THE IRONY CONTINUES

It seems that a single theme has crept into a lot of my current posts – irony.  I love irony, it comes closer than anything else in convincing me there is something to this karma thing.
 
Anyway, sticking to the irony theme, my last post was about pro-abortion people never actually hearing what they have to say.  And in today’s New York Times, feminist Barbara Eherenreich had a doozy.  She was lamenting the fact that abortion - a legal procedure, she hastens to point out – is not something you can actually talk about in pleasant company:
 
“…just not supposed to be mentioned or acknowledged as an acceptable option. An article in The Times on Sunday, "Television's Most Persistent Taboo," reported that a Viacom-owned channel is refusing to run the episodes of a soap opera in which the teenage heroine chooses to abort. Even "Six Feet Under," which is fearless in its treatment of sexual diversity, burdens abortion with terrible guilt. Where are those "liberal media" when you need them?”
 
She doesn’t get into why this is not talked about because then she would have to mention that messy “conscience” thing the Perth clinic was so worried about. 
 
But I digress.
 
She does actually bring up an issue that does deserve some attention – elective abortions in the cases of birth defects:
 
“Testing for fetal defects can now detect over 450 conditions, many potentially fatal or debilitating. Doctors may advise the screening tests, insurance companies often pay for them, and many couples (no hard numbers exist) are deciding to abort their imperfect fetuses.
 
The trouble is, not all of the women who are exercising their right to choose in these cases are willing to admit that that's what they are doing. Kate Hoffman, for example, who aborted a fetus with Down syndrome, was quoted in The Times on June 20 as saying: "I don't look at it as though I had an abortion, even though that is technically what it is. There's a difference. I wanted this baby."
 
Barbara wants these women to recognize that they are having abortions, just like the women who do it for “choice”.  And I agree with her, they should admit they are aborting their child because it has Down syndrome and not try to hide behind some “greater good” shield of conscience assuaging.  
 
The irony comes in when Barbara, in the spirit of fairness, then says she had two abortions in her lifetime:
 
“Honesty begins at home, so I should acknowledge that I had two abortions during my all-too-fertile years. You can call me a bad woman, but not a bad mother. I was a dollar-a-word freelancer and my husband a warehouse worker, so it was all we could do to support the existing children at a grubby lower-middle-class level. And when it comes to my children - the actual extrauterine ones, that is - I was, and remain, a lioness.”
 
Did she just say:
 
“You can call me a bad woman, but not a bad mother”
 
What was she thinking?  Barbara, you killed two of your children!  That makes you a TERRIBLE mother!  And still, you have the audacity, while admitting you killed two children, to say:
 
“And when it comes to my children - the actual extrauterine ones, that is - I was, and remain, a lioness.”

Well, in your defense, some mothers do eat their young in the wild, you lioness.