From an article in Psychology Today. showing that a preborn baby in the womb enjoys being read to:
A new wave of research suggests that the fetus can feel, dream, even enjoy The Cat in the Hat. The abortion debate may never be the same.
One psychologist weighs in on how a preborn baby moves:
Heidelise Als, Ph.D., a developmental psychologist at Harvard Medical School, is fascinated by the amount of tactile stimulation a fetus gives itself. “It touches a hand to the face, one hand to the other hand, clasps its feet, touches its foot to its leg, its hand to its umbilical cord,” she reports.
Preborn baby at 10 weeks after conception- within the time frame that most abortions take place
The article goes on to say the following about unborn babies:
Along with the ability to feel, see, and hear comes the capacity to learn and remember. These activities can be rudimentary, automatic, even biochemical. For example, a fetus, after an initial reaction of alarm, eventually stops responding to a repeated loud noise. The fetus displays the same kind of primitive learning, known as habituation, in response to its mother’s voice, Fifer has found.
But the fetus has shown itself capable of far more. In the 1980s, psychology professor Anthony James DeCasper, Ph.D., and colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, devised a feeding contraption that allows a baby to suck faster to hear one set of sounds through headphones and to suck slower to hear a different set. With this technique, DeCasper discovered that within hours of birth, a baby already prefers its mother’s voice to a stranger’s, suggesting it must have learned and remembered the voice, albeit not necessarily consciously, from its last months in the womb. More recently, he’s found that a newborn prefers a story read to it repeatedly in the womb – in this case, The Cat in the Hat – over a new story introduced soon after birth.
DeCasper and others have uncovered more mental feats. Newborns can not only distinguish their mother from a stranger speaking, but would rather hear Mom’s voice, especially the way it sounds filtered through amniotic fluid rather than through air. They’re xenophobes, too: they prefer to hear Mom speaking in her native language than to hear her or someone else speaking in a foreign tongue.
16 weeks, Legal to abort.
By monitoring changes in fetal heart rate, psychologist JeanPierre Lecanuet, Ph.D., and his colleagues in Paris have found that fetuses can even tell strangers’ voices apart. They also seem to like certain stories more than others. The fetal heartbeat will slow down when a familiar French fairy tale such as “La Poulette” (“The Chick”) or “Le Petit Crapaud” (“The Little Toad”), is read near the mother’s belly. When the same reader delivers another unfamiliar story, the fetal heartbeat stays steady.
Another scientist said:
Birth may be a grand occasion, says the Johns Hopkins University psychologist, but “it is a trivial event in development. Nothing neurologically interesting happens.”
Author Mary Kenny, who did much research for her book on abortion, tells the following story of a woman who begged to be denied an abortion:
“Please refuse me an abortion,” begged a 26 year-old, pregnant with her third child, to a woman doctor assiduously filling out forms in London’s Charing Cross Hospital. “We never refuse abortions – it’s our policy,” she replied, continuing to fill out the forms. In this case, the patient wanted the protection of the doctor while she was under pressure from her lover who wished to avoid a scandal. Feeling pressed into the abortion by her circumstances, the woman went through with it…Perhaps the doctor should have suggested some further, outside counseling.”
Mary Kenny Abortion: The Whole Story (London: Quartet Books, 1986) 11
She wanted to be denied an abortion. Her ambivalence should’ve been a red flag to the abortion provider that she would have a hard time coping after her abortion.
In an article of the OC Weekly, the author talks about the political beliefs of Edward Allred, an abortionist who owns a chain of abortion clinics. He describes his “contempt for feminism”:
Although his gambling and abortion practices may not publicly fit today’s “family values” GOP, Allred calls himself a Reagan conservative. He has proclaimed nothing but contempt for feminists and lesbians, and he opposes women getting equal pay for equal work. And while he has unabashedly supported the continuation of Medi-Cal payments for abortions (government funds that go directly to him and other abortion doctors), he favors the elimination of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (which goes directly to poor patients). The government has a fundamental obligation, he has said, to pay doctors for abortions to prevent overpopulation.
This abortionist is not a fan of feminism or champion of women. He is also quoted making some extremely racist statements. He insults minorities when he says:
Population control is too important to be stopped by some right-wing pro-life types. Take the new influx of Hispanic immigrants:their total lack of respect for democracy and social order is frightening. I hope I can do something to stem that tide; I’d set up a clinic in Mexico for free if I could. . . . The survival of our society could be at stake.
“Looking back on the newspaper cuttings of the great abortion debate, the editorials in serious newspapers such as the Observer and the Sunday Times constantly referred to the foetus as “a blob of jelly”, “a piece of tissue”. But in the years in between the science of embryology has developed extraordinarily, and the “blob of jelly” is now known to have human organs all in place after eight weeks and an entire nervous system after ten weeks. I have watched many abortions taking place, and in the early stages the operation is so swiftly destructive that nothing can be properly perceived by the naked eye. Into the second trimester (after thirteen weeks) however, it is evident that this is a very tiny human being. Once past twenty weeks, the baby begins actually to try to resist the needle, which draws away its amniotic fluid.”
Mary Kenny Abortion: The Whole Story (London: Quartet Books, 1986) 6
“The Project Rachel office in College Park is in the same building as an abortion mill. In fact, says Julia Shelava “At their College Park office, she said, they often see men in the waiting area while their girlfriend is getting an abortion.
“They look so sad,” she reflected. “My heart just aches for them. I approach them, and often they say, ‘I really didn’t want her to have this abortion.’
“I say, ‘Did you tell her?’
They say, ‘I told her I would support whatever she wants to do.’ That’s what the world tells him he should say. “We’ve had men in our office weeping while their son or daughter is being aborted.”
The article also says:
The Project Rachel staff at College Park has persuaded some of the abortion clinic’s medical technicians to quit the abortion industry
“Heartache, healing go side-by-side in College Park” Defend Life September – October, 2007
An article in Glamour magazine addresses men’s feelings about abortion:
“Male feelings also do not end with the procedure itself. A man is usually very concerned about how a woman will feel toward him afterward, and how he will feel toward her. Understandably, a considerable number of couples break up after the abortion. Recalls one young man, “I don’t know what went wrong, I just didn’t feel the same way about her anymore. I guess I felt guilty about it, and I didn’t want to be reminded of that.”
James Lincoln Collier “Abortion: How Men Feel about One of the Biggest Issues in a Woman’s Life” Glamour February 1980, 245
They lie about what abortion really is- routinely, and sometimes they do worse. I was in the ER for kidney stones when I found out I was also pregnant. First thing that happened when the pregnancy test came back wasn’t treatment for my kidney stones. No, a nurse came back and did nothing but badger me about aborting. I demanded to know how that was going to help me, and she shrugged and said that it might relieve the pressure of passing my kidney stones. I had enough medical knowledge back then to figure that was horsepucky. I asked her (already suspecting the answer was no) if I was going to die without an abortion. All she did was shrug and say that I was at high risk for miscarriage and abortion would be “easier.” She didn’t treat me. She didn’t even examine me. All she did was push abortion. I asked her if she was going to help me with my kidney stones and save the baby, and if she wasn’t, to leave, not bother me, and get someone who will actually help. She left, but came back later, once I got the treatment I needed complete with ultrasounds of my kidneys, my kidney stones, and my baby at six weeks. I said that no thanks to her, I managed to get the help I needed. She said, “You’ll have a miscarriage anyway.”
The kidney stones broke up in passage. I went home with some safe pain relievers. In about a week, I felt better. Thirty four weeks later, I gave birth to a baby girl.
How many women are pressured like this by medical personnel, and give in?
If Valerie gave birth to her daughter at 40 weeks, she would have been six weeks pregnant when the nurse encouraged her to abort her baby. This is what her baby would’ve look like then::
Dr. Timothy Black, abortionist at Marie Stopes, talks about his hopes for the future of abortion:
“One day very soon, women will have their abortions, perfectly happily, in the morning, go out to lunch and spend the afternoon shopping. It will be as simple as having a cup of coffee.”
Mary Kenny Abortion: The Whole Story (London: Quartet Books, 1986) 176
Pro-life doctor Melissa Ogle, MD, describes using a suction machine to complete a miscarriage on a woman at the end of her first trimester. This was not an abortion because the baby was already dead. However, she was using the same equipment that is used for an elective first trimester abortion.
In this situation, the cervix is forced open with an instrument called a dilator. A suction tube is then placed within the uterine cavity. The suction is turned on, the amniotic sac is ruptured, and the fetus is removed. As our bodies at this stage are well-formed, it was necessary for me to identify each body part as it was evacuated. Despite the knowledge that the baby was no longer alive, it was indeed the most difficult procedure I’ve ever performed as an obstetrician. As each portion of this little person was accounted for, my heart sank deeper and deeper. Many tears were shed during the procedure – both mine and those of others in the room. I imagine that every individual present in that operating room was taken to a deep place within their soul as that little one was removed limb from limb from its place of security. Each finger could be counted, each rib clearly seen
