They said it.
One woman who had an abortion asked the abortionist a question that he refused to answer:
“I always wondered, you know. I asked if it was a boy or a girl. He said, ‘Why would you want to know?’ He wouldn’t tell me if they could know. But he said, ‘Why would you want to know? It doesn’t make a difference.’ So it was a shut-down question. The feeling was, ‘You don’t need to know.’
Cara J. Marianna Abortion: A Collective Story (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002) 66
Share on FacebookBJ Williams, adoption director for San Diego Pregnancy Services, explains how many counselors are biased against adoption:
“So many counselors believe that only someone who doesn’t love the child will place for adoption. Adoption is looked on as a failure, a last-ditch effort.”
Susan Olasky, Marvin Olasky More than Kindness: A Compassionate Approach to Crisis Childbearing (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway books, 1990) 55
Is adoption a better choice than abortion for a baby like this one?
Share on FacebookThe testimony of Hannah, who had three abortions. She had children she had given birth to and was raising, and she feared that something terrible would happen to these living children as divine punishment for her killing the other three:
“[N]ow I started to have nightmares and the nightmares were about dying and dead babies and I kept jumping off mountains into darkness and I also started to think that something awful was going to happen to my children. I always thought that someone was going to kill my children… Also I started to cry a lot… I also realized that that [sic] I never could think about the abortion. I would never let myself think about [it]. Every time a thought of anything about abortion or anything in the radio or television or papers I would turn it off and I could not listen or read about it. I remember one day at the office where I worked as a part-time clerk …girls were whispering and talking quietly about another girl who was away for the day and it turned out that she had gone to have an abortion and when I heard this I started to cry and couldn’t stop. The others thought that I was like this because I had a headache (that’s what I said) but the truth was that for the first time I cried about the word abortion. After that time I kept away from the word.…
My life changed slowly but I never once associated my sadness, erratic behavior, uncontrollable crying, depression and unknown fear as being related to the abortion…
For me the triggering memory of the abortion was the birth of my best friend’s baby. I suddenly remembered never having a little girl and having always wanted a little girl and I remember saying that maybe I did have a little girl but that I’d killed her and that’s why God couldn’t trust me with more children or baby girls…
The regret is part of what I have to live with… Christmas is especially difficult because for some reason I seem to remember more strongly. When I look at the set Christmas table I remember that there should be other children there.… Today they are not sitting at their place at the table. For this I am so sorry.”
Anne R Lastman Redeeming Grief: Abortion and Its Pain (Balwyn, Vic: Australia: Gracewing, 2013) 243 – 244, 246
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Pro-Life author Troy Clark:
“A Newsweek poll, in its June 9, 2003, cover story, “Should a Fetus Have Rights?”, disclosed that a strong 58% majority of Americans believe either life begins at conception (46%) or when an embryo is implanted in a mother’s uterus (12%) shortly thereafter.”
“Newsweek poll shows majority of Americans believe life begins at conception” lifesitenews.com, June 2, 2003
Troy Clark, Ph.D. Abortion Every 90 Seconds: The Whole Story (Kindle, 2015)
Share on FacebookA woman who had been sexually assaulted had an abortion, and commented on how the procedure brought back memories of her sexual abuse:
“I felt very sad after [the abortion], and actually, that triggered my first really big wave of full-on memories of sexual abuse in my childhood.”
Cara J. Marianna Abortion: A Collective Story (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002) 74
Share on FacebookVicky went to Planned Parenthood for a medical abortion (by pill), but while she was in the waiting room, she had second thoughts. She thought she might come back, but she went outside and saw sidewalk counselor who encouraged her to have a free ultrasound at a pregnancy center nearby. She says:
“After hearing my baby’s heartbeat, I just kept thinking, what if I hadn’t heard it? If I had continued where I was, I most likely would not have heard it. I changed my mind when I heard that heartbeat, but my counselors made me feel like I was supposed to have this baby and that I could do it.”
Mike G Williams Thank You for Saving My Life (2016) 92
Whitney, a doula at an abortion clinic, writes about how abortion workers casually chatted right before an abortion. The woman was asleep on the table, prepared for surgery:
“In the background, music is playing. The doctors talk quietly about their upcoming vacations and the weather.
The doulas almost all say that they expect a certain reverence to fill the OR during an abortion, an air that is hushed, respectful, sometimes somber, and maybe even celebratory…We are often surprised when we see that for some people, especially the doctors and the nurses who do surgeries and abortions all day, every day, sometimes it’s just a job.”
Mary Mahoney and Lauren Mitchell The Doulas: Radical Care for Pregnant People (New York: Feminist Press, 2016) 93
Share on FacebookJacinta had an abortion. She tells her story of seven years of grief:
“The pain and despair I felt for the past seven years has been my own private hell. I didn’t realize that my behavior for those past seven years was due to the suppression of the pain and guilt I felt from the moment I knew I was pregnant… When I told the father of the baby he was cold and uncaring. He just told me it’s not a baby and it’s just a bunch of cells and that I’m going to have to get rid of it before it was too late. My heart and mind just were so torn, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to have an abortion! It was his idea, and I felt that I couldn’t have this baby when he didn’t want it.
He told me that I would destroy his life by keeping this baby. He made me feel so guilty that I felt I had no other alternative but to abort my precious baby… I held my belly and told my precious baby it will be okay. I won’t let anything happen to you. I love you.
Two days later I broke my promise to my precious baby. My partner had badgered me to the point I couldn’t deal with him anymore and the baby was the innocent victim in all this.
The hardest thing for me to accept for seven years was that I couldn’t and didn’t fight for my baby. The day that my baby died was a day I’ll remember forever in its entirety. My partner bought me flowers the night before to try and say sorry for putting me through this life-changing event.
At the clinic two days prior to booking me in for the abortion, my partner told me to lie about everything so they wouldn’t suspect I completely disagreed with having the abortion or they may not allow me to have it. The way I was treated I could’ve said anything and they still would’ve booked me in for the abortion. I did as I was asked and lied to the counselor who had only graduated five weeks prior and wasn’t much older than I was, namely 22 years. I saw no way of changing the situation. In fact the pain and shame I felt has now been suppressed for seven years and it has been so strong it resulted in me having three breakdowns, a lost relationship, lost career.… I was consumed with my partner and making him happy, his happiness at the expense of my sanity and self-respect.”
Anne R Lastman Redeeming Grief: Abortion and Its Pain (Balwyn, Vic: Australia: Gracewing, 2013) 208 – 209
Share on FacebookExcerpts from this California Medicine article on abortion has been frequently shared by pro-lifers. The California Medicine article on abortion was written while the push to legalize abortion was first starting. It was 1970, and abortion had been legalized in several states. The article was commenting on how “semantic gymnastics” were used to hide the fact that life begins at conception, which “everyone really knows.”
“The traditional Western ethic has always placed great emphasis on the intrinsic worth and equal value of every human life regardless of its age or condition. The ethic has had the blessing of the Judeo-Christian heritage and has been the basis for most of our laws and much of our social policy. The reference for each and every human life has also been a keystone of Western medicine and is the ethic which has caused physicians to try to preserve, protect, repair, prolong, and enhance every human life which comes under their surveillance. This traditional ethic is still clearly dominant, but there is much to suggest that it is being eroded at its core and may eventually even be abandoned…
What is not yet so clearly perceived is that in order to bring this about hard choices will have to be made with respect to what is to be preserved and strengthened and what is not, and that this will of necessity violate and ultimately destroy the traditional Western ethic with all that this portends. It will become necessary and acceptable to place relative rather than absolute values on such things as human lives… This is quite distinctly at variance with the Judeo-Christian ethic…
The process of eroding the old ethic and substituting the new has already begun. It may be seen most clearly in changing attitudes toward human abortion. In defiance of the long-held Western ethic of intrinsic and equal value for every human life regardless of its age, condition, or status, abortion is becoming accepted by society as moral, right and even necessary. It is worth noting that the shift in public attitude has affected the churches, the laws, and public policy rather than the reverse. Since the old ethic has not yet been fully displaced 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.”
“A New Ethic for Medicine and Society” California Medicine 113 (September 1970): 67-68
This California Medicine article on abortion comments on the how euphemisms were used to “rationalize abortion as anything but killing.” It sums up the abortion issue very well.
An abortion doula, who comforts women as they kill their babies, says:
“I’ve been taught to follow the patient’s lead. If she calls it her baby, then I do too. But with the next patient, just as far along, it’s fetal tissue, it’s the products of conception. One stumbles over her words, says “all the stuff inside,” and that feels right, too. “
Alex Ronan “My Year As an Abortion Doula” The Cut SEPTEMBER 14, 2014
Is this a baby? Or “fetal tissue?”