Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Pro-abortion forces in Texas are being accused of desperation for introducing a video game that lets players hunt for abortion access in the state because of a recently passed law that bans abortions after 20 weeks and imposes new clinic safety regulations.
Instead of applauding lawmakers for standing up for the rights of women and children in the Lone Star State, a two-woman team of abortion advocates designed a new online video game called “Choice: Texas” that leads players in an adventurous hunt for abortion access.
As LifeNews explains, the game is played through one of several characters, each of whom reflects specific socioeconomic, geographic, and demographic factors impacting abortion access in Texas. For instance, 35 year-old Latrice has a long-time boyfriend but “has never planned to have children, and between her career and family obligations, she feels she has her hands full enough.”
The obstacles Latrice and other fictional characters face is supposed to be reflective of the real circumstances facing women in the state now that the new law was passed.
Game designers Carly Kocurek and Allyson Whipple claim the game is intended to teach “awareness and empathy” and to be used as “a sex education tool for older high schoolers.”
During an interview with Persephone Magazine, Whipple explained that the game should help people, “including privileged pro-choice people” to realize how difficult it can be for the less privileged to obtain an abortion.
She’s hoping it will also help to build empathy in people “who want to shame and demonize women” who have abortions. She claims that while working for the Lilith Fund for Reproductive Equity, which helps women who need financial assistance obtain an abortion, that she “never talked to a woman who was happy to be having an abortion.”
She adds: “I hope that this game make people see just how difficult and serious this decision is.”
Unfortunately, the game and the message behind it misrepresent the Texas law, which was designed to protect late-term infants from being butchered by abortionists such as Kermit Gosnell of Philadelphia, and to demand that abortion clinics adhere to the same regulatory standards as other health care clinics in the state.
When viewed within a factual rather than a political perspective, Kocurek and Whipple’s game becomes more like an attempt to trivialize infanticide and to send a message to all those woman who are so unhappy to be having an abortion that this is their lot in life – to be used as an object of pleasure, then impregnated and left to “clean up” the consequences. How empowering!
If they really wanted to educate the masses, they’d create a game that shows women why surgical instruments need to be sterilized and doors and elevators need to be made wide enough to accommodate emergency equipment.
It could also teach them how to navigate through a discussion with a boyfriend who is pressuring her into having an abortion.
Or perhaps it can teach them about the pain an infant feels when an abortionist severs its spinal cord with a scissor just minutes after it is born.
What a shame to waste this video game on “helping” women find their way to a place most of them don’t even want to go!
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