By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer
In a bizarre example of the increasing callousness toward life, a popular men’s advice column is advising men on how to persuade their wives or girlfriends to have abortions.
According to a report by the Catholic News Agency (CNA), the column appeared on AskMen.com and was authored by Isabella Snow who is described as a Sex Education Correspondnet.
Snow begins by advising men to be careful to approach a woman “correctly” when trying to coerce them into having an abortion. She advises that the conversation take place on a sofa at home to provide intimacy and “reduced eye contact,” purportedly to make it easier for the woman to speak “openly.”
“You’ll also want to take care with your word choice; pregnant women tend to feel like they’re carrying someone, as opposed to something, even if she is just a month or so pregnant,” Snow adds. “You can’t just talk about having an abortion the same way you’d talk about having a cavity filled.”
“If you don’t want to be a father, you have every right to come out and say so. You don’t have the right to berate her in the process and you should be kind, but you don’t need to understate anything,” she writes, and advises men to use phrases like “I need” instead of “I want.”
The columnist advises readers to emphasize the “significant life changes” involved in having a baby, such as the cost of food, diapers and medical care. It also links to another article detailing the costs of raising a child to 18, an estimated $307,000.
Possible questions to ask the woman might be “Who’s going to care for the baby while you’re working? Will you have to move to a new home? Will you have to sell your Harley and get a station wagon?”
Snow also counsels against threatening to end the relationship, not out of a need to provide support for the woman, but as a matter of self- interest.
An unsupported woman could despair, she says, in which state women “rarely make rational decisions.” Further, the column says, withdrawing from a woman would encourage her to ignore “any needs of yours that she may have been considering.”
Snow tells her readers “[if] your woman decides to have the baby anyway, this does not mean you’re required to get married or move in together.”
“You’ll probably want to provide for your child regardless, but if you’ve been clear about your intentions from the start, you are not obligated to contribute beyond what your conscience and the law expects of you. This was her decision, not yours, and the bulk of the responsibility is now hers.”
“Take a moment to spell this out for her when she gives you the final decision; it may just sway her over to your side,” Snow advises.
Serrin Foster, President of Feminists for Life, told CNA she thought the column was “a primer for coerced abortion masking itself as choice.”
In Foster’s view, Snow’s column was “absolutely vile” but speaks to “the need of the pro-life movement and the pro-woman and pro-man movement to speak about the importance benefits of having children in their lives.
She also stressed the importance of being sympathetic to the columnist “We don’t know what has happened to Isabella in her private life to take out whatever she has on other women,” Foster said.
“In a weird way she is alerting women and girls by documenting what has happened all the time to women and little girls especially from older men or people from clinics. The best part about this is that Isabella has documented it and now we can warn women and girls that this is a routine – no matter where you hear it from.”
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