Comedian jokes about her abortion but wonders if she made a terrible mistake

(LifeSiteNews) — In a grim, haunting column, comedienne Emma Estrada revealed in the Los Angeles Times last week that she makes standup jokes about the abortion she had – but that she also wonders if she made the wrong choice. “I chose my comedy career over motherhood,” she wrote. “I wonder if I got it wrong.” It is the sort of column that highlights the profound spiritual sickness of our era.

When Estrada told her then-boyfriend Gabe that she was aborting his baby, she made it a joke. He picked her up for a date and told her that his sister had had a baby. “Seeing this as the perfect segue, I told him I, too, was having a baby except I wasn’t keeping mine. He blinked at me.” Estrada then played him Enya’s hit song “Ony Time.”

Two things struck me about her morbid reveal. The first is that the father of their child had no say whatsoever in whether his baby lived or died. She didn’t ask him what he thought. The second is that throughout the column, Estrada makes no effort to pretend she is aborting a “clump of cells.” She knows she is carrying a baby, and she calls it a baby.

“Gabe became sick in the following days and didn’t talk much,” she writes. “Not that he talked much to begin with, but now he was practically nonverbal. He felt personally responsible for the situation, but I couldn’t blame him. I was there too.” But, Estrada says, “a baby wasn’t in our cards. Besides, I had my career to focus on.”

Estrada called her healthcare company and told them she wanted “one abortion, please” as if “I was ordering a pizza.” They directed her to a Planned Parenthood, where they said “the baby was 5 weeks old” and the nurse “told me to expect chunks.” Of baby, that is. A month later, she made a joke about being glad she had an abortion in California because driving out of Texas would have been tough in her beater car.

“That’s how Gabe’s brothers found out,” Estrada writes. “Me talking on a mic to 60 strangers in a Spanish restaurant on a Wednesday. We didn’t discuss it after. I posted the joke online a few weeks later: 2,892 views on TikTok.” She and Gabe broke up soon after, but she saw him again a few weeks later. She asked him if he ever thought about it.

“Do you ever think about the fact that we almost had a kid?”

His reply was instant. “All the time.”

“All the time” played like a mantra in my head for days. It rang out to me in my sleep, in my waking life. I wanted to replay my 20s, to rewind, to fast-forward, to choose differently. I would try to see myself with a child. They’d be four years old now. Gabe would be there. We’d be living together in North Carolina where he’s from. We’d be happy. I’d be writing. He’d be painting. We’d have big windows and a backyard.

Estrada’s story abruptly shifts from savage humor to wistfulness. She has stopped performing as a comedian. She wonders if it was all a mistake:

When I think of forgoing a baby for a comedy career, I think: What career? I work as a copywriter. No awards to my name. Nobody recognizes me. I never made it to 100,000 followers. At the time of writing this, I have 3,390 followers on Instagram. Just 96,610 to go.

I think of Gabe and think of him thinking about it. The potential kid, the aborted future. I wonder if he mourns it too. He must. Like a botched cover of Enya’s greatest hit, his voice calls out to me from the wall between us.

All the time. All the time. All the time.

Estrada’s honesty is heartbreaking, and her story is a microcosm. Millions of young women like her have been sold the same lie: “forgo” the baby, even if that means having it extracted from your body in “chunks” at an abortion clinic in order to prioritize your career. Abortion is just like “ordering a pizza,” except the baby will haunt you. How old would she have been? Would she have looked like her mother, or her father, or both? What did her face look like? Because she was not a hypothetical. She was here, and she is gone.

Like so many aspiring artists who have abortions, Estrada did not know, when she did what so many millions of women have done, that she would be followed by a ghost forever whispering on the edges of her consciousness. She and Gabe came together, created life, and separated – but the baby that died still haunts them both.