No, the title of this post isn’t clickbait.

Today, Democrats forced a procedural vote in the Senate on an abortion rights bill called The Women’s Health Protection Act, allowing abortion “any time for any reason.”

As expected, the bill failed to pass. But regardless: We know this isn’t the end of the issue.

In fact, this year, we’ll likely hear more about abortion than we have in the 49 years since Roe v. Wade.

Chances are, you already have a strong opinion about abortion, and I’m not naive enough to think a single blog post like this one could change your mind.

So the point of this post is not to argue whether or not abortion should be legal. Truly.

Instead, I just have one question—

Can we at least agree on who abortion eliminates?

If you have a conversation about abortion, very quickly the discussion will likely turn to rape, incest, and/or the threatened life of the mother. Maybe you’ve had conversations like these.

While these are difficult, devastating scenarios that deserve our utmost care and respect, it is deeply inaccurate to believe these issues are common reasons women abort.

They just aren’t.

(1% of women have an abortion due to pregnancy through rape, and less than .5% do so because of incest. This according to the Guttmacher Institute.)

Instead, according to Very Well Health, “Abortion is the most common surgical procedure done on American females.”

Research consistently reveals these to be the two most common reasons women abort:

• having a baby would dramatically change my life
• I can’t afford a baby now

To be clear, neither of these are superficial issues. Women in need deserve our help and support. This could be its own blog post, and maybe it will be.

But it is also true—

I am who abortion is designed to eliminate.

I was an unwanted pregnancy.
My brother was an unplanned pregnancy.
My son was abandoned at birth.

All three of us were born to women who experienced the two most common reasons women abort. And yet, by some statistical miracle, the three of us were born and then adopted.

Almost two decades ago,

I sat across the booth from my birth mother in an old diner outside Detroit as she explained how inconvenient her pregnancy was with me. She had nowhere to go, nobody to trust, and she was too far along in her pregnancy to legally abort in the state of Michigan.

In every way, I shouldn’t be here. And in a single, terrible moment, I might not have been.

To be clear: My offense in the womb wasn’t being the product of rape or incest—it was the statistically far worse offense of being inconvenient and unwanted.

Abortion exists to eliminate the inconvenient.

On days like this one, when politicians are debating abortion rights and a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy any time for any reason, I waffle between survivor guilt and a deep sense of gratitude for this gift of life that hasn’t been afforded to over 63 million people just like me.

And I feel a deep responsibility to say: At least know who’s being exterminated.

Look her in the eye.

One final note

When you hear abortion statistics (i.e., 150 babies aborted every hour), please don’t picture clumps of cells or even women caught in worst-case scenarios. That’s an agenda. Imagine instead people like my brother, my son, and me—who live and love in big ways—and whose only real crime was being conceived at the wrong time.

We are the majority.