This past Thanksgiving Day was greeted with the usual chorus of anti-American diatribes from the miserable utopians of the Left. Wealthy celebrity ingrates like Bette Midler and John Leguizamo sneered at Americans and the holiday on social media (the John Wick actor tweeted, “Happy indigenous survivor’s day! F*ck thanksgiving!”). MSNBC’s resident race-monger Joy Reid accused Republicans of wanting to portray Thanksgiving as a “simplistic fairy tale” to cover up that America was founded on “genocide.” Even the head of terrorism-linked CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, lectured Americans about “the dark history associated with this holiday” and the “unspeakable atrocities” committed against Native Americans.
But nothing sank to the depth of the Left’s perverse worldview quite like a Thanksgiving Day essay in the radical rag The Nation titled, “We’re Thankful for Our Abortions,” which declared there’s literally nothing to be grateful for in our current state of the union except the endangered freedom to abort one’s own unborn children.
The essay’s author is Nikiya Natale (preferred pronouns “she/her”), deputy director of We Testify, a group created by the National Network of Abortion Funds (NNAF) that advocates for women who have undergone abortions. Her bio on the group’s website states that Natale’s “passion” for her work “stems from her own multiple abortion experiences.” Multiple “experiences.”
Natale claims in her Nation article that many of those who have had abortions “celebrate their experience”; some of the women themselves – We Testify “abortion storytellers” – then go on to detail their infanticides in the article and why they are “thankful” for them.
Predictably, like all social justice warriors who live in a state of ceaseless discontent over perceived historical injustices, Natale felt compelled to begin her essay by wondering “why our nation celebrates the complicated holiday of Thanksgiving at all” – “complicated” because America was “founded on the unforgivable genocide of Native Americans.”
“[T]he harsh reality is that the utter disregard for all Indigenous people in the 1800s fuels the same systems of white supremacy that dehumanize all of us today,” she charged.
Let’s pause for some fact checks: 1) The United States of America was founded not on genocide, but in the affirmation that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That this basic fact even has to be clarified shows how deeply the Left has subverted our youth through decades of anti-American historical revisionism; 2) isolated atrocities aside (and there were atrocities committed by both sides) the European colonial powers did not wage genocide against Native Americans; 3) America is demonstrably not a nation in the grip of “systems of white supremacy.” It is, however, in the grip of an irrational, anti-Western wokeness that has twisted any potential sense of gratitude in privileged young people like Nikiya Natale into a perpetual grievance. They can’t set aside their Marxist obsession with imagined power struggles for even one day in November to appreciate the freedoms and abundance that previous generations of Americans have struggled and fought to grant them.
“When I look at the state of this nation, the anger piles up, and my gratitude is depleted,” she complained. In all fairness to her, I confess I feel the same sense of anger, but for completely different reasons. When I look at the state of this nation, I see it riven by a not-so-cold civil war between people who love this country despite its historical and current faults, and people like Nakiya Natale who despise this country because all they want to see are its historical and current faults.
Anyway, despite the weight of the world bearing down on her as a social justice activist, she did manage to find a modicum of gratitude — for the right to end the lives of her unborn. Natale and her fellow abortion storytellers want not only to be able to “shout their abortions” without shame or guilt; they want their “choice” to be validated, preferably celebrated, by others. They believe as Natale puts it, that “people should be supported in whatever they decide, every time.” They want to end the “abortion stigma.”
Of all the things for which Americans could be grateful – rights and freedoms which exist nowhere else in the world, our historically unprecedented material prosperity, even the simple personal pleasures of family and friends – pro-abortionists like Natale and The Nation could find nothing to “celebrate” but their “experiences” of having terminated inconvenient pregnancies. Even more tragically warped, they demand that society cheer the fact that they have made an idol of sexual liberation and sacrificed their own unborn for it.
Pro-lifers don’t want to send anyone to jail or tar-and-feather them over abortion. We don’t want to shame young women into living with corrosive guilt. We don’t want single mothers or struggling young couples to be overwhelmed by the responsibility of unplanned children. We want to create a culture of life in which the least among us are protected, and in which abortion is not viewed as a casual, go-to solution. We want to reclaim a culture that recognizes the reality that sex was biologically designed for procreation, and therefore any time you decide to engage in it for recreation, you risk creating a baby (that decision is where one should exercise one’s “choice”). We want to reclaim a culture that prioritizes intact, fruitful families. The day that comes to pass, we can all truly celebrate together.
