly not raised with a strongly pro-life foundation—unformed, conflicted, less than coherent, but tending in the direction mainstream media is looking for.

The Post shone a similar kind of spotlight on a pro-choice Florida couple who couldn’t obtain an abortion when their baby was diagnosed with a lethal disability. The law itself was somewhat ambiguous, but medical providers elected to err on the side of caution. Multiple mainstream media outlets tracked the couple through the child’s delivery and death. The couple willingly cooperated with the media’s agenda, protesting the legislation even more vocally than Brooke and Billy protested the Texas ban. Their story was heartbreaking—and convenient.

Clearly, there is a market for “deep reads” about victims of “oppressive” conservative legislation in general. The same trend can be observed in stories about kids unable to obtain “trans care.” Another WaPo story romantically traces the “8-hour journey” of a girl and her parents to obtain testosterone after Mississippi banned cross-gender hormone shots. The lead photo zooms in on her chin, covered with the blonde tufts of her first beard.

But Brooke and Billy pose a challenge for Caroline Kitchener—a challenge in the form of two wiggly, adorable little girls, whose very existence is an unavoidable, unanswerable case for life. For all that the writer wants to frame the story in a pro-choice way, their tiny hands keep insistently pushing the door open enough for the light to shine through. One wonders what they will think, years from now, when they read these stories and discover how they almost never were.

It’s sad to consider that Brooke and Billy’s story probably represents the best one can hope for from this sort of “abortion deep read” in mainstream media today. We are still meant to think that they are victims—admirable, plucky victims, but still victims, of a choice that was unjustly made for them. This shows that while the pro-life movement may have made incredible gains, with precious little families like this one to show for it, we are still very far from a world where abortion is unthinkable.

Now, our new task is to make that world a reality.

This story has been corrected to reflect that the Texas Heartbeat Act went into effect on Sept. 1, 2021.