Barbies & Babies
David Mills on Abortion in the Real World
Walking down Constitution Avenue on a cold day last January 21 with tens of thousands of other pro-life marchers, I saw ahead of me a big heart-shaped sign with a pink rim. The sign said in big pink letters, “God loves Barbies and we do too.”
For a pro-life sign, I thought “God loves Barbies” was a rather creative way of speaking, even “edgy.” I assumed “Barbie” was a new nickname for those young women, usually executive secretaries and salesgirls in the better stores, who had not wanted to settle down after college, who now wanted a husband and a home and a life like the Cleaver family’s, who were sweet, sincere, and morally careless.
Barbies were the young women who might easily find themselves pregnant, and, finding themselves pregnant, were likely to find themselves also alone and desperate. Being so “middle class” they were of no real interest to the pro-choice crowd, and being so frivolous they were of no real interest to some pro-lifers either. The sign told them that God loved them and so did his people, even if it did call them “Barbies.”
I looked again and saw that the sign said, “God loves babies and we do too.” I was disappointed, but as I reflected on the mistake, I came to think that the “Barbies” are a symbol, perhaps the poster children, of a society in which to live is to enjoy sex at will, and of what happens when you do.
Love That Lasts
In the checkout lines at the grocery store down the hill, the owners have put the women’s magazines at eye level, where their headlines, almost always advertising sexual pleasures of one kind or another, will entice the impulse buyer. In bright, big letters at the top of one I saw recently was the headline “10 Dates Before Sex!?” for an article on “Secrets of love that lasts and lasts and lasts.”
As the punctuation indicates, you are supposed to believe that this is a surprising and very difficult requirement, though it amounts, at one date a week, to moving, in a little over two months, from meeting a stranger to giving him entrance to your body, with all that involves. This, the magazine promises, will make him love you more, which I suppose may sometimes be true, though it probably will not make him love you for very long.
I assume this magazine and the 10 or 20 magazines just like it, whose circulation is in the tens of millions, know what their readers want. There is something ineffably sad in the desire of their ideal young woman to have a free sex life and yet have a man love her and stay with her, and in the breezy, carefree, willfully open way she tries to talk about it.
That millions of these young women really do exist helps explain the great demand for abortion in America. If sex is the way you can get a man to commit himself to you, you will have sex, probably more often than you intend. If you have sex, you will have babies. (Even oral contraceptives sometimes fail.) If you want to have sex and you do not want to have babies, you must have abortion.
If you do not want abortion and you do not want to have babies, you must give up sex. The women who read magazines with headlines like “10 Dates Before Sex!?” are not going to give it up, not least because they believe it will lead to “love that lasts and lasts and lasts.” Nor are the men who want sex and do not care if their partners—even the word “girlfriends” may suggest more commitment than they have—must have abortions to let them have it.
David Mills has been editor of Touchstone and executive editor of First Things. He edits the opinion page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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more on abortion from the online archives
27.2—March/April 2014
on C. S. Lewis & the New State Paganism by W. E. Knickerbocker
24.1—January/February 2011
How Planned Parenthood's Founder Played the Christians, and Won by Allan C. Carlson
19.1—January/February 2006
on Death & Seven of the Last Words of Socrates by Graeme Hunter
more from the online archives
19.4—May 2006
The Culture War Is Between Religious Believers on Both Sides by Howard P. Kainz
33.4—July/August 2020
Our Views on the President Are Not Crucial by S. M. Hutchens
32.1—January/February 2019
Divine Love & the Love of Man & Woman Surpass Mere Consent by Anthony Esolen
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