In the past several days, a scene from the television series “Girls” offering an unintentionally clear picture of abortion has made the rounds on social media. Daily Wire podcast host Matt Walsh urged pro-life advocates to consider not only how the scene exposed the horrors of abortion, but also an “unspoken truth” that many pro-life organizations refuse to acknowledge.
The viral scene depicts character Mimi-Rose Howard, played by Gillian Jacobs, revealing to boyfriend Adam Sackler, played by Adam Driver, that she had an abortion the previous day, and that the preborn baby murdered in that abortion was indeed his child.
But as Adam reacts in shock, anger, and confusion, Mimi is noticeably callous, seemingly showing no emotion about the fact that she had murdered their child only one day earlier.
WARNING: The following clips contains vulgar language and descriptions that some readers may find offensive.
— Serf (@TheRoyalSerf) June 2, 2025
Walsh offered commentary on the scene during his podcast, noting that the pro-life movement broadly neglects the reality that while some women are indeed victims of abortion, plenty of women are willfully making the choice to murder their babies with malice aforethought.
“I know that a lot of people in the pro-life movement like to think of and talk about women who get abortions like they’re all these kind of scared, helpless, confused victims, but the fact of the matter is that a lot of them are exactly like this, exactly like the woman in this scenario,” he remarked.
Walsh added that the scene “does represent a certain not-insignificant portion of the women who get abortions,” a reality that he called the “unspoken truth” about abortion in our country.
He also made clear there are some women “who are scared, who are exploited” into abortion, but noted that “those are the cases that we talk about all the time” as anti-abortion people. “When we talk about abortion as pro-lifers, we tend to talk about it as though the latter kinds of cases are the only ones,” Walsh said. “We don’t really talk about cases like the one you see depicted.”
Walsh observed that certain pro-life activists are “worried about the optics” of discussing the horrifying truth about abortion, yet cautioned that “some pro-life activists are far too concerned about that,” meaning they “won’t talk about” women willfully and callously pursuing abortions.
He remarked that speaking to abortion clinic sidewalk counselors and others working to reach abortion-minded women will usually reveal that they “run into those kinds of women all the time.”
In his response to this viral scene, @MattWalshBlog offers a thoughtful and badly needed critique of the claim that women are always victims of abortion.@MattWalshBlog rightly observes that while Pro-Life organizations tend to claim that all women are victims of abortion, there… https://t.co/mCeqo297is pic.twitter.com/Yhvmww03Sm
— Foundation to Abolish Abortion (@AbolitionistFAA) June 5, 2025
These comments from Walsh are entirely correct. There are certainly women who are pressured by boyfriends, parents, or even sex traffickers into having abortions against their will. There are others, on the other hand, who are fully aware that they are willfully murdering their own baby.
The claim that all women are categorical victims of abortion is therefore plainly false.
But many pro-life establishment organizations wholeheartedly believe this claim, even to the extent of codifying blanket protections for all women who have abortions into their laws, as well as opposing any effort to establish equal protection of the laws for preborn babies.
In the three years since Roe was overturned, several of these pro-life entities have indeed opposed bills to end abortion on the basis that they would also criminalize abortion for women.
One now-infamous “open letter to state lawmakers,” spearheaded by National Right to Life and signed by prominent groups such as Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Americans United for Life, and March for Life, warned lawmakers nationwide that those groups “do not support any measure seeking to criminalize or punish women” for willfully choosing to have abortions.
That document has been invoked across the country to oppose abortion abolition bills seeking to protect preborn babies with the same laws protecting all other image-bearers of God, even in conservative and broadly anti-abortion states like Louisiana, Missouri, and Kentucky.
Many signers of the letter, as well as pro-life activist group Students for Life, signed yet another document only last year asking the North Dakota Republican Party to refrain from passing an equal protection resolution, claiming that “turning those women into criminals is not the way.”
Why did Republican lawmakers in North Dakota vote to keep abortion legal in their state last week?
Here is everything you need to know.
Christians across the nation watched last week as Republican state lawmakers voted against a simple bill to protect the lives of preborn… pic.twitter.com/ZdzN7ZGlwD
— Foundation to Abolish Abortion (@AbolitionistFAA) February 17, 2025
But nobody who supports equal protection seeks to “criminalize or punish women,” and none of them support “turning those women into criminals.” They merely support treating preborn babies the same under the law as everyone who has already been born. That means criminalizing the act of abortion, not specific classes of people who have abortions, and letting the existing justice system determine which parties are victims and which parties indeed willfully harmed another human life.
Walsh was completely right to speak the “unspoken truth” about abortion in our nation.
Rather than casting all women as victims, we should simply state that anyone who willfully partakes in the death of a preborn baby has committed murder, whether that person was the father, the mother, or a third-party abortionist. When pro-life entities deny that simple position, they not only act inconsistently with their professed belief that abortion is murder, but they create a blanket license to murder a baby, so long as the mother herself is the murderer.
We either believe that abortion is murder, or we do not. We either believe that preborn babies are image-bearers of God, or we do not. We either want to abolish abortion, or we do not.
Walsh and other conservatives are seeing that reality, and pro-life groups should follow suit.
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