Graeme lost a child to abortion. He was encouraged to write a letter by his therapist to his therapist. He explains how his relationship fell apart after she aborted his child against his will:
“I cannot say that you helped me much because there is not much anyone can do to help me and how I feel about my girlfriend’s decision to abort our baby. I don’t think there is anyone who can console me…
NOT all of us men want our babies aborted. I didn’t. I offered everything under the sun for my girlfriend to have our baby, but she didn’t. She kept saying she wasn’t sure she wanted to be a mother. Her mother wanted her to abort. Her friends thought she should abort, and I am sure even the milkman had a say in her decision, EXCEPT ME the father. I was the only one who wasn’t listened to.
Well she went through with it. She took our 13 week baby (I was sure it was a boy) and she had him killed and for this I will never forgive her. In fact I never want to see her again…
Picture of baby at 13 weeks, just like Graeme’s child
The morning she went to the abortion I got blind drunk; I just didn’t want to be thinking while it was happening. I didn’t want to be conscious.
The worst part of the whole damn situation was the fact that I could do nothing to protect my son. He needed me and I couldn’t do anything to stop what was going to happen to him. I don’t think I want to have any children in the future because maybe I won’t be able to help them when they need me, as I wasn’t able to help John…
It didn’t have to happen because we could have managed. We could have got married and had our own family. We wouldn’t have been rich, but we could’ve had our family and slowly things would’ve got better…
I certainly have none of the feelings that I had for her before this. I had seen us together for life. Not anymore.…
She willingly took our baby to be killed. I don’t want to be involved with this kind of person and certainly wouldn’t trust her with any of my children again.”
Anne R Lastman Redeeming Grief: Abortion and Its Pain (Balwyn, Vic: Australia: Gracewing, 2013) 83-84
Graeme is just one of many post-abortion fathers who are hurt by abortion.
This is a letter to an abortion clinic escort from a former abortion clinic worker. Catherine Adair worked at Planned Parenthood for a number of years. She wrote this letter to reach out to any clinic escort who volunteers at an abortion facility.
“Dear Clinic Escort,
Today I saw you, with your bright orange vest emblazoned with ESCORT on the front and back. You refused to make eye contact with me. I saw your gritty determination as you grabbed arms with that young woman and whispered in her ear, “Ignore them,” you said, “Don’t look at them, they are here to intimidate you, to scare you. I’ll keep you safe, don’t worry.” You walked quickly, head up, steel in your eyes, never letting up your grip on her arm. Her head was down, following your lead, mutely keeping up with your fast trot to the abortionist.
You ushered her in through the doors and soon emerged, alone, smiling at us triumphantly, a glimmer of malice in your eye, a smirk of arrogance and joy at having bested us – another woman you saved from the anti-choice fanatics. You rejoin the other escorts, laughing and joking, until the next car pulls up, and your face resumes the mask of the militant soldier, ready to do battle for women’s reproductive rights.
As I watched you I wondered, have you ever been inside the clinic? Have you ever been in the waiting room, filled with the silence of trepidation and fear? Have you listened to the stifled tears?
Have you ever been in the counseling room? This place, where instead of asking questions and listening, the worker masks the truth, or outright lies about the third life in the room, the life growing inside the woman’s womb? Have you seen her sad and scared eyes? Have you asked her why she is there? Do you know if she is being pressured or forced into this abortion, if she is safe at home…all the questions she won’t be asked inside the clinic? Does she know about all of the help available to her if she keeps the baby? Does she know how many couples would love to adopt her baby?
My dear Clinic Escort, have you been there for the ultrasound, where you can see the fully formed baby kicking its arms and legs? Have you heard the worker tell her it is just a bunch of cells? A blob? A product of conception? Have you been with her, holding her hand as she screams in pain, ignored by a doctor who doesn’t even know her name? Have you heard the suction machine, watch as the blood, tissue, and body parts flow from her body into a cold jar? Have you heard the sound of the currette scraping her uterus? Have you seen the body parts – an arm, a leg, a piece of a rib cage, poured into a baggie as though it were scraps of meat?
Have you sat with her in the recovery room as she stares off into space, desperate to get away from this place so she never has to think of it again? Have you been with her through the depression and the anxiety that plague her after the abortion? The breakup of her relationship? Have you helped her through her drug addiction, her binge drinking? Have you been there when she is unable to bond with her children? When her marriage falls apart? Will you be there when she attempts suicide? Will you be at her funeral when she succeeds?
Dear Clinic Escort, look into my eyes. They have seen things you could never imagine. Things that have made me scream in the middle of the night. Things that are never discussed in the intellectualized, feminist world of abortion rights. Because while you see a job well done when you usher her through those doors, her nightmare is just beginning.”
Dr. Edward Allred who committed roughly 35,000 abortions in just 7 years, owns and operates a string of abortion clinics up and down the California coast. A reporter says of him:
Abortions in his clinics are carried out “on a scale so large and so efficient that they turn a profit one can only guess at. It is enough to support a staff at each clinic and maintain fulltime lawyers and accountants.”
Lorraine Bennett “Abortion Clinic Doctor: “Applying Principles of Good Business” Los Angeles Times (Orange County Edition) October 16, 1977, p 1
Pro-life activist William Brennan describes a study that took place in the 1970s:
In an experiment on human sexual development in Canada, during the 1970s, aborted babies were dissected of their testes, ovaries and adrenals. 54 babies were involved – 33 males and 21 females ranging in age from 10 to 25 weeks gestation. The organs were “minced, homogenized, and subjected to histochemical analysis.” It was meant to learn about “the onset of sexual differentiation by comparing concentration of sex steroids in fetal testes with those in the ovaries and adrenals.”
William Brennan The Abortion Holocaust: Today’s Final Solution (St. Louis, Missouri, 1983) 61
The study referred to was:
FI Reyes JSD Winter and C Fairman “Studies on Human Sexual Development I Fetal Gonadal and Adrenal Sex Steroids” Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism 37 (July 1973): 74-78
In an article in The American Feminist, former Planned Parenthood worker Rhyan explained how Planned Parenthood prioritized calls from women seeking abortions.
From the article:
The sales began with the automated answering system that picked up all calls first. The pleasant, recorded voice invited callers to press one number if they wanted birth control, another for a well woman exam, and another for abortion. All abortion calls were automatically jumped to the front of the calling queue.
Rhyan added that “If you were calling for birth control, you could wait 20 minutes to get a phone operator.” “Closing the sale” on abortions was also supported by Planned Parenthood’s policy of requiring callers to set an appointment prior to discussing costs.
Ellen J Reich “An Insider’s Look into the Abortion Industry” The American Feminist Fall/Winter 2016
An article from The New York Times described abortion mills in New York City:
“It is a shadowy business, the unregulated world of abortion mills, shabby clinics operating behind the facades of doctors’ offices, often in poor neighborhoods. Its victims are women who know little about legal rights or medical options, who have seen an ad or heard a tip and come to this … to risk butchery on a table….No one knows how many such fly-by-night surgeries there are in New York City or how many abortions they produce. But law-enforcement officials and medical experts say dozens of these clinics are believed to be tucked away behind storefronts and in more ordinary-looking doctors’ offices and they are believed responsible for scores or even hundreds of illegal or incompetent abortions annually.”
The article refers to:
“chilling secrets of sleazy abortion mills — most of them run by licensed doctors who use their offices as abortion “clinics,” but are not licensed as full-fledged abortion clinics and are thus not subject to rigorous state standards and periodic inspections.”
After giving several examples of abortion malpractice, the Times points out that despite multiple botched abortions causing injuries, only one New York doctor lost his licence.
“Only one doctor in 1989 had a license summarily suspended for gross misconduct in an abortion….there have been only four other summary suspensions — emergency actions invoked before hearings on charges — related to abortions in the last six years — one in 1985, one in 1990 and two this year.
While the state regulates and inspects the legitimate clinics, it lacks the authority and staff to regulate and inspect doctors’ offices, and can only challenge a doctor’s license after a complaint and an investigation. And many clients, even if dissatisfied, are reluctant to file a complaint.”
This is a rare candid article from a newspaper that usually stays firmly pro-choice and, in future years, would argue against any kind of health regulations on abortion facilities.
Two abortion doulas who provided comfort f0r women having abortions claimed that people in the mainstream pro-choice didn’t want to acknowledge that abortion was often painful to women, not “empowering.”
In their book about being abortion doulas, the authors say:
“There were more traditional pro-choice groups and activists who would express concern about our acknowledgement of the emotion that accompanies an abortion. We had been fed narratives through our activist work that many people felt “empowered” by their abortions. But our very presence in the procedure room undermined that message by hinting that abortion might be physically painful or people might have complicated feelings about it. Mostly, what we saw from people having abortions was a nuanced mix of mourning and relief. We would rarely hear that our clients regretted their procedures, nor would be hear them speak of it in empowering terms. But when we talked about all of this, it often wasn’t received by the pro-choice community the way we expected it to be.”
Mary Mahoney and Lauren Mitchell The Doulas: Radical Care for Pregnant People (New York: Feminist Press, 2016) 18
A woman who had abortions recalled that the clinic worker doing the group counseling session said she had had 8 abortions herself.
“When I went in, went in to get, it was at the University Hospital, and they had a consultation you had to go to. There were couples there, and the girl that was doing the group had said she had had, like, eight abortions. It made me feel really kind of dirty and sick because I didn’t want to ever say that.”
Cara J. Marianna Abortion: A Collective Story (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002) 69
Mary Mullany, a British psychologist, describes how emotional problems plagued nurses who work at abortion facilities. The graphic nature of the abortions they witnessed created discouragement and led to a high turnover rate.
“My work as a Psychiatric Clinical Specialist involves direct counseling with women wishing to have an abortion and consultation with nursing and medical staff performing the procedures. What has been the most distressing to me is the discouragement that the nursing staff experience, resulting in a very high attrition rate. The staff perform first trimester as well as prostaglandin abortions weekly. Clearly prostaglandins are the most controversial and stressful for all involved.
Recently, I started working with nurses’ groups to help them to articulate their thoughts, feelings, and concerns about the abortion process and hopefully channel concerns appropriately. There are numerous occasions where the nurses’ own ambivalent feelings interfere with patient care and heighten conflict among staff.
I recognize that there are no easy answers, that abortion is a very complex emotional and ethical decision for all participants. I continue to be impressed with how long the unresolved pain of abortion resides with so many women.”
Mary Kenny Abortion: The Whole Story (London: Quartet Books, 1986) 272
