On March 24, the women’s fashion magazine Cosmopolitan published an article about what happens to unborn babies when their mothers are smoking. The piece highlighted 4-D scans of unborn children grimacing and covering their faces in discomfort and how “disturbing” it is for pregnant women to smoke. It’s amazing how scrupulous they think pregnant women should be for the sake of their child when they are one of the most outspoken pro-choice magazines circulating the U.S.
Everything about the piece is hypocritical. Cosmopolitan has published article after article trying to convince impressionable young girls into supporting the abortion choice. The magazine even takes the extreme position of opposing late-term abortion bans. In their article “10 Things You Should Know About 20-Week Abortion Bans,” Cosmopolitan’s response to the question of whether or not babies in the third trimester feel pain was “probably not.” Condemning a pregnant woman for smoking because of the harm it does to her child while simultaneously supporting the legal right for her to end that child’s life via abortion is as absurd as it is morbid.
Another notable point about the article is the language that was used. Whenever the magazine publishes a piece about abortion, the unborn are referred to as fetuses, pregnancies or clumps of cells. In the article about the effects of smoking, the author accurately described them as babies. Her article wasn’t about abortion, so there was no danger in calling a spade a spade. Additionally, the pregnant women were referred to as mothers. Isn’t a woman only a mother once she’s given birth? After all, that has been part of the pro-choice narrative.
When talking about hypocrisy, Cosmopolitan is an easy target. The magazine masquerades as being "feminist," while it tells women what to wear, what to say and how to please men. What is so scary about this particular affectation is not that Cosmopolitan endorses it, but that it emphasizes a problem that is deeply embedded in our society — bigotry. We live in a culture that tries to define humanity in terms of convenience.
If a child is convenient or “wanted,” that life is celebrated and smoking, drinking or any other action that could harm the child is condemned. But if the child is inconvenient or “unwanted,” the abortion procedure is made readily available and women are pressured into having it. “Wanted” is a label and nothing more. The fact is, deciding whether or not an unborn child is wanted is a reflection on our society, not on the humanity of the unborn child. We don’t get to decide when an entity is or isn’t human, biology does. No amount of phony and grammatically incorrect language will ever change that.
Of course smoking while you're pregnant is bad. It’s awful. But if the harm done to unborn children through irresponsible actions such as smoking is unethical, what is abortion? If any unborn children are worth protecting, then all of them are. To say otherwise is illogical and deeply hypocritical. As humans we are valuable because of what we are, not what we can do, and certainly not because of how we are labeled.
Reach the columnist at Joan.Lebeau@asu.edu or follow @joanlebeau94 on Twitter
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Editor’s note: The opinions presented in this column are the author’s and do not imply any endorsement from The State Press or its editors.
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