Actress Michelle Williams said a lot about abortion during her Golden Globe win on Sunday night, without ever uttering the word. But what she was implying seemed pretty clear. Abortion is the only reason she could achieve such an award.
As Autumn Johnson, writer for The Blaze, so eloquently put it on Twitter, per Mark 8:36 (ESV), “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?”
Williams is perhaps best known to the mainstream for her starring role in Dawson’s Creek, her red-carpet style and for her relationship with Heath Ledger, with whom she had a child before he passed away from a drug overdose in 2008. She is known mostly for taking roles in independent and arthouse style films that appeal more to critics than vast audiences. According to recent reports, Williams is newly engaged and also pregnant with her second child.
Her latest win is for the FX series Fosse/Verdon, and she used her moment on stage to proclaim the supposed virtues of abortion and encourage women across the country to vote for abortion.
In her acceptance speech, she said, “I’m also grateful to have lived in a moment in our society where choice exists. Because as women and as girls’ things can happen to our bodies that are not our choice. I’ve tried my very best to live a life of my own making and not just a series of events that happened to me but one that I could stand back and look at and recognize my handwriting all over—messy and scrawling, sometimes careful and precise, but one that I had carved with my own hand.”
She went on to say, “And I wouldn’t have been able to do this without employing a woman’s right to choose. To choose when to have my children and with whom, when I felt supported and able to balance our lives knowing, as all mothers know, that the scales must and will tip toward our children.
“I know my choices might look different than yours but thank god or whomever you pray to, that we live in a country founded on the principle that I am free to live by my faith and you are free to live by yours.”
There are a couple of different ideas to dissect here. The first is the idea that “things can happen to (women’s) bodies that are not our choice.” That is true. Women in this country and across the world are sexually assaulted every day. I’ve interviewed women who have experienced harrowing ordeals of international sex trafficking. Their stories are utterly terrifying, and three out of the four women I interviewed had a child as a result of rape.
But here’s the difference between Williams and these victims of trafficking: the women who experienced at times the most horrible abuse imaginable chose to have their children. One woman, who’s experience was so violent that she could not even talk about what happened, went ahead and gave birth to her rapist’s child. But all the women also said that their children gave them a sense of hope and healing despite the trauma they experienced.
The other enormous problem with Williams speech is that she says all of this pro-abortion propaganda as a woman of immense privilege. Ironically, the only thing that separates Williams from many other women who have experienced unplanned pregnancies is that as an actress she has been able to amass an estimated fortune of $16 million. Williams herself has admitted that as an emancipated teen she took a correspondence course that left her able, in her words, “barely (able to) add and subtract” and “frustrated with the limitations of (her) own mind.”
She made a choice to skip out on a quality education in order to pursue her passion for acting, would she have been unable to manage her career if she had a child? The answer is probably not.
Women, no thanks to people like Williams, fall into this belief that it must be either one or the other. They can either have their child or their career, relationship pr education. That simply isn’t true. Many women across the world are able to have their children and be successful at the same time. It isn’t a one or the other. You can do both, or, if that isn’t an option, you can give your child up for adoption if the timing and situation just isn’t conductive to raising a child.
Hopefully, no teenager or woman takes Williams’ advice to heart. As a woman, I believe that a child does not destroy a woman’s life but instead adds to it. Is it hard? Yes. Will it mean sacrificing some important relationships and activities? Sometimes. But life is always the better choice.
Photo from Youtube
