On behalf of all women, Cole and Savannah LaBrant can go to hell.
On Saturday, “The LaBrant Fam” released a 40-minute documentary-style YouTube video outlining their views on abortion. The couple talks with healthcare experts, members of their church, and people who have experiences with abortion.
The family channel has over 13 million subscribers, and this video immediately follows a “baby number four” update in which Savannah has an ultrasound. The clear image of the baby’s face in the ultrasound and other footage from that video is used in the abortion documentary just a week later.
The video opens with a look at how a fetus grows inside the womb as narration plays over footage of anti-abortion and pro-choice protests. The narrator asks The LaBrant Fam’s audience to consider being “pro-love,” a term that’s loosely defined twenty minutes after it’s first stated as choosing to love the child no matter what.
They don’t define this term well, so I don’t understand why they chose to center that view in the video.
Here’s my main issue with this “documentary”: why is this family channel, that’s continually marketed as “wholesome family content,” trying to add harmful rhetoric to an already crowded conversation? Why are they using religion, especially the church, as a vessel to demonize of women that choose abortions?
Not only do the interviews the LaBrants conduct with medical professionals forget to include any medical jargon, they completely overstep their positions as medical advisors as well. Telling someone not to do something because it doesn’t align with their morals as people rather than as doctors is unethical in the highest regard. The one thing they could’ve done right, they did wrong.
I can see this documentary becoming the next anti-abortion power tool in excusing abortion as murder, and I implore the audience of this piece and theirs to consider thinking for themselves. If you’re going to be so easily brainwashed into believing absolute garbage about abortion––from a man, no less––please disconnect your WiFi and go touch some grass.
Following the opening narration, Cole and Savannah LaBrant compare the number of abortions in the United States to different genocides around the world, including the Holocaust. This is not only wildly inappropriate, but it obscures the impact the Holocaust had on the Jewish community and the experiences of Jewish people thereafter.
I wouldn’t expect “YouTube’s favorite Christian family,” as they’re marketed, to give a shit about their Jewish following, but nothing excuses comparing abortions to a genocide.
Following the numbers plastered on the screen, the LaBrants sit down with two doctors, Dr. Anthony Levatino, MD, and Dr. Kathi Aultman, MD. The two discuss their “professional” views on abortion as a method of healthcare.
Following their introductions, the doctors give terribly graphic descriptions of the multiple ways one can have an abortion. Dr. Aultman outlines how she was taught to perform abortions in medical school and the other methods of abortion she sought to learn about outside of her education.
In an article written in 2020 by Dr. Aultman for Focus on the Family––an online publication devoted to pro-life and faith––she outlines the different moral experiences she had with women who requested abortions and why she ultimately stopped doing them. All it took for Aultman, according to her written statement, was comparing abortions to the Holocaust.
“But it wasn’t until a Christian friend gave me an article comparing abortion to the Holocaust that I changed my opinion completely,” she wrote. “Just as I did not consider the humanity of fetuses, the Nazis did not consider the Jews to be human beings. I realized that I was no better than they were.”
If the LaBrants were expecting to scare their audience, they’ve done it just nine minutes into the video.
Dr. Levatino’s attitude towards abortion was what I took the most issue with. As a man, there already isn’t any room for him in this conversation, and there shouldn’t be. As a medical professional and ex-abortionist, it is his duty to advise his patients and perform the abortion at a pregnant woman’s request. It is not his place to tell a patient to “never, ever get an abortion because of convenience.”
I’m happy to say that the other sources the LaBrants chose actually understood the importance of making that choice. They talked to a number of women who had considered abortion but decided to keep the child by a choice of their own. They also talked to Embrace Grace, a Christian-based church support group that supports women in their decision to keep or terminate a pregnancy.
The Embrace Grace company was, in my opinion, the best part about this documentary. I’m just ashamed of the way I learned about it.
The first testimony the LaBrants introduced was Cole’s grandmother’s, who Cole said “chose” life for his mother. Cole’s great-grandmother was pregnant with his grandmother at age eighteen, chose life, kept her for four months, then gave her up for adoption.
Yes, because deciding to keep a child only to raise it in a parentless world in the name of “morals” makes choosing life so much better. Considering there are around 400,000 children in foster care ranging from newborns to adults, and using the LaBrants’ logic, they should consider adopting or fostering children rather than continuing to get pregnant.
But of course, Cole LaBrant couldn’t end the video without stating that fathers should have a say. I was really waiting for this line. As we all know, it isn’t anti-abortion propaganda without mansplaining women’s healthcare.
It’s not that fathers shouldn’t have a say in whether or not a pregnancy should be terminated—it’s all of mankind that shouldn’t.
Being “pro-love”—the watered down anti-abortion stance—that Cole and Savannah share is bad enough, but “considering the feelings of the father,” is somehow worse.
Additionally, Savannah LaBrant used the word “choice” a few times when talking about her pregnancies. If she’s going to be so strongly anti-abortion, why would she constantly call it a choice?
Imagine being a loyal subscriber to The LaBrant Fam and expecting weekly wholesome family content, but one Saturday morning, they drop a 40-minute anti-abortion documentary on you. I don’t think any of their subscribers signed up for anti-abortion propaganda, especially when the median age group of their subscribers is between eight and twelve years old.
I don’t want to hear more from The LaBrant Fam on this topic as they’ve already proven their idiocracy. It is not up to the church to decide what is best for a pregnant woman, it is not up to the LaBrant family to determine what is best for a pregnant woman, it is up to the pregnant woman to decide.
Overall, this documentary reiterated the reason why no church, no person, and especially no man, can make the choice to keep a child on behalf of any woman.
With that said, I hope Cole and Savannah LaBrant find acceptance through God, because I know they won’t find it online.
