chapotraphouse

That is when your empathy has led you in a bad direction and has turned toxic.

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Her story was first told by NPR. She found out that her baby had a fatal fetal anomaly at the 20-week mark, but in Texas she wasn’t allowed to abort her child. NPR tells the story as if this was horrible for Samantha, who had to go through the financial, physical, emotional burden of bearing this child, only to have this child to die.

By the end of the story, the reader feels exactly how it seems NPR wants them to feel, which is that this is a great injustice toward Samantha. How dare these draconian laws force her to do something so painful, so financially burdensome. We need to liberate women from these anti-abortion laws that are making them go through so much.

You have so much empathy for Samantha that you support the pro-abortion position by the end of this, through the mode of storytelling. What I try to do is tell the story from the other perspective: The actual victim in this story — that NPR and most mainstream media outlets do not want you to know about — is the baby.

They don’t want you to think about the actual victim of abortion. What would have been the fate of this baby, whose name is Halo? What would have been her fate if Texas had not had this — quote, unquote — pro-life law? She would’ve been poisoned. She would’ve been dismembered. She would’ve been discarded like toxic waste.

But instead, she was delivered and clothed and named and held and loved and buried like the full human being that she is. My argument is that toxic empathy — when it comes to any issue, not just abortion — is actually cruel and destructive and deadly, both for the individual and for society because it only focuses on one purported victim and ignores the actual victims on the other side of the equation.