Is aborting someone OK if we won’t miss them?

By Chiara McKenna, originally published April 30, 2024, Mercator

By now, you’ve probably been seeing the headlines in both the left- and right-wing media. Comedian Bill Maher admitted on HBO’s Real Time that abortion is murder.

To be exact, Maher stated the following:

“I scold the left when they say ‘they [pro-lifers] just hate women.’ They don’t hate women… they think it’s murder. And it kind of is. I’m just okay with that. I am. There’s 8 billion people in the world. I’m sorry, we won’t miss you.”

It’s rare to see such honesty. Shocking honesty, but honesty nonetheless. Most pro-abortion advocates deny or dance around this truth. They change the vocabulary to make it seem less harmful. First, it’s not murder, it’s an abortion. Then further, it’s not pro-abortion, it’s pro-choice. They sanitize the reality of an abortion so even the women going in for the “procedure” aren’t prepared for the reality of what they’re about to experience.

Grief

Now, all pro-abortion arguments fall apart with enough prodding, but Maher chose to use one of the worst ones. According to Maher, killing a baby by abortion is okay because “we won’t miss you.”

There are two major issues with the idea that a person’s value lies in who remembers them when they die, which results in the belief that unborn babies have no value because no one will miss them.  

First of all, they will be missed. The mothers who go through abortions do feel the loss of their babies. For some women, it’s immediate regret; for others, it takes years. Even if it takes years to manifest, in most cases the loss comes to affect their lives in some way.

For women who have an abortion between the ages of 11 and 19, they generally won’t process the abortion until age 25. Vicki Thorn, founder of Project Rachel and the National Office for Post-Abortion Reconciliation and Healing, observed a phenomenon that many of the calls she received were from women who were around the age of 25.

It wasn’t until years later that she delved into brain research and found that 25 is when the corpus callosum in women’s brains, “the linker between the right brain and left brain,” becomes fully active. At that point, they process what they’ve been through and what they’ve lost, when previously they were operating “mostly out of the amygdala, which is the fear center of the brain.”

Women’s bodies miss the baby whether they are conscious of it or not, as well. All pregnant women go through “microchimerism”, where cells from the growing baby pass to the mother. For the rest of a mother’s life, whether she has an abortion, miscarriage, or successful birth, she will carry cells from her child.

“These cells are part of biological knowledge, someone’s missing,” Thorn shared in an interview with Catholic News Agency, going on to explain that feelings of loss can come up at any time, even years later, when an unexpected “trigger-incident” occurs.

This is why Rachel’s Vineyard exists. Why the international group Silent No More exists. Why even Facebook groups built around a community of women with abortion regret exist. Why countless organizations to help women deal with their loss exist.

A mother will feel the loss of her child, physically in the after-effects of the procedure and later emotionally.

Overpopulated?

Now, that was just the first major issue with Maher’s argument. Let’s talk about the second major issue. For argument’s sake, let’s pretend for a minute that absolutely no one will miss a child killed in an abortion. That’s still not a justification for murder.

We don’t murder people for having no friends, or no social media followers, who may end up unremembered and un-mourned after they die. In one hundred years, it’s unlikely that anyone will be remembering and missing Bill Maher, but does that mean he has no value now? Obviously not.

What Maher is really saying boils down to an argument of utility. The unborn baby isn’t contributing anything to society, they are of no use, so why keep them around? It’s the same argument given in euthanasia debates, claiming that the elderly or disabled aren’t contributing to society, so it’s okay to give them an early death.

Just because Maher cannot see what the child contributes to the world, does not mean that child contributes nothing to the world. It does not mean that a child contributes nothing to the mother carrying them, in those months when she is their whole world.

But even if the unborn child contributed absolutely nothing, human value is not based on how many people will remember and miss you. It’s also not based on how much you are currently contributing to society.

Every human being has inherent value and dignity and should be treated as such. Your value cannot be diminished based on the number of people who will miss you when you die. And since Maher felt the need to highlight how many people are currently on Earth, I’ll also clarify that your value cannot be diminished by the number of people on Earth either. Your value remains the same whether there are 8 people or 8 billion people on this planet.

Maher may not care about unborn babies, may even be fine with the mass murder of unborn babies, but his argument does not justify abortion in the least. None of the arguments that the pro-abortion movement can come up with justify the killing of an innocent human being in the womb.

Hopefully, Maher’s honesty serves as a wake-up call for pro-choicers who sit in the grey area of “reasonable limits.” Abortion is murder, whether the baby is nine months gestated or nine days gestated. May this wake some people up to what they are really supporting. This is what the Culture of Death looks like: a world where people recognize that abortion, and euthanasia for that matter, are acts of coldblooded murder, but see nothing wrong with it.

Maher is being honest. Abortion is murder. But it should ring warning bells for everyone that the world is so radicalized that a public figure can admit abortion is murder on live TV, no dancing around, and face no repercussions for doing so. He can even justify the murder with a defense so flimsy that it can be torn apart in under 60 seconds, yet the pro-abortion movement will still stand with him.

Chiara McKenna is a New Media Specialist at the Population Research Institute.