Category: Rhetoric Vs. Reality

A woman who had three abortions describes saying goodbye to two of her preborn children. She says of her first aborted baby:

“I was young and much more centered on myself and my life circumstances than on the baby. I was not really in contact with this baby.”

Later on, she had two more abortions, 18 months apart. She says:

“I was able to go inside myself and have an intimate relationship with these two babies. I was older, wiser, and able to focus on the meaning of these two close experiences…

Actually, I felt I was talking to the same being both times. I felt gratitude because he/they accompanied me during difficult times. I never felt I was doing them harm.

Just before the abortion for each of them, I asked the lady who showed me the ultrasound screen to give me five minutes alone with the baby, before the intervention. I spoke to each of them in a fluid, soft manner, more like saying, “Thank you, see you later…”

With the second, I said, “I guess I didn’t really get it the first time. You had to come back for me to realize fully that I had to leave this man. And I promise you I will do it.”

It was so clear for me that these two children had not come to me saying, “Let me be born.”…

These babies helped me, and I acted on what they helped me with. I honored them. And they had a tremendous healing effect on the guilt and angst which I carried a long time during and after my first abortion. I realized that I had not understood the meaning of this first baby’s presence in my life. I was incapable of going inside myself and relating to that baby.

I was able to recognize the last two babies as beings who were my equals, partners in learning. The ultrasound screen conversations were a way of recognizing the relationship, expressing my gratitude.”

Claudette Nantel “Conscious Abortion: Engaging the Fetus in a Compassionate Dialogue” Journal of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health 35 (2) Summer 2021, pp. 14 – 15

This post-abortive woman believes that her babies existed to teach her life lessons and that they weren’t meant to be born. In reality, she chose to violently kill them through dismemberment. See what abortion does to a preborn baby here.

Share on Facebook

From pro-choice author Miriam Claire:

“There are many reasons for choosing to have an abortion. Perhaps underlying them all is a deeply maternal, instinctive feeling that the time is not right to give birth and that to do so would be detrimental to all concerned…

It is a maternal instinct that prompts women to have an abortion, because they don’t believe that they can provide emotional and physical sustenance for a child (or another child) at that time in their life.”

Miriam Claire The Abortion Dilemma: Personal Views on a Public Issue (Xlibris Corporation, 2013) 15, 31

Below: 8-week old baby. Before and after abortion.

 

Share on Facebook

One pro-choice activist wrote:

“There is nothing moral about giving birth to children we cannot feed and care for … It is precisely because women take lives sacredly – our own as well as our children’s – that some of us choose not to bring into the world those we cannot take care of.”

Quoted in:

Rosalind Pollack Petchesky Abortion and Women’s Choice: The State, Sexuality, and Reproductive Freedom (New York: Longman, 1984) 376

Share on Facebook

Pro-choice authors Jules Saltman and Stanley Zimbering write:

“In the earliest days of the existence of an impregnated egg, getting rid of it may be as simple as removing a wart from the side of the nose.”

Jules Saltman and Stanley Zimbering Abortion Today (Springfield, Illinois: Charles C Thomas Publisher, 1973) 15

There is no such thing as an “impregnated egg,” any more than there is such a thing as a “fertilized sperm.” The accurate term for a new human life just implanted in the womb is “embryo.”

Before this, the new human being is called a “zygote.” Calling an embryo an impregnated egg (or fertilized egg) is an attempt to muddy the waters and is scientifically inaccurate.

Although an early embryo may not yet look like a baby, the embryo is still a human being in a very early stage of development.

Life begins at conception.

Share on Facebook

Pro-choice activist Barbara Baird:

“It is from this woman’s perspective that it’s so demeaning, and ridiculous, to suggest that abortion is by definition a negative and unfortunate experience…

For the woman who is pregnant and not wanting to be so, an abortion could easily and logically be understood as a godsend.”

Barbara Baird “Somebody Was Going to Disapprove Anyway”: Rethinking Histories of Abortion in South Australia, 1937 – 1990″, PhD thesis. Adelaide, SA: Flinders University

Quoted in: Erica Millar Happy Abortions: Our Bodies in the Era of Choice (London: Zed Books, 2017)

 

Share on Facebook

Pro-choice activist Ruth Cowan

“… Once left free to decide, most women decide to abort for reasons that have to do with their sense of good nurturance: for example, when they feel either that this is not a time when they can nurture a child properly or this is not the fetus that will grow into a child whom they can nurture properly.”

Ruth Schwartz Cowan “Genetic Technology and Reproductive Choice: an Ethics for Autonomy” in Daniel J Kevles, and Leroy Hood, eds. Social Issues in the Human Genome Project (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992) 262

Share on Facebook

Joseph Fletcher, ethicist, justifying abortion in cases of rape:

“The embryo is no more innocent, no less an aggressor or unwelcome invader [than the rapist]!”

Joseph Fletcher Situation Ethics (Philadelphia: the Westminster Press, 1966) 39

Is this baby as guilty as a rapist?

Share on Facebook

From pro-choice activist Joyce Arthur:

“Abortion is a major blessing, and a sacrament in the hands of women…. Now, a flake of dandruff from my head is human, but it is not a human being, and in this sense, neither is a fertilized egg.”

Joyce Arthur. “The Fetus Focus Fallacy.” Pro-Choice Press [Pro-Choice Action Network], March 2005. Downloaded on December 31, 2007.

Share on Facebook

Garrett Hardin, pro-choice activist

“Most women who would have abortions want them, and for the best of all possible reasons: because they love children.”

Garrett Hardin Stalking the Wild Taboo (Los Altos, California: William Kaufman Inc., 1973) 29

Below: preborn child, before and after abortion

 

Share on Facebook