Tracey Erbacher, artistic director of Abortion Road Trip, discusses the protesters who are pushing back on her effort to destigmatize the killing of prenatal children. Her play is a ‘comedy’ about a mother who takes a taxi across state lines to present her healthy living child to an abortionist who then proceeds to kill them.
When asked during an interview with DC Theatre Scene about the pro-life community protesting her work, she stated that she didn’t expect anyone to push back against her efforts because “…it is a beautiful script. I read it and fell in love.” Sadly, Ms. Erbacher seems incapable of extending that same love to the thousands of ‘unwanted’ children scheduled to die today.
She goes on, “Somebody wrote an essay on a major Pro-Life site about the Washington Post review and the show, and that got picked up by a whole bunch of other Far Right blogs. And then, a piece came out specifically targeting me – which was extremely surreal. It has my headshot with the word “INHUMAN” in giant red letters across it. The first line is something like, ‘this is the face of Tracey Erbacher,’ and it’s this dramatic piece about how I personally don’t value human life even though I, too, passed through the fetal stage of human life.”
Tracey clearly lacks the gift of self awareness. She thinks it’s funny to tell stories about killing human beings at a stage of life and level of dependency she once experienced. She seems oblivious to the concept that her ability to push for the normalization of abortion was only made possible because she wasn’t aborted. How easily some forget where they came from.
Of course, absent of the threat of actually being aborted, people like Ms. Erbacher will declare they would have been perfectly fine with being killed in their mother’s womb if that was their mother’s choice. If you ask them if it would have been perfectly fine for their mother to kill them seconds after birth, even while still attached to their umbilical cord, they would react with feigned shock. After all, there’s no difference in the value of their lives just before that final push and just after.
Extolling the benefits of surrounding herself with people who think like her, she went on to say, “We had not even gotten home from opening night when we were inundated with responses from the community asking ‘how can we help?’ It has just been incredible. We are really fortunate to be a part of such an amazing community.”
I suspect that others who have committed human atrocities throughout our often sad history must have needed the same reinforcement from those who supported their ideology and the resultant loss of human life.
Further making my point, Tracey continues, “The protesters may be helping us more than they are hurting us if I am being perfectly frank. [Washington, DC] happens to be a very liberal city, and people don’t appreciate being shouted at with offensive metaphors or extremely gory photo-shopped images of fetuses.”
This is one of the images that Ms. Erbacher claims is “photo-shopped”. Clearly, she, like all those who support aborting their fellow human beings, is incapable of accepting what she advocates for. We live in a world where 120,000 people are aborted every day, yet she thinks there aren’t any actual images of the victims of this barbaric practice. That’s an interesting theory that doesn’t seem grounded in the reality of nearly ubiquitous access to camera enabled smartphones connected to the internet. To actually believe this, she must be willfully ignorant of the world around her.
Lamenting on the difficulty of killing a child in the womb, Ms. Erbacher stated, “I definitely didn’t plan this as an immersive theater experience, but this is a small sample [of] the aggression that abortion providers or people who are trying to seek reproductive care and abortions face outside of clinics … people who are coming in get at least a little taste of how hard it is for a person to go through this to get basic, guaranteed-by-the-supreme-court reproductive care.”
As Martin Luther King, Jr. once observed, slavery was legal and so was everything Hitler did in Germany. The law should never be used as a metric for morality. At the risk of stating the obvious, abortion isn’t healthcare. Healthcare preserves human life, abortion destroys it. These basic truths seem lost on Ms. Erbacher and those who support her determined effort to lighten the mood surrounding abortion.
To counter the protesters, Theatre Prometheus spray painted an ironic message on the sidewalk. Human rights can never include the right to kill innocent humans.
Finally, in a seeming effort to drive home her disconnect with reality, Tracey describes her characters, “But these women are just being human, living their lives, and we get to see how complicated it is, and how, for some women, it actually isn’t this big, tragic, horrible thing to have an abortion.”
She is literally tone deaf to her own words. These women wouldn’t “just be human, living their lives”, if they had been one of the 25% denied their very right to live as “guaranteed-by-the-supreme-court”.
“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
A Sad Journey With Tracey Erbacher
