Pro-choice and anti-suicide: A conflicting message to students

Most of us know suicide in America is a growing tragedy, but we may not be aware that 2023 held the all-time highest record for deaths by suicide in the United States. Over 50,000 Americans took their lives last year, and suicide is now the number one cause of death among 13 and 14-year-olds nationwide. Astutely, the attorney general says mental health is the “defining health crisis of our time.”

While there are numerous factors contributing to the rising epidemic of suicide, all worth exploring, there’s one that gets grossly ignored despite its significance — primarily due to the political pushback the mere mention is sure to elicit. But given what’s at stake, it must be said ...

The pro-choice movement undermines anti-suicide messaging, particularly as it relates to students.

While the debate wages on concerning the precise moment life begins in the womb, there’s no escaping the pro-choice-driven implication that an unwanted human body is discardable — quite literally deserving of death. Consider the resulting physiological inferences, then, on teens suffering the sting of peer or familial rejection. Does their life still count, or are they, too, deserving of death — i.e., suicide? 

Since the Supreme Court’s ruling on June 24, 2022, removing the constitutional right to abortion, students’ media feeds have been inundated with details and opinions as multiple states take steps to protect patient access to abortion, all the while championing the philosophy that a woman who does not want a baby is justified in terminating the pregnancy. I wonder, have those same proponents stopped to consider the psychological impact of such stances and statements on the millions of U.S. children today who have experienced parental rejection and abandonment? What’s stopping those students from naturally concluding, “If my parent doesn’t want me, my life isn’t worth living”?

Case in point, to the distraught pregnant woman burdened by her circumstances, society says, “Terminate life — the child doesn’t matter.” Yet to the distraught child who feels like a burden, we say, “Choose life — you matter.”

We hold sympathetic candlelight vigils in the aftermath of teen suicides, as we should, yet as a society, we march holding signs with calloused statements such as, “I had an abortion. Deal with it.”

As someone who has developed a mental-emotional wellness and character-building program for students that emphasizes and fosters self-worth, I encounter the contradiction firsthand. Try teaching a classroom full of students they have intrinsic value beyond measure, simply by virtue of being human, only to have them hold up a reel of a celebrity ranting about how liberating it is to have the right to abort a newly developing human.

Again, if the standard is that human life has value so long as it’s wanted, is it any wonder teenagers become suicidal when they experience rejection and feel unwanted?

Human life is either sacred, or it isn’t — a beating infant heart, worth protecting or worth nothing. You cannot have it both ways, and the ill effects on young people of a society that insists on advocating both are on full display in our country.