How messed up is this?

My girlfriend alerted me to this story about an advice column explaining to men how to convince women to have an abortion:

The advice column was authored by Isabella Snow, who is described as a Sex Education Correspondent. It was published on AskMen.com, a risqué site which claims seven million monthly visitors.

The column is bluntly utilitarian in style, focusing on pregnancy’s and abortion’s effects upon the relationship of a man and a woman. It ends each paragraph of advice with a summarizing tip labeled “prenatal prep.” The avoidance of children and fatherhood is a repeated theme.

Here's one part that floored me:

Snow advises discussing a possible abortion 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,” the column continues, telling male readers they should use phrases like “I need” instead of “I want.”

"I need" instead of "I want"? Men certainly don't need to be told to express their selfish desires as "needs." How perverse that abortion would be used to glorify men's desire to have sexual relations without the consequence of fatherhood.

How utterly dehumanizing abortion is! Notice how the author takes it as fact that the unborn child is merely a "something," despite the fact that a mere month post-ovulation, blood circulation has begun to develop, eyes and ears are forming, and the brain and spinal cord are present. But I suppose that since it doesn't look cute yet, it's not really human?

Thankfully, it appears that this article has been yanked from AskMen.com. Still, I wanted to write about it because if anyone actually reads my blog, you should know this side of the abortion debate.

What is sold to the public as a method of female empowerment is so easily twisted into a form of female exploitation. What selfish man wouldn't want advice on how to convince his partner to have an abortion? Then his sexual relationships require no commitment on his part.

It's good to know that Feminists for Life are speaking out about things like this:

CNA sought comment about the column from Serrin Foster, President of Feminists for Life, who initially characterized the column as “a primer for coerced abortion masking itself as choice.”

She said the content of the column “isn’t anything new,” but it does document the pressure a pregnant woman can face from “fearful fathers, embarrassed parents, well-meaning friends, people in medical settings in high schools and colleges who don't see a way for her to have a baby and continue her education or career.”

What I fear about abortion is that it becomes for many people a self-centered way out of actually solving major problems. Women shouldn't have to fear bringing children into the world. There's nothing wrong with children in the womb. It's the world that needs to be fixed.