Lena Dunham: "I still haven’t had an abortion, but I wish I had"

Via the Blaze, a clip that raises an important question: Can one be properly “woke” without having killed a baby?

Skip to 13:30 below. Someone whose cultural cachet doesn’t depend on being a young feminist and provocateur would have turned this into a more thoughtful bit of commentary. She’s a loud and proud abortion warrior, she says, but she’s uncomfortable (or used to be uncomfortable) with people thinking that she might have had an abortion herself. How come? Had she unconsciously adopted an unjust social stigma against abortion, as she assumes, or was she experiencing a moral intuition about abortion writ large at the thought of killing her own child? If we’re going with the stigma theory, are there any stigmas within her own in-groups that might encourage a woman to champion abortion even if she’s reluctant to do so? If so, how does that square with “choice” as the supreme virtue? Lots of fodder here for a challenging meditation on this subject. Instead she reacted in the most grotesque (yet provocative, of course) way: She wishes she had killed a baby of her own so that she wouldn’t feel the tug of that damnable stigma. It’s a perfect expression of pro-choice politics, treating a defenseless life as an instrument to express the depth of your allegiance to the tribe. There’s so much Social Progress that could be made if not for our atavistic squeamishness about blood.

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Her eventual podcast about having gotten pregnant for the purpose of ending the life inside her will be a smash, I’m sure. Exit question: Is this, paradoxically, actually further evidence that Dunham has a conservative streak? Literally everyone who listens to this clip will come away feeling a tiny bit more pro-life than they did before.

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David Strom 5:20 PM | April 15, 2024
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