Gotta be a prank. If even Gawker finds the idea horrifying, there’s no way a suburban couple would seriously be considering it. Would they?

That someone would do this is almost impossible to believe, of course. We asked the Arnolds if this was some sort of a prank. “No, it’s not. We are taking this very seriously,” Pete replied. We then asked if this was some sort of convoluted pro-life stunt. Alisha laughed. “It’s definitely not a pro-life campaign,” she said. “I believe in a woman’s right to choose.”…

Pete, who described himself as a Libertarian, framed the couple’s majority-rule abortion as kind of an extreme civics lesson that he hoped would bring the abortion debate home. “Voting is such an important part of who we are as a people,” Pete said. “Here’s a chance where people can be heard about whether they are pro-choice or whether they are pro-life, and it makes a difference in the real world.”

We pointed out an obvious flaw with his logic: The vast majority of people who are pro-choice aren’t pro-abortion, so it wouldn’t figure that they would automatically vote for the abortion option. The only people who would probably vote for the abortion are trolls who want to piss off pro-lifers. (In fact the anarchic message board 4chan has already hijacked the poll a couple times, tilting it to the “abortion” side.) Pete countered that during elections, “people do silly stuff all the time, and their votes get counted anyway.”

Gawker’s three theories: (1) They’re attention whores, (2) it’s a pro-life satire on how casually some people treat abortion, (3) they’re serious. I’m thinking it has to be number two. First, if they really are pro-choice, this is the worst possible thing they could do to advance that cause short of, say, filming themselves high-fiving during the procedure. Second, per a bit of background provided by Life News, they’ve already lost two pregnancies recently to miscarriage and the mother lost another when she was 20. A normal couple in that position (especially one with no children) would be desperate to see this one carried to term, not cavalier to the point of treating it as some sort of morbid civics experiment. But then, admittedly, no matter which of the three theories proves true, this is no normal couple. Third, their rhetoric about the glories of voting is so tone-deaf and self-important that it can only be satire. “Voting is such an important part of who we are as a people”? Seriously, buddy? Knowing full well that most of the people voting in the poll for abortion are lampooning the stupidity of soliciting strangers’ opinions about this, they still maintain that the results will “influence their decision heavily”? If that were true, it would mean they’ve placed their family planning decisions in the hands of bored trolls, which means … it can’t possibly be true. I think.