Lena Dunham ‘Is Trying To Convince Herself Abortion Isn’t Murder,’ Pundit Says


Lena Dunham, to borrow a comment from her preferred Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, may have “stepped in it” this week when she said on her podcast she wished that she’d had an abortion.

The remark brought fire from both sides of the political aisle. Conservatives, many of whom believe abortion is murder, found it to be evil; liberals, many of whom fall in the pro-choice camp, accused the comedienne of being insensitive to women who’d gone through with an abortion but found it to be an emotionally painful choice.

Once the comment made national headlines, it was only a matter of time before outspoken anti-abortion crusader Matt Walsh weighed in with his assessment. First, some background on Walsh.

While acknowledging the legality of abortion through the U.S. Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade, he has still charged on multiple occasions that abortion is the murder of an infant. His latest blog post for conservative news site The Blaze“There’s a ‘stigma’ around abortion only because it’s pure evil, and we all know it” — retreads many of his previous arguments against it and also diagnoses Lena Dunham as someone, who is aware abortion is murder.

“She’s trying to convince herself,” Walsh says at one point in the post.

For “evidence” of this, he turns to the remarks of Lena Dunham. The Girls star confessed that when she had been mistaken as someone, who’d experienced an abortion, she sought immediately to clear it up. This “knee-jerk” response, Lena said, made her feel guilty because she was subconsciously doing the very thing she was trying to fight against — stigmatizing women who’d made the decision to terminate a pregnancy.

“This is what conservatives often miss about modern liberalism: it’s not just that they want to silence us. It’s that they want to silence themselves, in a sense; their inner voice; their conscience,” Walsh writes.

He continued.

“Knocking down stigmas, normalizing, mainstreaming — they aren’t trying to convince you with all of this, they’re trying to convince themselves. It’s called rationalizing. They have discovered that although they can change the laws and change the culture and change society, they still cannot completely escape their own souls. But they will keep trying in any case. And all the while there will remain that pesky voice buried somewhere deep inside them, whispering: ‘This is wrong. This is shameful. This is murder.'”

Since the Lena Dunham abortion comment went viral, she has issued an apology, calling the remark a product of her “delusional girl” persona she often tries to portray in comedy. Today, in a long Instagram post, she took herself to task for taking that comedic risk.

“I truly hope a distasteful joke on my part won’t diminish the amazing work of all the women who participated,” Dunham said. “My words were spoken from a sort of ‘delusional girl’ persona I often inhabit, a girl who careens between wisdom and ignorance (that’s what my TV show is too) and it didn’t translate. That’s my fault.”

Walsh seized on the apology as well in his blog post, stating that Lena Dunham shouldn’t care about “de-stigmatizing” abortion since it’s already legal. “Why do you care about the stigma? Why can’t you let it alone?” he asks.

As is typical of Walsh’s style, he already had a response for Dunham lined up. “Well, there is, it turns out, a good reason why they (pro-choice individuals) can’t let it alone. Yes, abortion is legal, but that does not change the fact that it is a heinous evil. And because it is a heinous evil, despite the law, there is still a whisper of something, a sense, an instinct, an innate understanding that Lena Dunham even hears and feels herself.”

What do you think about Walsh’s comments on the remark? Do you think Lena Dunham made the remark because, at least subconsciously, she feels abortion is wrong? Sound off in the comments section below.

[Featured Image by Fortune Live Media/Flickr Creative Commons/Resized and Cropped/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

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