Entering this month, Abort73 had published 816 abortion stories. These unsolicited accounts have come to us from all over the world—mostly from women, but also from some grieving fathers as well. But then something unprecedented happened on America’s 248th birthday. From across the pond, Abort73 received its first ever abortion story from a transgender man. That is to say, from a woman who now calls herself a man. I realize, of course, that even that disclaimer pigeonholes me as a bigot. Transgender men are men (as the orthodoxy goes), but that’s a premise I’m unwilling to affirm. 

For virtually all of human history, it was understood that men can’t get pregnant. That, in essence, is what makes men men. “If men could get pregnant,” Gloria Steinem famously quipped in 1971, “abortion would be a sacrament.” But even then, her thinking was flawed. Because if men could get pregnant, they wouldn’t be men; they’d be women. Fifty years later, Steinem’s assertion has become positively medieval to those on the left—along with her opposition to pornography and prostitution. One of the difficulties in being a 90-year-old feminist, as The Guardian put it some years back, is that it’s “not easy to be an old hand in a political movement the very nature of which is… to interrogate and reject the assumptions of [all that] came before.” Yesterday’s vices are today’s vanguard. 

We might assume that an old-guard feminist like Gloria Steinem wouldn’t risk women’s safety and opportunity just to gain political points. But we’d be wrong. Instead of sticking to her guns and insisting that men can’t get pregnant (or compete in women’s volleyball), she told Cathy Newman in 2015 that “each person has a right to define themselves.” Feminism, apparently, is no longer about advancing the rights of women. It’s about rejecting traditional roles and expectations—wherever they’re found. “We need to change society to suit the individual,” Steinem demanded, “not the individual to suit society.” And then she assured Newman that “we aren’t there yet.” But that goes without saying. When there is no finish line, there can be no arrival. Only perpetual deconstruction. If the goal is to improve the prospects of women, that has a modicum of achievability, but if the goal is to simply destroy social structure wherever it exists, that is a task without end. 

Now that it’s become fashionable to pretend that men can get pregnant and have babies, we must brace for the real-world fallout—some of which arrived in Abort73’s inbox this past Independence Day. Because, while “let people define themselves” might sound noble as an abstract principle, it’s devastating in practice. The phenomenon of men pretending to be women presents the more obvious threat, but the problem of women pretending to be men has dangers all its own—as evidenced by last year’s school shooting in Nashville and the aborting of children whose “dads” didn’t think they could get pregnant. That was the case in our most recent abortion story. You can read it in its entirety on the Abort73 website, but I’m going to share portions of it here. Before I do, I should say a word about pronouns. 

Abort73’s first-ever account of a transgender abortion does not make use of any pronouns, nor do we identify the author as either male or female. That is revealed through the course of the story. This small concession to neutrality could be made without inconvenience or deceit, so I made it. But that approach doesn’t work in this context. Since I must employ pronouns to refer to the story’s author, I will be referring to her as her. Why do I do that? Because, as Steinem observed a half century ago, men can’t get pregnant. So if a person does get pregnant, you can rest assured that person is a her. Some will argue that in order to love your transgender neighbor, you must refer to them on their own terms—but I would argue the opposite, because love and lies cannot coexist. 

Love rejoices with the truth. That’s what Paul wrote in I Corinthians 13. “Let us not love in word or talk,” John said in his third epistle, “but in deed and in truth.” Or in the words of Solomon, “A faithful witness does not lie.” And when Christ himself was asked what is necessary for salvation, this was one of the conditions: “Do not bear false witness.” The devil is the father of lies, so when we lie, we are speaking his native tongue. That’s why I do not call it loving to affirm the pretense that men can be women or women can be men. I can love someone—including myself—without accepting or affirming the wicked things they do. So I can love someone who’s had an abortion or someone who’s purportedly changed their gender without condoning what they’ve done.

The believer is charged with both loving our neighbor and exposing deeds of darkness. On what basis should transgenderism be understood as a deed of darkness? Because in the beginning, God created us male and female. Among species, there is no more fundamental distinction. To reject this is to reject the wisdom, goodness, and authority of God. That is why I call it wicked. Bigots like me are criticized for not accepting people as they are, but this is mere projection. It is those who espouse the absurd belief that male and female are interchangeable categories who are fundamentally unwilling to accept people for who they really are.

Now to the story.

Today is the two-year anniversary of the abortion in question. A medical abortion. It took place on July 16, 2022. The baby was 9 weeks and 4 days gestation when its life ended. And medical abortions, you’ll remember, take place at home. The grieving mother described her child as “a beautifully formed baby that was the size of a cashew nut, or a raspberry, or an olive.” Of the hundreds of abortion stories I’ve read and published, this one is among the most heart wrenching because at no point did this woman ever want an abortion. She was against it from the start but went through with it because she’d been convinced it was the right thing to do. “I attended an appointment,” she reveals, “at a specialist clinic which had experience with assigned-female-at-birth transgender patients and pregnancy.” When they asked her if she was sure she didn’t want to continue the pregnancy, she mused to herself, “What else are you supposed to say?” She gave the answer everyone else was looking for. Yes. “I had a human inside of me,” she confesses, “yet had never felt so alone.”

Since men don’t get pregnant, and this woman believed herself to be a man, she didn’t consider pregnancy to be a real possibility. In her mind, apparently, she was a gay man having sex with her gay boyfriend, but she still had female parts. So, essentially, this was a straight couple passing themselves off as gay.  “[Abortion] is an experience I never thought I’d go through,” she writes, “a decision I never thought I’d make.” Why? Because “I didn’t think I was able to conceive due to my hormone replacement therapy.” She describes her partner as being supportive, but it’s hard to understand what she means by that since he clearly wanted an abortion. They disagreed on the essential nature of the fetus, she reveals. He saw it as just a “bunch of cells.” But she was in “fact mode.” That‘s her term. She knew the baby already had a heartbeat, and if left alone, “would come out of me as a full human being in seven months time.”

It’s a bit ironic that this woman, who considers herself a man, would lean into the biological facts when it comes to abortion but doesn’t bother with them when it comes to sex. I suppose we all have our own peculiar inconsistencies to reckon with. And in her case, there is plenty of self-confessed baggage to help explain them. She calls herself a “recovering drug addict,” who was only a few months clean when she got pregnant, with a history of mental illness and chronic disease. She also shares of having been raped while using drugs, which left her with both cervical damage and HIV. Ultimately, it was her fear that she’d pass some of this brokenness on to her child which helped convince her to go through with the abortion. It’s the same perverse calculus that animates so many abortions: killing a child to “protect” them from mental and physical health risks. In the mother’s words:

The pregnancy would be high risk. What would be passed down to the baby was a concern, and as a transgender man, carrying my own baby to full term would have been a journey of exhausting advocating, emotional distress, social humiliation, and what seemed like inevitable trauma for me. I also couldn’t know for certain that having a parent in recovery wouldn’t at some point end in the child having a very traumatic story themselves, and I did not want that for them. I chose abortion and it hurt my heart before the abortion had even begun… It was hideous then, and it’s still as horrid now. 

Though we’re given only a small glimpse into her history, virtually all of the trauma relating to her pregnancy and abortion can be laid at the feet of her decision to transition. If she didn’t imagine herself to be a man, and subjected herself to hormone “therapy,” she would have understood her propensity for pregnancy. And if she hadn’t undertaken the quixotic goal of becoming a man, the humiliation, distress, trauma, and advocacy she so dreaded would have been entirely unnecessary. Perhaps there were people in her life warning her of the huge lifelong dangers inherent in trying to be a man. Perhaps she ignored them. But it’s also possible that everyone in her life just went along with it on the warped conviction that that’s the loving thing to do. That, after all, is the easiest course to take—the pathway of least resistance. What’s the harm, you ask, in just going along with it? This is the harm. This is where the rubber meets the road. Going along with delirious pretenses does not make things better; it makes things decidedly worse. Forty eight hours after the death of her child was initiated at a UK abortion clinic, this is how she describes its conclusion:

I had mild cramps and back pain for the first couple of hours. Then, after the third dose of two Misoprostol it suddenly stepped up to a whole new level. It was agony. It was a radiating, deep pain I’d never experienced before. It got worse and worse, and I began bleeding like a period would look like. I carried on contracting and cramping. I had decided in advance that when I felt close, that I would pass the baby into the toilet, [so] when the pain began to feel unbearable, on the toilet was where I sat... I never expected to feel the sensation I did as the fetus passed. It was nothing like I’d ever experienced before, and it wasn’t over yet. I wasn’t prepared for what I saw in the toilet as I stood and turned around. I suddenly had a tsunami of all the feelings I’d been suppressing to hold myself together. I couldn't bring myself to flush the toilet. My partner had to do it after I’d left the room. It’s been almost two years now and I still remember it vividly. There’s a quote, “Grief is like the ocean: it's deep and dark and bigger than all of us. And pain is like a thief in the night. Quiet. Persistent. Unfair...” The grief comes in waves. Some days I just want to go back and linger in the magic of being pregnant again. Others I’m overwhelmed by the what ifs and the if only. Then there are days where I’m plagued by the emotional baggage and haunted by the loss. 

Generally speaking, women who have abortions and women who call themselves men have this in common. They are both victims and victimizers. There’s a sense in which they bear responsibility for the choices they’ve made and another in which their “choices” have been driven by manipulation and deceit. It’s part moral agency and part social contagion—which gives me more sympathy for the women on the operating table and less sympathy for the “doctors” and drug companies driving the carnage. Abortion may end a pregnancy—that’s the nice way of putting it—but abortion should never be understood as an ending. Because it doesn’t end the hurt, or trauma, or guilt. Oftentimes, it magnifies all three. It ends one crisis to create another, and the second can be far more consuming than the first. “I chose to end my pregnancy,” this mother writes, “yet the loss I feel is just the same.” Abortion is not the easy option, she continues. It isn’t the “get out of jail free card” people expect it to be. It’s heavy, and you have to carry it for the rest of your life. This is how she describes the ensuing years:

I had to work really hard learning to frame what happened in a healthy way. I’ve had to acknowledge the existence of the baby I carried inside of me for over two months. I had to make sure they knew they mattered even though they never made it “earthside” out of the womb. They were loved, and I miss them even though we never really met. I had to really focus on my mental health in order to prevent this from breaking me. I eventually decided to get a tattoo that would mark their existence and connect them with my body forever. The tattoo reads, “Nine weeks inside. Jeremiah One Five.” In the Torah, Jeremiah 1:5 says, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart.” It has been comforting to know and believe that God says such beautiful things about a child he created inside of me. That’s how special they were to Him. I wholeheartedly believe that God knows the turmoil I had in my heart. I know that as I let go of my baby, God was there to catch them. Their soul reunited with Him as it left its body here on earth. 

What a mercy that, somewhere along the line, this woman was introduced to Jeremiah 1:5. Maybe someday she’ll run into Deuteronomy 22:5, and maybe it will make a difference. I don’t mean to imply that citing a Bible verse or having it tattooed on your skin somehow justifies a life of unrepentant sinfulness. Bible tattoos are a dime a dozen, and then there’s that pesky Leviticus 19:28 to wrestle with. All I’m saying is that this woman’s story is by no means over, and so long as there is life there is hope. There is never a happy ending with abortion. Those are her words, not mine. “It’s always fundamentally full of grief, pain, and loss—a void (that) sticks around like an unwelcome guest.” Now these are my words. Hormone therapy won’t fill that void. Sex won’t fill that void. Not even church will fill that void. In this world, there is sorrow. That’s what Jesus told his disciples. But for those who are his disciples, there is the promise of a future rejoicing—where “no one will take your joy from you.” In fact, Christ compares it to the agony of pregnancy and the joy of having delivered a baby. “Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms… And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am, you may be also.”