The Scarlet Letter

On the pro-life tightrope

This week, a young pro-life woman announced that she had had an abortion. Not in the past, before she became a vocally anti-abortion activist, but recently, this very summer. And she wasn’t sorry about it.

A screencap has preserved what appears to be her Instagram post sharing a picture of her Planned Parenthood ultrasound, captioned with a quote from Kurt Vonnegut about Lot’s wife: “But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes. People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.” The post then directs her followers to a rough Substack draft of her story and jokingly concludes, “Please file out in an orderly manner, and please take all the love I gave over the years on your way out. It’s yours to keep. :)” In an apparent follow-up edit, she invites people to leave their best wishes, “from condolences to congratulations,” but warns that she will delete all personal attacks or “performative” comments.

As of yesterday, as I write, the Instagram page was still up but set to Private. Today, it’s gone entirely, as is her Substack, as is her Twitter. But the Internet is forever.

Her whole Substack post was captured in screenshots like this one before it disappeared. For anyone experienced in dealing with post-abortive women, it will ring all too depressingly familiar. The cycle of poverty. The abuse background. The mental health problems. The shame. The inability to picture a different future.

What makes Ayala’s story uniquely painful is that she had already been through this, under far more dire circumstances, and still chose life over death. In a clip from a now unlisted interview with Students for Life, with whom she served as a state captain, she talked about bucking the approved narrative for women who conceived a child in rape. At age 15, she had suffered years of abuse from a relative, but she chose not to abort her baby. Then, tragically, she suffered a miscarriage. As is unwisely typical in conservative media spaces, Ayala would go on to become a pro-life “it girl,” boosted and platformed so that her powerful story could reach the widest possible audience.

Because she’s Jewish, her dark turn was ripe to go viral on alt-right anti-Semitic Twitter, where the screenshots first surfaced. Catholic pro-lifers in her circle have claimed that she was pushed away from traditional Catholicism by a certain nasty brand of “rad trad.” Others have pushed back that while this may be true, and reprehensible, she remains responsible for her choice, which not only killed an innocent child but will leave behind a long trail of heartbreak and scandal.

The ensuing discourse has highlighted old tensions between different varieties of pro-life activism. It’s the perennial question: What do we do with the mothers? How do we talk to them? How do we talk about them? If it’s too late, how should they be punished? Should they be punished?

In a word, what we are debating is stigma.