Abortion clinic administrator:
“Pretty typically, our patients come from small towns… The majority are happy and healthy. If anything is guilt and trauma inducing, it’s the people picketing in front of our clinic.”
Faye D Ginsburg Contested Lives: the Abortion Debate in an American Community (Berkeley and Los Angeles California: University of California Press, 1989) 2
Testimonies from women who have had abortions seem to indicate that most are not going into the abortion clinic “happy” about their decision. As for healthy, this just gives evidence that few abortions are done for medical reasons.In fact, an analysis of all the abortions that took place between 1980 and 2000 found that only .36% were performed on women who had a health problem that interfered with her pregnancy.
Pro-life protesters are not there to make women feel guilty, but to offer them information they may not get inside the clinic and help with alternatives. Often clinic workers give false and misleading information about unborn babies and do not present all the abortion alternatives and where to go for help. Sidewalk counselors try to reach the women going in with the truth that they do not have to have an abortion; there are other options available and people who will help them in real, practical ways. Crisis pregnancy centers, which these sidewalk counselors often direct women to, offer a full range of services to pregnant women and their partners including free counseling, ultrasounds, baby clothes and diapers, and referrals to many different organizations. Sometimes these crisis pregnancy centers offer free medical care and housing along with parenting classes and job training. In contrast, the abortion clinic will take their money, do the abortion, and then send them home to cope with the aftermath.
Abortion itself can have very severe psychological complications for many women. A woman who has an abortion is 6 times more likely to commit suicide than a woman who hasn’t. Teens have a 10 times higher suicide rate after abortion. Hospitalizations for psychiatric illness and other disorders, as well as grief and guilt reactions sometimes including bad dreams or a condition similar to posttraumatic stress disorder, can sometimes happen
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