No, women are not having abortions for the money....

Anti-abortion groups in Israel use tactics of guilt, terror, and public shaming to force women to carry out unwanted pregnancies. It is time this stopped.

I was walking down a crowded street in Tel Aviv last week when I saw these words blasting at me from the side of the bus:

”You don’t end a life because of money.”

I thought, wow, the American eighties have finally arrived in Israel. The whole thing reminds me of Susan Faludi’s book, Backlash, first published in 1991, about the entire anti-abortion industry in America and what it does to women. All the blaming, shaming, and casting women as murderers for wanting to make our own bodily decisions and fertility decisions. (Shudder.) And here we are. The language of attacking women for daring to control our own bodies has not gone away.

The anti-abortion movement is wildly spreading, getting bolder, more violent, more dangerous. and more obnoxious. All around the world. In America, in addition to the Texas abortion law and its potential spread to other states, here is the frightening reality in which women are being jailed in America not only for having abortions but also for having miscarriages. Today’s America is even worse for women seeking abortion than what Faludi described thirty years ago. But again, it’s not just America.

The entire ad reads as follows (translation mine):

Abortion is not child’s play. It is hard to live with it. You don’t end a life because of money [Signed], Efrat, the organization giving advice and assistance to pregnant women in crisis.

There are so many things wrong with this ad. First of all, women choosing to have abortions do not need to hear anyone else telling them what a serious decision it is. The assumption that women are just “playing around” is infantilizing to women. As if women don’t know what they’re doing and need someone else to tell them that this is “serious”. (Cue eye roll) It is intended to make women feel stupid, mean, cruel and selfish.

Second, the assertion that abortion is “hard to live with”, intended to instill fearfulness, shame, and guilt, is patently false. One recent study showed that 99% of women who had abortions feel that it was the right thing to do, even five years down the line. The idea that women regret abortions is just a made-up line constructed by people who WANT women to regret abortions, even though women don’t.

That doesn’t mean that it isn’t a difficult decision. It is, of course, one of the hardest decisions a woman may have to make in her life. But it doesn’t mean that women cannot cope with it. Women can handle anything. Especially decisions that are about their own well-being. The last thing we need is men telling us that we will regret a decision that we make because they don’t want us to make it. It’s a classic example of emotional manipulation, of completely gendered emotional manipulation.

Finally, there is this doozy: That women having abortions are obviously, you know, money-hungry. Selfish, cold, unmotherly, uncaring baby-killers. Doing it all for the money. Women getting rich by killing babies.

In case you think that this thinking may be old or tired, the whole idea that pro-choice women are “baby killers” was a common meme during the previous two presidential elections. At one event that did when I was Vice Chair for Media at Democrats Abroad, I had a twenty-something American guy yelling at me that Democrats are baby-killers. This line is still with us, and is now riding around the sides of buses in Tel Aviv.

I am not even going to bother explaining how wrong this is. It is obvious that women have abortions for many difficult reasons, and putting it down to women's money greed is too twisted to warrant a response.

The whole ad campaign is made to cast women as selfish for daring to control our fertility choices.

Meanwhile, in an Orwellian twist, the advertiser, an anti-abortion group called Efrat, describes itself as simply “counseling” and “supporting” women in their choices.

I happened to do some research into Efrat a few years ago for an investigative story I wrote about Abortion in Israel with my friend and colleague Ariella Zeller for Lilith. So I would like to set the record straight about Efrat.

Efrat does not “counsel” women. Efrat aims to convince women not to have abortions, no matter what. No matter if the “woman” is a minor or was raped. No matter if the woman is a forty-year-old mother of ten who will die if she has another child. No matter if the woman is a poor, single immigrant saddled with debts and no support. It doesn’t matter. They all get the same response from Efrat. Which is heavy-duty pressure to keep the baby.

How do they do this? The same way anti-abortion activists do it in America. They show the woman/girl photos of grown fetuses, of what the baby looks like in the womb. Things like that.

Shaming. Guilt. Pressure.

And by the way, Efrat also runs radio ads. They open with: “Are you pregnant? Not sure what to do? Contact us. We can help.” It’s this whole fake “counseling” thing which is meant to disguise what they are really doing, which is shaming and pressuring women to have babies that they don’t want.

It isn’t “counseling” if the “counselor” has a political agenda about what they want the woman to decide. That’s just pressure. Obnoxious political pressure.

And about the money: Efrat promises “financial support”. Which means that for the first year, they may help with the costs of diapers and wipes. But that doesn’t even reflect a fraction of the real costs — financial, physical, and emotional costs — of bringing a human being into the world. The cost of a child is not just “diapers and wipes”.

Financially, is years of education, child-care, health-care, food, clothing, shelter, and a million emergencies. It is also the mother’s loss of work potential from being the one who works “mommy hours” and “mommy tracks” and cannot make it to the late meetings or the weekend retreats. (There are so many mountains of research on this that I’m not even bothering to put in a link. If you don’t think this is true, pull up a chair and Google it.)

Physically, there is a cost to women’s bodies. Carrying a pregnancy is physically risky to a woman, especially one who has other medical issues or who has had other babies already. Children also require physical care, carrying, moving around, and the physical space of another human being in a home. And a million pieces of equipment from cribs to beds to car seats to school supplies, as well as games and other devices. And if the child has special needs of any kind, that may requires extra equipment, time, space, specialists, appointments, and more.

Finally, there is the emotional cost. A child requires 24/7 attention, patience, compassion, and care. We all know what happens when a child does not receive that because pretty much every psychological thriller and every Law and Order episode ultimately discloses that the serial killer was deprived of some kind of love or care by their primary caregivers. Aka, mothers or fathers. So the idea of forcing a woman to bring into the world a baby who is not wanted carries with it some significant risks not only to the woman and to the child but possibly also to the people that the unwanted child will come into contact with.

Whose fault will that be, Efrat People?

And maybe, just maybe, the money factor matters. Because mothers who have no financial support to provide for a child will be adding suffering to the world, not out of callousness but out of an unfortunate inability to provide what the child needs. This is reality. Efrat “counselors” are blaming poor women who want an abortion for not having the money to raise a child, turning them into baby-killers. That is cruel, for two generations and more.

A child who is not sufficiently cared for, whose parents do not have the money, resources, or emotional or physical strength to care for them, or the desire to have a baby, is not necessarily a blessing for this world. This whole attempt to oversimplify women’s complex choices by calling them money-hungry baby killers is bad for women, bad for babies, and bad for society.

I want to say one more thing about Efrat, abortion, and money. One of the things that we found in our research for the Lilith article was this little factoid: The anti-abortion group, started by men, had an annual budget of roughly ten times what actual fertility counseling organizations get. That is why they can afford to do things like place bus and radio ads with the lie that they are offering “counseling” to pregnant women while the people doing actual counseling do not.

And by the way, imagine if the money spent on these ads actually went to women having babies.

A group of women’s organizations have started a petition to take down these ads. The bus company recently removed leftist political ads for being “divisive”. Based on that precedent, these ads should be banned, too. The petition, which sends letters to the people who have an ability to make this decision, is in Hebrew here. If you agree with what I wrote here, I would urge you to sign. I did.

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