The Labrants Think It’s Okay to Compare Abortion to Genocide
Everything they missed in their documentary
If you’re not familiar with the LaBrant family, lucky you. The Labrants are evangelical family vloggers who post their daily lives on Youtube. More recently, the couple decided to delve into making documentaries. The most recent one focuses on abortion and is stirring controversy online.
The documentary focuses on giving viewers a pro-life (or anti-choice) view of abortion. A few minutes in, they compare abortion to two historic tragedies — the holocaust and the Rwanda genocide.
The pro-life movement has been appropriating the Holocaust since the 1970s. Essentially using imagery from the concentration camps to promote their views on abortion. To say it’s disrespectful doesn’t even cover it.
During the Holocaust, doctor Gisella Perl used her skills to save the lives of hundreds of women. Pregnant women were sent to the gas chambers, so Perl performed abortions in very difficult conditions to save these women’s lives. The fact that abortions took place at these camps doesn’t give anyone permission to compare a medical procedure to such terrible crimes
The documentary doesn’t get much better after that. We are presented with interviews with pro-life doctors, women who decided not to have an abortion, and an animated live-action of an abortion. There’s very little information on this documentary and none of it it’s new, despite the fact that a 5-year follow-up study about abortion just came out recently.
There are a lot of things the Labrants didn’t mention, so here are things I wish they would have talked about.
Misconceptions about abortion the Labrants could have addressed in their documentary:
1. Women seek abortions because they want to
About half the women who seek abortions in the US live below the poverty line, and 3 out of 4 are low-income.
Raising a child in the US, born in 2022, will cost an estimated $272,049 until the age of 18. The poverty line is $18,310 a year for a two-person household. Over 18 years, someone who lives on that income will have earned $329,58 without excluding any expense. How is someone who ears below that (or even slightly above) supposed to raise a child?
A conversation about abortion that doesn’t address poverty is not a productive conversation. Unsurprisingly, women who get abortions are better off financially, after five years, than women who are denied an abortion.
2. Women seek abortions because they want to be childfree
Another common misconception about abortion is that women who seek abortions want freedom and to be childfree. The reality is far from that.
Over half of the women who seek abortions are mothers. In fact, one of the main reasons they decide to have an abortion is to be able to give time, attention, and financial security to the children they already have.
3. People who defend abortion care about life
The US has 29 states who are hostile or extremely hostile to abortion rights. If politicians defending these policies claim to be pro-life, you would think they have good conditions for pregnant women when they’re giving birth, right?
Except, women in the US die from pregnancy-related causes at a much higher rate than in most other high-income countries.
In fact, out of the 22 states that have a maternal mortality rate higher than 10 (per 100,000 births), 19 have strong anti-abortion legislation. For reference, the same rate is 7 in the UK.
4. People who defend abortion care about reducing abortion rates
I don’t think I have to tell you how important good sex education is to reduce abortion rates. Switzerland has one of the best sex education programs in the world and is the second European country with the lowest abortion rate. And this, despite abortion being legal for any reason up until 12 weeks.
Unsurprisingly, the US is nowhere to be seen in the best sex-ed countries. It’s also not one of the countries where the pill is free.
5. Most women regret having an abortion
Another common tactic used against abortion is the claim that, if you have an abortion, you’ll most definitively regret it.
For starters, abortion is not a decision that one makes lightly. In fact, most women who have had an abortion agree that they had a difficult time making a decision. Still, five years later, 99% of women reported that they did not regret having an abortion. In fact, the odds of someone saying the abortion was the right decision only increased over time.
If someone is making the decision to have an abortion, they likely have good reasons for it, and they’ve given it a lot of thought. And they're most likely not going to regret it.
Conversations surrounding abortion easily turn into a discussion about where life begins or even whether or not you should compare abortion to the Holocaust (please stop).
It’s a very complicated issue with a lot of moving pieces. A conversation about abortion also needs to be a conversation about poverty. And about health (physical and mental). And about the absolute importance of sexual education. And about the need for free contraceptives. And about maternal mortality.
The Labrants documentary is nothing more than a promotional video that adds to the noise and to the controversy but offers no solutions, no answers, and no facts. If you’d like some great content on this topic, please follow Doctor Mama Jones on Youtube.
If you’d like to read more content on medium, subscribe! For $5 a month, you can read unlimited articles:
