If you watch the Netflix original, “Orange Is The New Black,” you may have been yawning through an unoriginal abortion monologue scene in the show’s newly-released third season (maybe that’s why the director made sure the character’s outfit was outrageous– to keep the viewer’s attention through the snooze-inducing speech). Fittingly, this scene is played in an episode entitled, “Mother’s Day.” At a prison which serves as the show’s backdrop, female inmates are preparing a celebration and carnival for their respective visiting children. But one inmate, a mother of five, won’t be receiving any warm embraces from her children on the big day. All of her children are dead.
The character, Pennsatucky, underwent five abortions. On Mother’s Day, she keenly feels their absence, and commemorates them with makeshift grave markers. Pennsatucky, in spite of her life of crime, knows that her abortions – though legal – were wrong. But her mourning is irreverently interrupted by the show’s token, all-knowing abortion advocate, “Big Boo,” who is quick to squelch any semblance of grief with her sage advice to “let go of that sh*t.” The scene can be viewed here (disclaimer: the video contains offensive language).
Big Boo thinks that Pennsatucky should consider her abortions “a blessing,” because her children would have been “meth head, white trash pieces of sh*t,” and aborting her children “spared society the scourge of [her]offspring.” Big Boo substantiates her assertion that Pennsatucky’s children are better off dead with a debunked anecdote from the decade-old Freakonomics textbook. The book, she explains, correlates a mid-1990s dip in the U.S. crime rate with the absence of children who began to be legally aborted in the mid-1970s (after Roe v. Wade). These children, Big Boo and Freakonomics argue, would have been felons because “they would have grown up poor, and neglected, and abused – the three most important ingredients when one is making a felon.”
Abortion activists seemed to think this was a sound argument, as evidenced by tweets:
We’re glad to see popular shows like @OITNB talking about abortion. Watch the clip → http://t.co/yDols2Vlye #OITNB pic.twitter.com/hfUH6iBebj
— NARAL (@NARAL) June 16, 2015
One abortion zealot even went so far as to describe the monologue as “the best.”
However, closer examination reveals the danger of Big Boo’s spiteful comments, not to mention the fact that her claims are unfounded and outdated. The abortion-crime correlation of Freakonomics is a patently overstated misnomer. Steven Ertelt of LifeNews.com explains the argument’s multi-faceted demise here. Interestingly, too, abortion advocates who use this argument overlook all of the prominent examples of children who were supposedly destined for a life of crime – of whom society should have been spared—based on their childhood circumstances. Perhaps most notably, this example:
But the abortion movement subsists on the notion that only certain Lives are worth living. This philosophy has led to travesties such as the rampant prenatal eradication of children diagnosed with Down syndrome and other chromosomal abnormalities through abortion, and to the soundbite recycled in “Orange Is The New Black,” suggesting that the very potential that a child could grow up to be a felon disqualifies him from pursuing Life at all.