Commenting on the increased number of women who sought abortions after Roe versus Wade was decided, Daniel Callahan said the following:
“A change abortion laws, from restricted to permissive, appears – from all data and in every country – to bring forward a whole class of women who would otherwise not have wanted an abortion or felt the need for one… Women can be conditioned (and are in many places) to want and feel the need for abortions. Evidence from those countries where abortion on request has been long available (Russia, Japan, Hungary for instance) shows that the subjectively felt stress that leads women to seek an abortion is socially influenced.”
Daniel Callahan, “Abortion: Thinking and Experiencing” Christianity and Crisis, January 8, 1973, 296
Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s organizational documents, population control:
“[population control] is a most essential step, if not the most essential step… To solve the most critical problems of hunger, deprivation and the hopelessness of poverty, as well as deterioration of our water, land, and air.”
Schwartz “Bringing the Sexual Revolution Home: Planned Parenthood’s “Five Year Plan” America 138:6, February 18, 1978, 114 – 116
On the film Eclipse of Reason, a video that shows a late-term abortion:
“One moment it is a healthy `child’ with less than four months to go to full term; the next it is lying, a tangled heap of bloodied human remains, on the table beside the instruments of its destruction.
Skull, fingers and spine are crushed almost beyond recognition – but not quite. The tell-tale remains say clearly that this was a person who might have lived. This `little boy’ was exactly the same age as Professor Fisk’s [fetal surgeon]tiny patients who regularly survive intra-uterine operations to be born and live a full life.”
Abortion: New and Disturbing Questions. The Daily Mail July 17, 1996 11.
“We believe that the decision to have an abortion could be a good moral decision. We believe that women need to be seen is making good moral decisions for their own lives.”
Speech delivered at Marquette University, November 2, 1987 quoted in Monica Migliorino Miller Abandoned: the Untold Story of the Abortion Wars (Charlotte, North Carolina: St. Benedict Press, 2012) 65
Henry P David, psychologist active in the international abortion movement, said the following:
“[the decision to have an abortion] represents a healthy coping with reality, a maturing experience.”
Henry P David, “Abortion: a Continuing Debate” Family Planning Perspectives 10, no. 5 (September – October 1978) 313 – 316
In reality, abortion often leads to emotional distress and mental health issues in women. Read some of the studies about abortion’s psychological impact here.
Director of nurses at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, where they did abortions:
17 weeks
“Most nurses find the destruction of life the very antithesis of what they believe… Nurses in delivery rooms had been accustomed to every conceivable effort to save babies, even those of 1 to 3 pounds, and they found that sometimes they were “salting out” bigger babies than those they had worked to save.”
The hospital hired a psychiatrist to bring them around, to help them see that, “physicians help people in what they need, and a nurse should feel that way.”
Enid Nemy, “From Saving Life to Ending Them: Why Many Nurses Shun Abortion Duty” New York Times February 1, 1972, P 32
“Salting out” is another name for the seeming abortion method, were concentrated salt solution is injected into the gestational sac, mixing with the amniotic fluid and slowly poisoning the baby and burning it skin over the course of several hours. The mother then goes into labor and delivers a dead baby. The technique caused so many live births and was so dangerous to women that it was abandoned in the 1990s. Now a D&E is the most common procedure for late abortions.
The late Dr. Bernard Nathanson, former abortionist turned pro-life:
“On Operating Room schedules, the pre-Blackmun term that was written down was “therapeutic abortion”; after Blackmun it became “elective abortion.” Now it is “termination of pregnancy,” the ultimate euphemism, almost Huxleyan in its finesse. To the gynecology residents, it remains “scraping it out.”
Bernard Nathanson, with Richard Ostling, Aborting America (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1979) 177
Legalized abortion did not prevent many abortion deaths from happening. Read more about the era of illegal abortion here.
“One obstetrician reported treating 54 teenagers for significant abortion complications which, because the patient had not returned the physicians who performed the abortions, never appeared in the official statistics.”
Matthew J Bulfin “A New Problem in Adolescent Gynecology” Southern Medical Journal 72, no. 8 (August 1979): 967 – 968
One reporter recounts the story of a woman, a 30-year-old divorced mother of two, who had an abortion by pill:
“I took the first three tablets. The process had started and it was inevitable. But you have so long to reflect on it, and I became quite upset.
The second stage was pretty awful. After taking [the drug to induce contractions], the pain became very strong. It was just like early labor. I remember finally dispelling the fetus. The nurse told me it was “beautifully formed.”
[This method] may be physically more natural, but psychologically it hits you much harder. You preside over the killing of a baby, completely unblinkingly.”
Wendy Wright “The Deceit behind RU-486: Who’s Really in Control?” Family Voice, November/December 2000