(LifeSiteNews) — In a culture that champions abortion as a right, feticide inevitably metamorphoses from a choice into an obligation. If a man does not want to be a father, he can demand that the woman he has impregnated get an abortion and can exert an enormous amount of pressure on her while she is in a vulnerable condition. Abortion is, more often than not, an expectation rather than an option.
This is true from the poorest women to the richest. Last year, Britney Spears revealed in her memoir that her pop star boyfriend Justin Timberlake asked her to get an abortion in 2000. “I always expected us to have a family together one day. This would just be much earlier than I’d anticipated. But Justin definitely wasn’t happy about the pregnancy. He said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young.”
She wanted to keep the baby. Justin wanted to abort it, and so under pressure, she took abortion pills. It was the most “agonizing thing I have ever experienced in my life,” Spears says. “If it had been left up to me alone, I never would have done it. And yet Justin was so sure that he didn’t want to be a father.” After the abortion, she lay “crying and sobbing” on the bathroom floor, cramping painfully while Justin strummed his guitar in an apparent attempt at comfort as she bled their baby.
A similar story broke recently when Maya Henry, former fiancée of Liam Payne of the boy band One Direction, recently spoke out about her own abortion. The Texas model and pop star began dating in 2019, when she was 18 and Payne was 26. Henry has recently released a novel based on their relationship in which the main character Mallory, who is dating a pop star named Oliver, get pregnant but is told to have an abortion or lose her boyfriend. In the novel, Mallory has an abortion but suffers severe medical complications.
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This, Henry told People magazine, is based on her own experience. Henry underwent a medical abortion in the hospital; unlike Spears, she was alone. “It was very lonely, having these men tell you, ‘Oh, it’s going to feel like a heavy period, it’s not going to be painful, it’s going to be easy,’” she said. “But I’m like, you’ve never even gone through anything like [this], so how would you know what to tell me?” Henry says that if the choice had been up to her, she “wouldn’t have done it.”
“But then also, if I were to have made a different decision, then I would’ve lost the person that I loved,” Henry said. “There were definitely difficult conversations about it. But looking back now, things happen for a reason.” Henry’s experience is a common one—our contraceptive culture has severed sex from procreation, and both men and women now presume that they can engage in the act of reproduction without reproducing. Children that are conceived anyways are thus unwanted, and many men insist that women simply “take care of it.” After all, if abortion is merely healthcare, why should his recreational sex turn into a paternal obligation?
Henry says she wrote about her abortion so that other women who have endured similar experiences would “feel seen.” This is not the sort of abortion messaging that abortion activists and the industry wanted to see this year. This is not to say that women and men are not both culpable when an abortion is procured; but Henry’s story does showcase the power imbalance in many of these relationships as well as the lie the lie that abortion is merely a “choice” or “healthcare.” When sterile sex becomes the expected norm, abortion becomes the perceived obligation.
Henry is just the latest woman to discover the truth behind the girl-power rhetoric.
RELATED: Britney Spears says she aborted child while dating Justin Timberlake, calls decision ‘agonizing’
