I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and spent most of my life in heavily Democrat enclaves.  That is why I know that when you boil things down to their essentials, most Democrat women and many Democrat men are single-issue voters, and that issue is abortion.  You can delicately bring them around to agree with you on subjects such as taxes, borders, national security, and keeping porn out of grade schools, but abortion is, as Nancy Pelosi said, "sacred ground."  That's why they're panicked about the Texas abortion law and why Saturday Night Live did the single most weird, surreal, embarrassing, and scary skit ever...about "clown abortion."

The premise of the skit was that abortion is a serious subject but that Goober the Clown (SNL's Cecily Strong) would get people on board by doing funny clown stuff while talking about her abortion the day before she turned 23 and how great that was.  The skit opened with some bland new face on SNL (which I haven't watched since, hmm, maybe the 1980s) as the newscaster saying the Supreme Court heard arguments about the Texas abortion law that effectively stops abortions after six weeks.  "Here, to cheer us up," he says, is "Goober the Clown, who had an abortion when she was 23."  Cue Strong, in full clown costume.

The sketch includes such unnerving lines as "it's a rough subject, so we're going to do fun clown stuff to make it more palatable" and "the abortion I had at 23 is my personal clown business but that's all some people want to discuss all the time, even though clown abortion was legalized in 1973 in Clown v. Wade," and "when they [clowns] do talk about it [abortion], if you were a clown who wasn't the victim of something sad like clowncest, they think your clown abortion wasn't a righteous abortion."

The skit continues in that macabre, bizarre vein for another two minutes.  The line that most perfectly sums it up is when Cecily says she loved a joke her doctor made about the fact that she wasn't far along because it wasn't a "funny ha-ha joke but like a funny 'you're not an awful person and your life isn't over now' joke.  The best kind."

And with that, the takeaway from the sketch isn't that abortion is a wonderful thing for women.  Instead, even for those who most ardently advocate for abortion, it's a painful experience.  Cecily Strong isn't strong at all.  She's an angry, unhappy, brittle woman who knows that she did something wrong, and, rather than owning up to it, repenting, showing remorse, and trying to redeem herself, she is doubling down on the same thing that damaged her so much in the first place.

But I can tell you something else about abortion, having grown up in that milieu: the nascent child simply doesn't factor into it.  It's all about the woman's emotional response to that pregnancy.  Whether she's in school, has a burgeoning career, or is in a bad relationship, she fully understands that a pregnancy deprives her of good things or traps her in bad ones.

Abortion frees the woman from that moment, but it doesn't free her from that subliminal sense of having done something wrong.  (Witness Alyssa Milano, a super-leftist, who believed that her miscarriages when she finally wanted a child were punishment for her abortions.)  And that's how you get the Cecily Strong skit, with someone truly showing the tears of a clown.  Ridi, Pagliaccio, ridi.

For many young women on the left, babies aren't the future, they aren't a step toward maturity, they aren't a lasting connection, and they aren't a biological inevitability.  Instead, they drag women down, and, even worse, they are a blight on the Earth, destroying an environment that should be left pure for all life forms other than humans.  The New York Post has an achingly sad essay about young women getting sterilized to avoid the burden of parenthood and the damage to Mother Gaia.

I'm not someone who particularly likes children, but I can say with certainty that having mine was the best thing that ever happened to me.  My kids forced me to grow up; they forced me to become a better, stronger, more caring, less selfish person; and they forced me to think about my values.  And now that they're grown, they're good human beings who bring me a great deal of joy.  All these sad, angry leftist young women are on a path to miss out on that.

Image: Cecily Strong abortion skit (edited in befunky).  YouTube screen grab.

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