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Noteworthy Pro-Life Articles

Various sources, as indicated.
The list provided in the Table of Contents is not in any particular order, they're simply added as they become available.

Canadian Physicians for Life released today the following statement by president of the organization, Dr. Will Johnston, in response to the new guideline released last week by the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada, recommending that all pregnant women be offered prenatal genetic testing. (See SOGC guideline at: http://www.sogc.org/media/pdf/advisories/JOGC-feb_07-CPG.pdf )

Baby steps to a Brave New World
by Will Johnston, MD
 
You shouldn’t have to believe that surgical abortion is politely hidden barbarism, our last acceptable form of capital punishment, to question the new push for prenatal screening launched last week by the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada. The SOGC claims, in effect, that those who challenge the detect and destroy process for Down syndrome children want “the right to withhold this [prenatal] information from the women in their care.”[1]
 
Wrong. The problem is not the information but the moral vacuum chamber in which the new screening techniques are devised and promoted. We are going far beyond simply giving parents a helpful preview of their child in a value-neutral context. When Down syndrome fetuses are found, 80% are aborted.[2] Because there is a system in place actually doing this, the public mind is continually posed an insidious question “Are some lives best seen as avoidable errors?”
 
It is this inhuman attitude, and not the sharing of information with parents, which some of us lament. In Canada, the SOGC is the most respected and persuasive voice shaping our behaviour towards unborn handicapped children. The track record, it must be said, is worrisome. Even a healthy fetus, if unwanted, has no official friends at the SOGC. For the Down syndrome fetus, the SOGC proposes more powerful scrutiny “ like Sauron’s eye peering out of Mordor “ to expose it before it gets too far along the road to birth. 
 
To cull defective children, ancient cultures used the quality control technology nearest to hand, generally some variation on a pile of rocks outside the city wall. True to the same spirit but better equipped, the SOGC promotes various “choices” - maternal blood tests and ultrasound to guess at the baby’s faults before moving in with the amniocentesis needle and perhaps finishing off with an abortion. 
 
Replacing unconditional love with an intolerance for imperfections is one harmful side effect of this new eugenics. One recent study showed that maternal-fetal bonding may be weakened by participating in the blood tests which the SOGC is advertising.[3]  Further, amniocentesis causes even healthy babies to be lost, as many as 22 a year in BC recently.[4] And even hardened participants in the abortion-on-demand system are given pause by late-term abortions for minor flaws like cleft palate, as has happened within my own medical community.[5]
 
The progress of eugenic abortion into the heart of our society is a classic example of “mission creep”. In the 1960’s, we were told that legal abortion would be a rare tragic act in cases of exceptional hardship. In the 70’s abortion began to be both decried and accepted as birth control. In the 80’s respected geneticists pointed out that it was cheaper to hunt for and abort Down’s babies than to raise them. By the 90’s that observation had been widely put into action. Now we are refining and extending our eugenic vision, with new tests and abortion as our central tools.  
 
Yet there are ways to reduce the proportion of children born with Down syndrome by a more civilized approach  than finding them and killing them before birth. The SOGC could begin by educating Canadians about the optimum age for childbearing closer to 24 than the current average of almost 30 years old.[6] We could push for constructive changes in the workplace and in higher education so that young families could better participate. We all agree that making babies with younger eggs in younger moms means less Down syndrome and brings other health benefits. 
 
There is no logical end to the consumerism and utilitarianism which puts unborn children on a potentially lethal probation. Human nature allows no limit to our aspirations for our children, yet because of the screening mentality there will be no limit to our dissatisfactions with them either. Once the last Down syndrome child is gone, we will find a new focus for our anxieties. Without a profound change of heart, it is foreseeable that this whole project will end badly.    

- 30 -
 

For further comment, please contact:

Will Johnston, MD
President, Canadian Physicians for Life
ph: 613-728-5433

email: info@physiciansforlife.ca

Notes:
 
[1] SOGC Media release Jan 17, 2007 found at http://www.sogc.org/home/pdf/sogc-statement-on-access-to-genetic-screening.pdf

[2] Presentation by BCRCP (British Columbia Reproductive Care Program) staff at BC Women’s Hospital 2005. 

[3] Lawson KL, Turriff-Jonasson SI. "Maternal serum screening and psychosocial attachment to pregnancy," J Psychosom Res. 2006 Apr;60(4):371-8.
PMID: 16581361 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

[4] BCRCP staff at 2005 presentation.

[5] Personal communication with nurses at BC Women’s Hospital.

[6] http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/060731/d060731b.htm

Canadian Physicians for Life is an educational organization representing physicians who hold that reverence for every human life lies at the root of all medical tradition. Through the ages, this tradition has been expressed in the Oath of Hippocrates. It was rephrased in modern times in the Declaration of Geneva (1948), which says in part, “I will maintain the utmost respect for human life, from the time of conception; even under threat, I will not use my medical knowledge contrary to the laws of humanity.”

Canadian Physicians for Life

PO Box 1289

Ottawa ON  K0A 2Z0

ph/fax: 613-728-5433

www.physiciansforlife.ca

More Than Half a Heart - March 1, 2002
http://www.nrlc.org/News_and_Views/index.html.Dave Andrusko can be reached at dha1245@juno.com

One of the many reasons our Movement (media stereotypes to the contrary not withstanding) is composed of people coming from such widely divergent points of view is that the case against abortion can be made on any number of equally solid grounds.

One champion can base her argument on completely secular grounds or quote scripture from a number of sacred texts. Another pro-lifer can base his case on a proper reading of the Constitution while someone else is drawn by the appeal for a more encompassing understanding of the human community.

Still another pro-lifer will passionately oppose abortion for the damage it does to the aborted womanand to her family. Someone else will take his stand on the bedrock principle of human equality.

Yet another pro-lifer will cite the wisdom of Ben Franklin, who once said during the American Revolution that we hang together or we hang separately. This pro-lifer intuits that the killing machine, once revved up and its engine in high gear, is not choosy whom it runs over next.

But among the best ways to make the case for the unborn child is to document the continuity between that temporarily out-of-view passenger and the young baby who at birth arrives at the station. This indivisibility argument is becoming easier and easier to make for a whole host of reasons, beginning with the fabulously gripping view of the womb afforded by ultrasound.

A powerful, related example was illustrated in a couple of stories appearing this past week. The first titled, Huge Display of Heart, appeared February 26 in the Sacramento Bee.

On January 11 medical history (yet again) was made when doctors operated on Serena Brown, the smallest baby to undergo open-heart surgery. Born at 25 weeks gestation on December 27, Serena (one of triplets) suffered from a life-threatening heart abnormality.

V. Mohan Reddy, the physician who performed the surgery, told the Bee Serena's veins coming back to the heart were not connected to the heart, but were instead connected below the diaphragm into the veins of the abdomen and that is a lethal condition.?

In a five-hour-long procedure Dr. Reddy rerouted the veins. He connected them back with running, looping stitches which are about as fine as human hair," he said. "and are almost not visible unless you are wearing magnified glasses.

Serena, now breathing on her own, is recovering nicely in the neonatal intensive care unit at Sutter Memorial Hospital.

Serena would have been 27 gestational weeks at the time of her surgery. Stories last week in the New York Times and the British Broadcasting Service described innovative surgery (labeled by the Times a "science fiction" success) on a 23-week-old unborn child.

Annually about 600 to 1,400 U.S. children are born with what's known as hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a condition so devastating that most parents abort if confronted with the diagnosis. Most often the cause is a blocked aortic valve which prevents the left side of the heart from growing properly. Essentially the child is born with half a heart.
 
If the child is not aborted, her prospects are still grim. The child will die without a series of operations which still leave her a candidate down the road for a transplant.

But doctors at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital offered the parents (identified only as "Mr. and Mrs. G.") another option to treat the child whose problem had been identified by an ultrasound at 20 weeks. They suggested widening the baby's valve while still in his mother's womb. 

After reflection (abortion, thankfully, was not an option), the parents chose surgery for the child they would name Jack. The operation took place September 13.

An obstetrician carefully kneaded Mrs. G's abdomen and rolled the fetus over to give the doctors better access to his heart, the Times reported. Cardiologists then inserted a tiny catheter tube into the abdomen of Jack's mother, through to the womb, and on into the organ itself.

Next two doctors "passed a threadlike wire through the tube and the tiny wire was then pushed through the tube," according to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). (Doctors guided the catheter and wire using images produced by an ultrasound scanner.)

"Once across the valve, a minute balloon [the same kind used to dilate blocked arteries in adults] was inflated to widen the valve, then the balloon, wire and catheter pulled back out," the BBC reported. Inflated to roughly an eighth of an inch, the balloon was passed back and forth several times. Then the balloon, wire and catheter were pulled back out.

Needless to say, doctors had to be very, very precise for two reasons: to avoid piercing coronary arteries or other parts of the heart and because it would be very unsafe to repeatedly jab Jack's heart.

Amazingly, the whole operation took less than 20 minutes. Improved blood flow through the valve began almost immediately. The unanswerable question was, would the valve close up again over the remainder of the pregnancy?

At Jack's birth last November, doctors were delighted to see that the aortic valve, though a tad narrow, was wide enough to do the job. No additional surgery was needed. "Jacks outlook is good,? the Times reports.

Will surgery such as this mean that ordinary good-hearted people (abortion aside) will be more receptive to our pleas? Think of it this way.

Right now, it's as if the arteries leading to their heart are too narrow (a congenital defect, so to speak) or clogged with plaque (pro-abortion propaganda).

Either way knowledge of the similarities we've just discussed will operate like the thin wire inserted into Jack's aortic valve.

Let's extend the metaphor. Once the realization that the unborn patient is just like the newborn patient who is treated a few weeks later makes its way into the American public's aortic valve, our job resembles inflating that minute balloon which was passed back and forth to enlarge the opening. How?

With demonstrations of your sincere love and compassion and concern for both mother and child. And when this is widely known, children will once again be safe.

Why? Because Americans no longer will have only half a heart.

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Abortionist Appreciation Day
Source: Joel Mowbray, March 19, 2002, TownHall.com Columnists (http://www.townhall.com/columnists/joelmowbray/jm20020319.shtml)

In a despicable display of affection for degeneracy, Sunday, March 10th was the National Day of Appreciation for Abortion Providers, where demonstrators held up signs declaring, "Abortion Providers are Heroes," and activists nationwide were asked to "take out ads in local newspapers." Such a tasteless spectacle shows the depths of the depravity of the abortion movement.

Perhaps this grotesque celebration would be easier to comprehend if it were organized by fringe leftist organizations that have no real influence in our political process, but it wasn't. The lead sponsor was the American Civil Liberties Union, and it was also backed by the inappropriately-named Catholics for a Free Choice and National Organization for Women, among others. And their stomach-turning efforts were underwritten by billionaires such as Warren Buffett, George Soros, and anti-Catholic bigot Ted Turner.

Establishing a day to praise the virtues of abortionists belies the assertions by self-proclaimed pro-choicers that they want, in Bill Clinton's words, abortion to be "safe, legal, and rare." For the abortion lobby, their political struggle isn't about "choice," it's about abortion.

In the hippies' heyday, the movement may have been wrapped up in women's lib efforts, with control over one's body-and the baby inside-becoming symbolic of the overall campaign. But now, with the original mission fulfilled, the abortion lobby has spiraled to the radical fringes in a bid for continued relevancy, and the supposed abortionist holiday is indicative of the excesses of the abortion movement.

As they have moved further away from their original purpose, abortion activists have become more strident in their support for the procedure itself. No longer is abortion a necessary evil, but an act of bravery to be celebrated with a national holiday.

This fanaticism has influenced the movement's policy positions in recent years, including opposing a ban on killing babies who miraculously survive abortion procedures. If a baby has staved off the abortionist's murderous attempts, what "choice" does a woman need to exercise? A baby outside the womb poses no inconvenience to a mother, so why would abortion rights groups oppose efforts to protect born-alive infants?

In revealing their true colors by endorsing the killing of born-alive infants and partial-birth abortions, the abortion lobby has alienated those outside its direct core constituency, minimizing support for the abortion-on-demand views they espouse. In the early 1990's, public backing for liberal abortion policies-abortion at any time, for any reason-peaked at 34%, according to Gallup. In the five years since the advent of the debate over partial-birth abortion, however, support for both late-term procedures and abortion overall has plummeted.

In a recent poll tied to the 29th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Gallup found that support for third-trimester abortions was a miniscule 7%. Polling Company President Kellyanne Conway attributes this change to the graphic nature of the discussions about partial-birth abortion. Most self-identified pro-choicers had relied on not religion or morality, but science and medicine in favoring abortion rights. After the realization that there was in fact a living baby in the womb, at least in the later stages of pregnancy, Conway explains that many could no longer support second- or third-trimester abortions.

The Polling Company found last summer that a mere 16% of those polled backed legal abortion after the first trimester. When presented with six different policy options, three pro-life and three pro-choice, a plurality of 48% supported pro-life positions, with 42% backing pro-choice stances, although most in the latter category only supported abortion during the first trimester. More significantly, in a widely ignored poll last August, Gallup found that, for the first time since it asked the question, as many Americans identified themselves as pro-life as pro-choice, at 46% each, a 21-point swing in just five years.

Not coincidentally, the "Day of Appreciation" was born the year after partial-birth abortion became a hot-button issue. With callous disregard for how people with even an ounce of sensitivity or compassion might view such a celebration, the abortion lobby cluelessly calculated that it could rustle up political support by lauding those who commit unspeakable acts against innocent infants. These radical activists have become so ensconced within their own rhetorical nonsense that they fail to gauge the reactions of those who don't view abortion as an ideological ideal.

As disgusting as the "Day of Appreciation" is, widespread publicity of the indefensible holiday would wreak havoc on the abortion lobby, giving lie to myth that its leaders are fighting for "choice."

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NARAL Mounts New Ad Campaign "Choice for America" March 4 & 5, 2002
http://www.nrlc.org/News_and_Views/index.html.Dave Andrusko can be reached at dha1245@juno.com

Part 1

Advertising, by its very nature, is intended to present a message in the most favorable light possible in order to persuade viewers to endorse/buy/look kindly on the advertiser's "product."

Often ads are just fluff, cotton candy for the brain. But other times-irrespective of the nutritional content-an ad can be extremely telling, because it reveals a business or organization's core values.

In that sense NARAL's "Choice for America" ad campaign is the cat's meow. Distilled to its essence, the message of the Abortion Establishment found in these ads brilliantly illuminates the peculiarly disembodied way pro-abortionists view the taking of human life. First, some background.

According to an article in the Oregon RTL newsletter, written by Oregon RTL Vice President Cindy Rahm, 

"The ad campaign is funded by a $7.5 million gift from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.  Oregon NARAL also received $30,000 for television ads from a private foundation."

The ads run in selected states, states where a pro-life incumbent is up for re-election this fall, such as Oregon's own Senator Gordon Smith, according to Rahm. What's the NARAL game plan?

"NARAL's website (www.naral.org) explains the campaign as 'a public education initiative of The NARAL Foundation that seeks to define a woman's freedom to choose as a fundamental American freedom.  The project combines paid advertising with a grassroots organizing effort designed to reconnect Americans with the concept that being pro-choice is a fundamental American value.' "

Apparently, in that bizarre world where pro-abortionists reassure themselves that all's fair in love and abortion politics, "a fundamental American value" is bashing volunteer, cash-strapped crisis pregnancy centers. Rahm writes,

"Several months ago, NARAL began a campaign aimed at weakening pregnancy centers by creating negative publicity and laying groundwork for lawsuits and restrictive legislation.  In a published guide, 'The Step-By-Step Guide Unmasking Fake Clinics,' NARAL tells abortion activists how they can go 'undercover' and engage in activities which are unlawful in many states. 

"The guide advises activists to pose as fake clients and secretly record counseling conversations - hoping to 'expose' instances of improper client treatment and possible racial discrimination.  The guide also suggests posting negative flyers near the centers or at nearby campuses accusing the centers of deceiving, misleading and pressuring women seeking help with an unplanned pregnancy."

As we've talked about recently in Today's News & Views, the campaign to sabotage CPCs has been aided and abetted by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer who is harassing CPCs in New York. Such skullduggery is apparently spreading. According to the February 27 World Net Daily,

"As New York crisis pregnancy centers rally to fight subpoenas issued last month by Attorney General Eliot Spitzer demanding information about their business practices, the National Abortion Rights Action League, which supported Spitzer's election, is training pro-abortion-rights activists to 'investigate' California CPCs.

"On Feb. 7, NARAL's California state affiliate, the California Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League held a "special training" session on 'Unmasking Fake Clinics' at the Westside Pavilion shopping center in West Los Angeles. An Internet announcement for the event promised, 'During the training, CARAL will expose the hidden agendas and activities that take place behind the doors of CPCs. The session will also equip you with the necessary information and training needed to take action against CPCs in your community.' "

But then again, should it surprise us that people who traffic in the blood of unborn babies and the misery of desperate women would bully tiny volunteer organizations with one-zillionth the resources of the NARALs and Planned Parenthoods of this world?

On Tuesday, we'll examine some of the scripts in NARAL's "Choice for America" ad campaign. They are most revealing.

Part 2: "Choice for America"

We began the week with a quick glance at NARAL's new "Choice for America" television ad campaign. We observed that the same organization which touts choice as " a fundamental American value," is doing its level best to assure that tiny, mom and pop, volunteer-staffed Crisis Pregnancy Centers do not exercise their choice to help women and their unborn babies find a life-affirming outcome.

Legal assaults, the calculated use of phony "clients," the distribution of scurrilous pamphlets nearby the CPCs represent the harassment du jour for the bullies at NARAL. They are indeed a piece of work.

There are a number of ads in the campaign, which you will find  listed on NARAL's web site (www.naral.org). And if you understand that "choice" is a kind of secular religion, it is no accident as you read through them that you encounter allusions steeped in certain imagery. For example, in the ad labeled "I Believe," we read,

"I believe there's a reason we are born with free will.
And I have a strong will to decide what's best for my body, my mind, and my life.
I believe in myself.
In my intelligence, my integrity, my judgment.
And I accept full responsibility for the decisions I make.
What's life without choice?"

A couple of things. "Free will" and "a strong will" may be separated by only four words in the text but their meanings are as far apart as the East is from the West. Since we are humans, it is not always exercised in this manner, but free will implies reflection, a wrestling with one's conscience, a search for a moral plumb line to gauge whether the action we are about to take is ethically defensible.

Put another way, "free will" has nothing in common with I-will-do-my-own-thing-so-stop-bugging-me.

Strong will, by contrast, suggests a decision which mindlessly runs roughshod over external considerations; all that matters is what I want. Reflection is for weaklings and consciences are not sounding boards but opponents to be pinned to the mat. That's a responsible use of "my intelligence, my integrity, my judgments"?

Granted, I am a pro-lifer, but I can assure you that after all these years I do understand the power of pro-abortion mantras for devotees. There is for them a seductive relief that accompanies mind-dulling chants such as "The Greatest of Human Freedoms is Choice" and "What Good is Life Without Choice?"

The function of such meaningless, content-free gibberish is critical: to shield the conscience from the horror of abortion. And this elaborate exercise in self-deception can reach epic (if not clinical) proportions. Take the ad simply labeled "Bike":

"I want every good thing in the world for you. I want you to know, right down to your toes, that all of life's choices are open to you. Sure, you'll skin your knees along the way, but you'll learn. That it's your body, your life, and your responsibility.

"Never give up the freedom to choose. Your dreams are tied to it."

"Skin Your Knee"!? The "choice" to end the life of your own child is equivalent to skinning your knee? That's bad enough.

But to describe the evisceration of a helpless infant as an educational experience whose moral is that you can do whatever you want to someone who has no choice is not only an exercise in escapism but represents a cynical calculation to treat women as if they were children.
 
While such too-clever-by-half language may send chills up and down the spines of self-congratulatory ad copywriters, assuming "responsibility" (whatever that means) doesn't make the baby any the less dead.  But, to be fair, they have got one thing right: taking the life of unborn children is often linked to "dreams."

Many, many women have written of what they describe as "a little ghost" who forever haunts them. For these desperately unhappy women, the dream has become a living nightmare.

Betcha you don't see that ad in "Choice for America."

dave andrusko can be reached at dha1245@juno.com

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National Right to Life: Today's News & Views February 25, 2002

"Personally Opposed"-a Different Take [Part One of Two]
One of the many benefits of the World Wide Web is that pro-lifers can instantaneously communicate/forward key information to one another. The downside is that users (including me) tend to send along tons of material each and every day.

Which is by way of explaining why it was not until this morning that I noticed a story which appeared eight days ago in the Washington Post and which had been zipped along to me the same day. The author is Liza Mundy and early on she makes her position clear. Like the Post itself, her desk functions like a satellite office for Planned Parenthood.

What we encounter in her story is an interesting rhetorical ploy I don't see quite as often as I used to. This is the one where the writer erects the man of compassionate steel: the doctor who performs a few abortions here and there. Why?

Well, as Ms. Mundy's Dr. "R" explains it, because "I feel it's a social service," and "social service was why he wanted to be a doctor."

Get it? Eviscerating unborn babies--kind of like donating a used car to the Salvation Army or volunteering blood at the Red Cross. Six of one, half dozen of the other. Solid citizen, this Dr. "R."

And then the fates appeared to smile brightly on our young doctor, as if to reward him for his dedication. He finds work at a clinic "serving mostly migrant workers-exactly the population he wanted to work with."

No telling how much "social service" he can do with such an utterly powerless group.

But, hold on. The clinic "had a no-abortion policy." Worse yet he couldn't even blame the mandate to sheathe their curettages on the clinic's religious affiliation-it didn't have any!

"Rather-he gathered-some of the other doctors didn't want to do abortions, and wanted the practice as a whole to steer clear of them. The same was true of the hospital where it had admitting privileges. No abortion. No discussion. 'It's safer that way, for an institution to say they don't do abortions,' he says. 'So they don't have to deal with the controversy.' "

Mundy writes that, given the paperwork blizzard that buries physicians these days, few coming out of medical school go solo. But if they go with a practice, the collection of doctors is likely to be more conservative than a Lone Ranger physician out on his own.

We could talk a lot about stigmas and the like, how most physicians to this day dismiss abortionists as hacks. (Mundy doesn't, but we could.) But what makes this article far more interesting than the usual pro-abortion drivel is that she doesn't attribute this reluctance to snuff out children to fear.

Rather, it's something else altogether, as we shall discover tomorrow, something that is immensely encouraging for pro-lifers. See you then.

dave andrusko can be reached at dha1245@juno.com

"Personally Opposed"-a Different Take [Part Two of Two]

Yesterday we took a preliminary look at a story that appeared in the February 17 Washington Post. The writer was Liza Mundy and the topic why fewer and fewer clinics are performing abortions.

Understand, Mundy is not talking about the Jiffy Lubes of the abortion business, the kind that specializes in tearing unborn babies to pieces. Rather, she is referring to the full-service clinics that snuff out kids as but one line of business.

The peg for her story is Dr. "R.," a great guy. Dr. R really wants to be a "family practitioner, serving kids, old folks and everyone between." To our modern day Dr. Welby, "it seemed natural" that from "time to time, this might include ending the pregnancy of a woman who wished it ended."

Better yet, he finds work at a clinic "serving mostly migrant workers-exactly the population he wanted to work with." Just when he's about to "serve kids, old folks, and everyone between" (in other words, everyone but the unborn), he learns the clinic won't do abortions.

Is the clinic affiliated with a religious institution? No. Rather the explanation is two-fold.

First, practices with a number of physicians (as opposed to a doctor on his/her own) are naturally more reluctant to get themselves caught up in the abortion controversy. In most stories, the other explanation would be fear.

But Mundy is honest enough to go where the evidence takes her. And the evidence comes from a study conducted by Henry J. Kaiser Foundation which "set out to study doctors' broad reluctance to administer RU-486, the so-called abortion pill."

The report "suggests that the are a surprisingly large number of ob-gyns who don't do abortions for the simple reason that they don't believe in it."

When ob-gyns and family practitioners were asked why they said no to offering either surgical abortions or RU-486, "roughly one-third stated that they are 'personally oposed' to the procedure." Mundy characterizes this as "a startling number." Why? Because two studies--one in l971 and another in l985-found that "88 percent of ob-gyns expressed support for abortion legalization."

Quite correctly, Mundy points out this is not exactly analogous  to what physicians were asked in the Kaiser study but "it suggests that that many doctors, like many members of the American public, have grown more doubtful about the activism of the '70s has ebbed."

Even among those who expressed support for abortion, that support was "soft." Let me make one last point by offering one last one quote from Mundy's story: Everywhere you look, there is a rethinking of abortion. However abortion proponents do the arithmetic, they see a precipitous decline in support for abortion.

That's because at some level they're beginning to understand that 1+ 1 (a mother and her unborn child) =2. And that 2-1 (the woman who aborts her child) does not equal 1 but zero.

As we have said a million times, abortion kills unborn babies and maims their mother. And no "new math" can ever change that equation.

dave andrusko can be reached at dha1245@juno.com

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Can't be Stopped: National Right to Life - February 27 & 28, 2002

Part 1
If it's true that often you can gauge a man by the enemies he makes, it is even more true that the more ferocious his opponent attacks the more likely it is they feel deeply threatened. Such is the case with the benighted Abortion Establishment, which seems to be perpetually angry/enraged/infuriated these days.

Which is easy to understand. Basing your entire argument on a lie, as they have done for going on four decades, means your position is as sturdy as a pile of pick-up sticks.

Once one is moved, the whole wobbly heap begins to collapse. Watching/waiting anxiously for that first movement must be emotionally draining.

The worst part, I should think, is that they must deny the self-evident, day in and day out. Thus, for pro-abortionists, everything presents a threat.

Just listing a few items gives us some idea of the task they have before them.

They must defend the practice of adult males transporting minor girls out of states with parental notification/consent laws to states that don't so that the "evidence" might be destroyed.

They have to minimize the death of an wanted child who is killed in the course of an attack on his/her mother. They must pretend that when this child is brutally assaulted the only victim is the mother who lost not a child but a "pregnancy."

They must feign outrage at a proposed requirement that when a child somehow survives an abortion, he or she is treated as any other child would be-no better but no worse.  They even get antsy when the United States House of Representatives (by a vote of 417-0) approved a bill to prohibit any state from executing a woman who "carries a child in utero," defined as "a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb."

Medically, technology, which improves by the hour, sends them into a more-or-less controlled panic. (On Friday we will talk about yet another medical breakthrough in prenatal medicine.)

From the pro-abortionist's increasingly gloomy perspective, it's bad enough that baby's first picture is no longer the photo taken in the nursery and found in the family album but an sonogram taken just a few weeks after conception and attached to the refrigerator.  But now crisis pregnancy centers--volunteer mom and pop operations-are finding ways to scrounge up the money to buy ultrasound machines.

Which means that women at their most vulnerable moment are more likely to be offered the option of seeing whom it is that they are thinking about destroying. (More about that tomorrow.)

Pro-abortionists are forced to rant against the "evil" of technology, sounding like Luddites. They also must assume the role of a modern day King Canute, commanding the ocean waves not to roll in.

Vainly, pro-abortionists keep piling on sand bags-lie after lie, non-sequitur after non-sequitur-all in a vain attempt to hold back the rising tide of evidence that is flooding over America. Put another way, it's like using your hand to try to catch every rivulet of water streaming through a colander, a formidable challenge even when you have the major media, foundations, and academia in your hip pocket.

Over the next few days we'll take a more specific look at the evidence that is more and more putting the Abortion Establishment in an impossible position. See you tomorrow.

dave andrusko can be reached at dha1245@juno.com

Part 2: Can't be Stopped
As you may remember, we began talking yesterday about the myriad of developments that pose such an enormous threat to the hegemony once enjoyed by the Abortion Establishment. No sooner had I finished than it dawned on me how closely this is related to phony so-called campaign finance "reform."

With bills like Shays-Meehan, everyone knows two things. First, there are huge swathes of blatantly unconstitutional provisions running through the bill. Second, we are supposed to pretend that this is like slightly spoiled frosting on the cake which the courts will dutifully scrape off when they review the legislation.

But there is a third thing we all know, but not all are willing to admit: at the core of Shays-Meehan (and the Senate counterpart McCain-Feingold) is a fear of free and open discussion. "Bad thoughts" MUST not be allowed into the marketplace of ideas-and the likes of Sen. McCain will do the honors in deciding what is acceptable and what isn't.

This is exactly the dilemma facing the Abortion Establishment, except on an infinitely worse scale. They must not only stifle everything that smacks of humanity and commonsense but also every scintilla of evidence that the Littlest Americans are just that: small members of the human community who desperately need our protection.

We talked in passing Wednesday of medical technology and crisis pregnancy centers, also known as Women Helping Centers. Understand, if you are Planned Parenthood and NARAL,  you are always worried about National Right to Life. NRLC's energetic, multifaceted outreach to change the abortion landscape is a constant, like the sun in the sky-or to pro-abortionists, like a big burr under the saddle.

CPC's were enough of a "threat" when they were hugely under-financed, resource-starved outreach efforts to desperate women. Like all phases of our Movement, they will always be operating on a shoestring budget.

But of late, efforts have been made to funnel some of the proceeds from life affirming "Choose Life" license plates to help CPCs.  And what really drives pro-abortionists bonkers is the idea that the states and/or the federal government might actually make a few bucks available to them.

Imagine: Planned Parenthood receives so much state and federal money you'd think there is a permanent, special line-item subsidy that is supposed to go forever. But give volunteer, hand-to-mouth enterprises like a CPC a couple of dollars to help them purchase an ultrasound? The scandal of it all!

Which helps explain why cats-paw politicians such as New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer are harassing CPCs in New York. The man was elected four years ago by a hair and feels deeply indebted to pro-abortionists.

As part of the payback, many have suggested Spitzer is in the midst of a fishing expedition, ostensibly to determine if the CPCs are misrepresenting what services they offer. What a sick joke.

They advertise under "Abortion Alternatives," which pro-abortionists say "confuses" women. These are the very same people who constantly harp that pro-lifers underestimate women!

Spitzer, who spoke to NARAL in l999 and accepted a campaign contribution, wants "copies of advertisements, web site addresses, services provided, staff who provided the services, and training materials," according to a story that ran in CNS News and reprinted in the February issue of National Right to Life News. The real aim is impossible to miss: coercing mom and pop CPC operations out of business.

There is a huge irony in all this. Pro-abortionists have long screamed that CPCs are "practicing medicine without a license."

But no sooner do many CPCs begin (as the Washington Post put it) to "expand their services by converting their facilities into medical clinics with ultrasound machines and part-time physicians and nurses" than pro-abortionists switch their criticisms. Now CPCs aren't giving a "full range of options" -counseling for abortion--to women.

South Carolina Attorney General Charles Condon wrote to Spitzer, saying that CPC clinics are providing "outstanding" assistance. "The centers soothe the pain, relieve the suffering and ease the trauma of women who are hurting," Condon wrote. "Those who operate the centers freely give of themselves with a helping hand and a loving heart."

We will keep you abreast of the Spitzer and Spitzer clones both here and in National Right to Life News. Let me end with this.

It is said the truth will set you free. I believe in that sentiment passionately.

So do pro-abortionists, which is why they will go to any lengths to muffle anyone who dares to speak the truth about abortion.

dave andrusko can be reached at dha1245@juno.com

P.S. By going to the following hyperlink, you can read all about NRLC's upcoming annual conference, which will be held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, June 27, 28, and 29.
www.nrlc.org/news/2002/NRL02/conven.html

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UN GENDER COMMITTEE ADMITS LEGAL ABORTION UNSAFE FOR WOMEN

After years of advising countries to legalize abortion, members of the UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) expert committee have voiced concern over extremely high levels of abortion in the Baltic nation of Estonia.

During hearings on Estonia's compliance with the CEDAW Convention, held at the end of January, the committee members were surprised by the frequency of abortions in the country. According to a UN press release, one member even commented that "It was inconceivable that there were 98 abortions for every 100 births," as Estonia had reported.

The expert committee assesses party-states' compliance with CEDAW. Although abortion is not mentioned in the actual Convention, the committee has repeatedly called on states to end restrictions on abortion. During the hearings on Estonia, however, one expert admitted that compliance with CEDAW did not require legalizing abortion, noting that, "As far as the Convention was concerned abortion was not a part of women's reproductive rights." 

A committee member also stated that abortion in general was dangerous to women. According to the UN press release, "An expert said that abortions in many cases were hazardous to women's health. Aside from physical complications, termination of pregnancy could entail psychological problems. It could also lead to infertility." This statement would seem to contradict an argument often made at the UN, in both CEDAW hearings and at conferences on women and population, that legal abortion is "safe" abortion. 

The committee member noted that the Estonian report did not provide essential information "about the frequency of repeated abortions in an average woman's life." She advised that "abortion should not be used as a form of contraception, and she urged the Government of Estonia to take a serious look at the problem."

Another committee member cited the high level of divorce in Estonia as a cause for concern. She asked the representative of Estonia whether "efforts [were] being made to reconcile spouses. Because marriage helped to stabilize society, this trend was worrisome." Previously, CEDAW meetings have often described marriage as a potential source of discrimination against women. Estonia faces severe demographic challenges.

The Estonian fertility rate is now under 1.5 children per woman, well below the 2.1 rate necessary to maintain population size. The UN Population Division predicts that, in the next fifty years, the population of Estonia will fall by 46 per cent, from 1,393,000 people to 752,000 people. The Population Division believes that this decline could result in social unrest between young and old. 

It is unclear whether these concerns motivated the committee members, or whether their statements mark a lasting shift. But, as Peter Smith, a consultant for the International Right to Life Federation, told the Friday Fax, "It is simply wonderful to hear someone in this committee finally raise these issues. The committee has always focused on removing barriers to abortion and divorce, while ignoring the harmful consequences of these practices."

NOTE: This article was reprinted from the Catholic Family and Human Rights Association Friday Fax, Vol. 5, No. 7, Feb. 8, 2002. For more information, email: c-fam@c-fam.org

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GROUNDBREAKING BOOK ON ABORTION'S IMPACT REISSUED

When it was first published 15 years ago, "Aborted Women, Silent No More," quickly became a best-seller in pro-life circles. The Conservative Book Club said it "may be the most powerful book ever written on abortion." Now the book has just been reissued by pro-life publisher Acorn Books.

Written by leading post-abortion researcher Dr. David Reardon, "Aborted Women, Silent No More," chronicles the physical and emotional impact of abortion on women and includes personal testimonies from more than 20 women about their struggles after abortion. More than 252 women participated in a survey about their abortion experiences for the book, with many reporting a host of personal problems like increased depression, substance abuse, dysfunctional relationships and suicide attempts after abortion. 

"As I began researching the effects of abortion on women's lives, I saw more and more that this was a story that needed to be told," said Reardon, who directs the Elliot Institute, a national post- abortion research and education organization located in Springfield, Ill. "People need to be educated on this issue so that the millions of women and men who've been involved in abortions can find resolution and healing, and so that millions more will be prevented from taking that same terrible road."

One hopeful sign he sees, Reardon said, is the dramatic increase in the number of organizations ministering to women and men after abortion. "The post-abortion movement has really grown in the last 20 years," he said. "Post-abortion counselling and support groups are now available throughout the country, and hundreds of professional counsellors, lay volunteers and clergy members are being trained to provide healing and support for those who need help resolving a past abortion. I really feel that post-abortion healing is helping to turn the tide on abortion in this country." Reardon pointed out that the message of "Aborted Women, Silent No More," is as timely today as it was when the book was first published.

He said that surveys have shown that often months or even years may pass before a woman realizes that her abortion had any negative consequences on her life. "Often women may realize they are hurting but will either not recognize the source of the problem or will not know that there is any help available to them after abortion," he said. "Many women have reported that when they tried to share their struggles with others, they were told that the abortion was 'for the best' and that they needed to get on with their lives. Often women have the impression that they are the only ones having these 'crazy' reactions after abortion, and they feel very confused and alone."

Asked what he felt was the greatest impact of the book, Reardon said he believed it has helped the pro-life movement to focus the abortion debate on helping women in need. "There was, and sometimes still is today, a notion among some pro-lifers that talking about the impact of abortion on women weakens the moral argument against abortion," Reardon explained. "But I've always believed that the average person who tolerates abortion does so only because he or she believes abortion actually helps women. To open the hearts of these people to the unborn child, we must first help them to see that abortion doesn't help women, it makes their lives worse. Many simply need to hear the truth from the mouths of women who have been there. Focussing on the effects of abortion on women, then, is simply a necessary step in converting hearts. In addition, it is through hearing the stories of women that grieve that many people learn about the humanity of the children they have lost. The testimony of a woman who says 'My baby died in that abortion' is often more powerful than the scientific facts about fetal development." 

"Aborted Women, Silent No More" is available from Acorn Books for $24.95 plus shipping. To order, call the toll free order line at (888) 412-2676.

         Sit with me for a moment in the waiting room of an abortion clinic.  Here you will find women who, in general, are neither philosophers nor fools--categories which admittedly include substantial overlap.  Very few of these women have engaged in arcane debates about the meaning of "personhood."  Fewer still are so foolish as to believe the claim that having an abortion is no worse than having a tooth pulled.
         Look about and you will see women from a wide cross-section of American culture.  Bright and dull, conservative and liberal, religious and irreligious.  All are represented.  There is significant overrepresentation by adolescents, unmarried women, and racial minorities, but still, they are a cross-section of America.  And like all Americans, these women are uneasy and deeply divided over abortion, more so today than ever before in their lives.
         Many of these women, even now, while waiting to be escorted to the operating room, bury their heads in the sands of denial.  "It will be over soon.  I just won't think about it.  I'll just go on with my life like before.... It wouldn't be legal if it wasn't right; it wouldn't be legal if it wasn't safe.  I just won't think about it."
        Others, who at best consider their pending abortions to be an evil necessity, are saying goodbye: "Forgive me.  Mommy doesn't want to do this, but I really don't have any choice.  If only I could have you, I would love you so much."
         For some their wait is unemotional, but they are intellectually tortured by the metaphysical question: "Am I doing the right thing?"  Others are carefully focused on their answers to this same question: "This is the right thing, the only thing to do.  I can always have a baby later, when the time is right, when I can be a good mother.  It wouldn't be fair to me, to Jim, or even to the baby, to have it now."
    These women, joylessly seated around the waiting room, are just typical Americans.  They share the same spectrum of American beliefs and angst over the abortion question.  Polls show that roughly 70 percent of Americans believe that abortion should be legal.  Yet 75 percent (which obviously requires substantial overlap) also believe it is immoral.  There is clearly a tension in our hearts between what should be legal and what is actually moral.
        This tension is especially visible in abortion clinic waiting rooms.  Interviews at clinics confirm that at least 70 percent of the women having abortions view abortion as immoral, or at least deviant, behavior. (1)  Rather than choosing according to their own moral beliefs, most women are acting against their belief systems.  They feel "forced" by circumstances, or loved ones, to violate their consciences for the sake of some "other good."

Everyone Knows
       Why, after over twenty years of legal abortion, do Americans--including young women for whom abortion has always been legal--still have a negative moral view of abortion?
        The answer to this question is the same at it was two decades ago.  In 1971, the editors of California Medicine wrote in support of legalized abortion, but noted that the moral view underlying this change would only slowly be adopted.
 

Since the old [Judeo-Christian] ethic [of the sanctity of life] has not yet been fully displaced [by the new ethic which places relative rather than absolute value on human lives] it has been necessary to separate the idea of abortion from the idea of killing, which continues to be socially abhorrent.  The result has been a curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous whether intra- or extra-uterine until death.  The very considerable semantic gymnastics which are required to rationalize abortion as anything but taking a human life would be ludicrous if they were not often put forth under socially impeccable auspices.  It is suggested that this schizophrenic sort of subterfuge is necessary because while a new ethic is being accepted the old one has not yet been rejected. (2)   [Italics added]

Everyone Struggles
        The feeling of a life being killed is a common thread throughout the testimonies of women before, during, and after an abortion.  According to one woman, interviewed in a clinic's waiting room: "It's killing.  But it is justifiable homicide."  Another, shortly after her abortion, says: "Like when you have an abortion you're just destroying a part of yourself.  That's the way I feel anyhow.  I just feel bad inside, that's all.  I didn't really want to do it.  It's a sin." (4)  Still another woman, describes her feelings after an abortion, saying: "I hated myself.  I felt abandoned and lost.  There was no one's shoulder to cry on, and I wanted to cry like hell.  And I felt guilty about killing something. I couldn't get it out of my head that I'd just killed a baby." (5)
        For some the anticipation of guilt itself moves them toward acts of self-punishment.  An example of this is reported in a New York Times interview with American women who have travelled to England for RU-486 abortions.  A woman from Pennsylvania explained that for her there were "psychological advantages" to the harrowing experience of repeated clinic visits for RU- 486 and prostaglandin injections and in the six hours or more of labor pains to expel a dead human fetus.  "I didn't want to just zip in and be put to sleep and zip out in two hours with it all done," she explains. "In a way, that would have been too easy.  This was a big painful decision for me.  I would have felt irresponsible if it had just been over with like that.  I wanted to remember this all my life.  I never want to do it again." (6)   For this woman the price for an abortion must be measured in something more than negotiable currency.  The act must be etched in one's memory with proper solemnity.  Physical and emotional pain are the only fitting tributes which can be made to a life denied.
        Even for those who deny the humanity of their unborn child, there is a often an admission that this denial can be maintained only by a conscious effort.  For example, one woman writes:  "I didn't think of it as a baby.  I just didn't want to think of it that way." (7)  Another insists that denial is the only way to deal with it:  "I made up my mind to do it, and like I could let it drive me crazy, any woman could, but you can't, because you've got to live with it and there's really no sense in letting it drive you right off the edge." (8)
        For others, even the process of discussing their experience threatens their precarious equilibrium.  For example, one woman interviewed in a clinic as she awaited her third abortion at first insisted she had adjusted well to her first two abortions, but then she went on to describe experiencing symptoms which are now identified as part of post-abortion syndrome.  She found herself confessing that she had developed a compulsive fascination with other people's children, outbursts of rage, and periods of depression and substance abuse.  As she heard herself describing these problems, which she herself attributed to her previous abortions, she began to doubt what she should believe, finally concluding: "Maybe I should go to a psychiatrist, but I really don't have the money or the interest.  Truth is hard to take, and I just don't know if I'm ready for it." (9)
        What is the truth, which she already knows, but is too "hard to take?"  Abortion destroys a human life.  Moreover, this life is her own child.  This human life is also the progeny of her male partner.  And their parents.  And their grandparents.  In this way, abortion is even more than a profound moral issue; it is a familial issue.  The abortion experience not only defines how she sees herself, it also defines how she sees her family.

No One is Safe
 Even the most ardent defenders of abortion rights are not immune to these issues.  Linda Bird Francke, a professional journalist, feminist, and pro-choice activist, describes how when faced with an unplanned pregnancy which would have interfered with her and her husband's rising careers, the couple decided "It was time for us," not another child.  It was a relatively easy decision.  Without any emotional handwringing, the logical and practical choice was made.
    It was not until Francke and her husband were actually sitting in the waiting room, that an unexpected ambivalence arose. "Suddenly the rhetoric, the abortion marches I'd walked in, the telegrams sent to Albany to counteract the Friends of the Fetus, the Zero Population Growth buttons I'd worn, peeled away, and I was all alone with my microscopic baby."  Intellectually, she tried to concentrate on how small the fetus was, and therefore how impossible it was for it to be human, but she had borne children before and the feel of her own body kept telling her that there was real life growing within her. "Though I would march myself into blisters for a woman's right to exercise the option of motherhood," she writes, "I discovered there in the waiting room that I was not the modern woman I thought I was." (10)
        By the time the she entered the operating room, Francke was desperately hoping for some release from her predetermined course.  She longed for her husband to valiantly "burst" through the door and stop it from happening.  When he failed to do so,  and the doctor began to dilate her for the surgery, she herself begged him to stop.  But the doctor told her it was too late and completed the surgery anyway.  At that point she gave in: "What good sports we women are.  And how obedient.  Physically the pain passed even before the hum of the machine signaled that the vacuuming of my uterus was completed, my baby sucked up like ashes after a cocktail party."
        Afterwards, her ambivalence continued.  During times of relaxation when she had time to reflect on the beauty of the world, she experienced the common reaction of "visitations" from her aborted child.  Her benign "little ghost" would come to her and wave.  And she would tearfully wave back to reassure her lost baby that if only he could return, now they would make room for him in their busy lives.
        Five years after her abortion, Francke was drawn to reinvestigate her own mixed feelings about abortion and wrote a book entitled The Ambivalence of Abortion, in which she transcribed reactions to the abortion experience of almost 70 women, couples, parents, and men.  What she found, as the title suggests, is universal ambivalence, and often frank admissions of guilt and remorse.  Over 70 percent of those she interviewed expressed some type of negative feelings about the abortion.  Most saw that abortion involves a "baby."  Those who denied the human fetus's humanity did so in curt assertions which belied an edge of uncertainty.  Few were as well prepared for the abortion decision as was Francke, who at least had the advantage of having been a pro- choice activist who had confronted the issues and argued for the principles used to justify abortion.  Instead, few had ever participated in the abortion debate.  Most had deep moral reservations about abortion, yet they were aborting because they felt they had no other choice.
        Francke's interviews are consistent with the findings of other researchers.  These findings suggest that for most women, abortion is at best a marginal choice.  Between 30 and 60 percent of women having abortions initially have a positive desire to carry the pregnancy to term and keep their babies. (11)  Many of these women still desire their babies even at the time of the abortion, but are aborting only because they feel forced to do so by others or by circumstances.  Indeed, of women who experience post-abortion problems, over 80 percent say they would have carried to term under better circumstances or with the support of loved ones, over 60 percent report having felt "forced" to have the abortion by others or circumstances, and approximately 40 percent were still hoping to discover some alternative to abortion when going for counseling at the abortion clinic. (12)
        Such data suggest that rather than "choosing" abortion, many women, perhaps most, are instead "submitting" to abortion.  The rhetoric of "choice" may actually be obscuring the national problem of unwanted abortions--abortions on women who would prefer to keep their babies if only they could receive the love and support they need to empower them as mothers.
        No one can reasonably deny the testimonies of women who describe how their unwanting lovers, parents, and others have pressured, badgered, blackmailed, and even physically forced them into accepting unwanted abortions because it would be "best for everyone."  Even pro-choice ethicist Daniel Callahan, director of the Hastings Center, writes: "That men have long coerced women into unwanted abortion when it suits their purposes is well-known but rarely mentioned.  Data reported by the Alan Guttmacher Institute indicate that some 30 percent of women have an abortion because someone else, not the woman, wants it." (13)

Everyone is Changed
        This data, combined with over a thousand case studies in my own files alone, demonstrate that the decision to abort is often a tentative one, or even one accepted solely to please others.  For many it is nothing more than an act of despair.  For all, it is an intensely emotional issue which irreversibly changes the course of their lives and touches the very depths of their sexuality and self- image.  It is a life-marking event.  Just as after a marriage one becomes a wife, or after the birth of a child one becomes a mother, so after abortion one becomes--well, "another"--somehow different than before.
        As with all life-marking events, it is human nature to look back and wonder, "How would my life be different if I hadn't married Jim?  How would it be different if I had never had the twins?"  So the woman who has had an abortion is inevitably confronted with the question, "How would my life be different if I'd had that baby?"
        For many women, the abortion becomes a key point in their lives around which all other events take reference.  In their minds, everything can be clearly placed as having occurred either "before the abortion" or "after the abortion."  They may even see themselves as being two completely different people before and after this defining event.  In a retrospective study of 260 women, an average of nearly eleven years after their abortions, 51 percent report having undergone a "dramatic personality change" following their abortions, of which 79 percent say the change was a negative one. (14)
        Abortion is such a profound event in one's life, that one must either thoughtfully integrate it into one's life, or fearfully suppress it.  Neither is easy.  The former requires great fortitude and honesty.  The latter is simply unhealthy.  It is a fundamental principle of psychiatry that suppression of emotions is the cause of numerous psychological and physical ailments.  Suppressed feelings create their own internal pressures, sap emotional energy, and cause turmoil in one's life until they burst forth in a way which can no longer be ignored.
        These observations are substantiated by the testimony of Dr. Julius Fogel, a psychiatrist and obstetrician who has been a long-time advocate of abortion and has personally performed 20,000 abortions.  Although he approaches abortion from a pro-abortion perspective, Dr. Fogel is deeply concerned about the "psychological effects of abortion on the mother's mind."  According to Dr. Fogel:

Abortion is an impassioned subject.... Every woman--whatever her age, background or sexuality--has a trauma at destroying a pregnancy.  A level of humanness is touched.  This is a part of her own life.  She destroys a pregnancy, she is destroying herself.  There is no way it can be innocuous.  One is dealing with the life force.  It is totally beside the point whether or not you think a life is there.  You cannot deny that something is being created and that this creation is physically happening.... Often the trauma may sink into the unconscious and never surface in the woman's lifetime.  But it is not as harmless and casual an event as many in the pro-abortion crowd insist.  A psychological price is paid.  It may be alienation; it may be a pushing away from human warmth, perhaps a hardening of the maternal instinct.  Something happens on the deeper levels of a woman's consciousness when she destroys a pregnancy.  I know that as a psychiatrist. (15)

The Necessity of Denial
        Suppression and denial are the most common means of coping with abortion.  Between 60 and 70 percent of women who eventually confronted negative feelings about their abortions admit that there was a period of time during which they would have denied to others and themselves any regrets or negative feelings.  On average, this period of denial was about five years, with a low of one month and a high of twenty years. (19)
        In general, denial and avoidance behavior is readily apparent.  Participants in our own case study project who claim that their post-abortion adjustment was easy almost always give only short, concealing responses which at the same time reveal volumes.  Consider the following response, which arrived just today, and is typical of the pattern I have described.

Why did you have an abortion?  "I wasn't carrying the baby right and I had knots in my stomach"
How would you describe the abortion?  "I didn't like it, but I did what was best."
How did the abortion affect you?  "It made me feel sad because I took another's life."
What have you done to deal with the abortion, and did it help? "Nothing really.  I got over it."
How do you think the abortion changed your life?  "I take better care of myself."

        Notably, this woman describes that what she aborted was a "baby," not a "fetus" or a "pregnancy."  She further states, very matter of factly, that in having the abortion she "took another's life."  These statements suggest that this woman is not engaging in any sophisticated rationalizations.  To her it was not a "potential life," it was a baby, whose death warrants sadness.  In the same simple and straightforward way, she copes with this death simply by "getting over it."  One hopes that she has indeed gotten over it, but one fears that in actuality she may simply be engaging in avoidance behavior which prevents true resolution and integration of the experience into her life.
        But then, denial and avoidance are integral to abortion.  Don't take my word for it.  Look at In Necessity and Sorrow, a book by Dr. Magda Denes, a pro-choice feminist psychologist.
        Shortly after her own abortion, Denes, like Francke, felt drawn to spend months at an abortion facility to observe how others experienced abortion.  Unlike Francke, Denes is a trained psychologist and knows to look beyond the words of those she interviews.  She sees that words of bravery are used to disguise fears, words of calm to hide doubts.  For example, when introducing the interview of one patient, she writes:  "All that she says sounds honest and straightforward.  It is only when she refers to the abortion that she lies, not so much to me as to herself." (20)
        But seeing through these self-deceptions does not mean that Denes criticizes them.  Instead, she justifies denial as necessary to protect ourselves from the worst in us:  "Oh yes," she writes, "these people lie, they kid themselves, testify falsely, confess in bad faith, shirk responsibility, only pretend to honor, bracket the past, and invent their lives.  And who among us does differently?  Especially in times of crisis.  Especially in times of irreversible choice." (21)
        Self-preservation is the name of the game, and Denes clearly sees that sanity in the abortion clinic can be achieved only by a strict adherence to the rules of the game.  Both patients and staff collaborate in this conspiracy of self-deceptions.  Describing her interviews with both staff and patients, she writes, "Above all, this a document on the evasions, multifaceted, clever, and shameful, by which we all live and die." (22)
        In the abortion clinic, she adds, "Reality is a matter of courtesy.  A matter of agreement not to rock the tempest-torn boat." (23)
        Though Denes is personally committed to the pro-choice philosophy, her book, like Francke's, was never embraced by the pro-choice movement.  It is too dark, too questioning, too disturbing.  In fact, despite the opposite leanings of their authors, both Denes' and Francke's books show that abortion is at best an ugly experience, at worst a heart wrenching nightmare.  Neither is able to find any substance in the stories they tell to support the pro-choice rhetoric about "salvaged lives" in which they themselves earnestly hope.  This failure is due to the fact that when one studies the effects of abortion on women in an intimate and personal way, it is never an encouraging story.  What emerges is always much more sorrow than joy, much more guilt than relief.
        The philosophy of "choice" is admirable only when stripped of its reality, only when worshipped as an ideal, believed in its abstract.  When examined from the viewpoint of women filled with despair, dread, guilt, and denial, this pro-choice rhetoric is cold and uncomforting.  When examined from the viewpoint of the aftermath of breast cancer, miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, substance abuse, suicidal tendencies, sexual dysfunctions, impacted grieving, and Mother's Day depression, it is a mockery.
        In sum, speaking as one who has been there, Denes favors abortion on demand purely on the grounds that women should be given a choice.  Yet she is discomforted with that choice, for even under the most ideal circumstances, even if abortion on demand were "provided free by the state, [and] supported with mercy by the church," she believes that such a pure freedom would only accentuate the horrors, doubts, guilts, and other problems which are inherent to abortion.  "For if we remove abortions from the realm of defiance of authority," she writes:

...if we permit them to be acts of freedom as they should be, their meaning, private and collective, will inescapably emerge in the consciousness of every person....I think it is a far, far lighter task to regard oneself as a martyr and to battle the world than to know the private sorrows of unique commitments and the heartache of self-chosen destiny.  I wish, therefore, to be taken for what I am.  A proabortionist with a bad secular conscience." (24)

The Journey Begins
        So it is, when I look around the clinic's waiting room, I see lives driven by despair, not hope.  I see women inwardly crying, saying goodbye.  And I see women whose clenched teeth and fixed eyes are determinedly set on the future because they dare not look at the present which will forever be their past.
        As I look into their many faces, the philosophical debate over when a human becomes a "person" dissolves into nothing more than ethereal elevator music.  Whether these waiting women listen to it or ignore it, it has no real effect on the living of their lives.  For beneath the lyric of excuses and jargon, on the level of a little girl who once asked, "Where do babies come from?", every woman here knows that life begins at conception.  It is a human life.  It is a familial life.  It is a part of her and a part of another; it is their child.  The only question which remains is how well will she be able to live with this truth...or how long will she be able to run from it?

                                                                                                                           -David C. Reardon

NOTES:
1.     Mary K. Zimmerman, Passage Through Abortion (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1977), 69.  David C. Reardon, Aborted Women,
        Silent No More (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1987), 13.
2.     "A New Ethic for Medicine and Society," California Medicine, Sept. 1970, 113(3):67-68.
3.     Zimmerman, Passage Through Abortion, 194-195.
4.     Magda Denes, In Necessity and Sorrow, (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 94.
5.     Linda Bird Francke, The Ambivalence of Abortion (New York: Random House, 1978), 61.
6.     New York Times, March 23, 1994 cited in "The Public Square," First Things, June/July 1994, p.79.
7.     Francke, Ambivalence, 201.
8.     Denes, In Necessity and Sorrow, 97-98.
9.     Francke, Ambivalence, 63.
10.   Jane Doe [pseud. Linda Bird Francke], "There Just Wasn't Room in Our Lives Now for Another Baby,"  New York Times, May 14, 1976,
        Op-Ed Section.
11.   Zimmerman, Passages, 110-111.  Reardon, Aborted Women, 12.
12.   Reardon, Aborted Women, 14-15.
13.   Daniel Callahan, "An Ethical Challenge to Prochoice Advocates," Commonweal, Nov. 23, 1990, 681-687, 684.
14.   Reardon, "Psychological Reactions Reported After Abortion" The Post-Abortion Review, Fall 1994, 2(3):4-8.
15.   From an interview with columnist Colman McCarthy, "A Psychological View of Abortion," St. Paul Sunday Pioneer Press, March 7,
        1971.  Dr. Fogel, who continued to do abortions for the next two decades, reiterated the same view in a subsequent interview with
        McCarthy, "The Real Anguish of Abortions" The Washington Post, Feb. 5, 1989.
16.   R.F. Badgley, et al., Report of the Committee on the Abortion Law, Supply and Services, Ottawa, Canada, 1977:313-319.
17.   "New Study Confirms Link Between Abortion and Substance Abuse," The Post-Abortion Review, Fall 1993, 1(3):1-2.
18.   Reardon, "Psychological Reactions Reported After Abortion" The Post-Abortion Review, Fall 1994, 2(3):4-8.
19.   Ibid.
20.   Denes, In Necessity, 101.
21.   Ibid., 122.
22.   Ibid., xvii.
23.   Ibid., 6.
24.   Ibid., xv-xvi.

Back to Table of Contents

One Victim or Two: The Case Against "One-Victim Approach" Legislation
By Joe Kral, M.A. Pro-Life Infonet; March 7, 2002

[Pro-Life Infonet Note:  Joe Kral is the legislative director for Texas Right to Life and lobbies on medical ethics issues in Congress for National Right to Life. He holds a Master's degree in Theology from the University of St. Thomas with a concentration in legal ethics.] 

It comes with much tragedy that Pro-Life movement must face a new legislative threat against "Unborn Victims of Violence" legislation -- a threat known as the "one-victim approach".  Not only does the language of these legislative measures contain the philosophy of the culture of death, but unfortunately they have also confused some well-meaning Pro-Life legislators and organizations.

While on the surface they may seem similar to "Unborn Victims of Violence" legislation, "one-victim approaches" have grave deficiencies contained within it.  One of the primary reasons why National Right to Life and its state affiliates oppose such measures is that they take a one-victim approach rather than a two-victim approach as do "Unborn Victims of Violence" legislation.  What these "one-victim approaches" would do is have enhanced penalties for those who cause a pregnant woman to miscarry her pregnancy.  While on the surface this may seem Pro-Life, in actuality it is far from.  Essentially, "one-victim approaches" treat the unborn children as mere "things" of the mother (i.e. property).  These measures are quite explicit when defining miscarriage and stillbirth to use such terms as "products of human conception".  These are terms that pro-abortion advocates use to intentionally dehumanize the unborn child. As Pro-Life advocates, we acknowledge that the unborn child is a unique human individual and if a crime is going to be committed against the child then we should call it a crime against the unborn child.  In essence, call a duck a duck.

What is even more shocking is that these "one-victim approaches" would also codify the pro-abortion position.  This bill would solidify the Roe v. Wade position even outside the context of abortion.  This is frightening!  This language would further codify the language of the culture of death-the culture we are fighting against!

Furthermore, on a pragmatic level, "one-victim approaches" are problematic in the case that both mother and child are killed.  As the bill suggests one would have to cause the miscarriage of the child in order for the perpetrator to be charged with an enhanced penalty.  It is doubtful any enhanced penalties could be brought against the perpetrator since the mother cannot suffer any additional loss since she has been killed.  In essence, the capitol offense would consume the lesser offense.  The perpetrator would not be charged with any crime against the unborn child under this circumstance if a "one-victim approach" were enacted.

Also, "one-victim approaches" do not address the issue if the unborn child is injured in-utero by a criminal act but survives the injury.  The local district attorney would be unable to press any criminal charges against the perpetrator under this circumstance.  A good example of how ineffective a "one-victim approach" law could be just recently occurred in Houston, Texas when a pregnant mother was savagely beaten by her boyfriend.  Both mother and child survived the criminal attack, but the child was born prematurely and had obvious injuries as a result of the attack.  The local prosecutor was unable to file charges on behalf of the child because the child was not considered a victim of a crime at the time since the child simply was in her mother's womb.  Needless to say, the family was outraged that nothing could be done about this.

Even more recently with the decision of the Bush Administration to have "unborn children" eligible to receive funds from the State Children's Health Insurance Program we can also see a problem with consistency under the law if "one-victim approaches" became law.  Essentially, Pro-Life advocates must ask themselves one question, how can "property" be eligible for medical insurance?  It is in this light we can see the value of true "Unborn Victims of Violence" legislation--that is if the unborn child is eligible for medical insurance (especially if they are injured during a commission of a crime), then, they too can be a victim of a crime as well.

However, what makes this language even more unacceptable to Pro-Life advocates is pro-abortion forces (i.e. Planned Parenthood, National Abortion Rights Action League, and the ACLU) have tried to gut other Pro-Life "Unborn Victims of Violence" legislation at the federal level and in other states using identical language.  It is the political interests of these pro-abortion organizations to thwart any attempt to recognize the humanity of the unborn child under any area of law even when it serves to fully legally protect the mother's decision to give birth to her unborn child.