Mark Rothberg, father of a son whose girlfriend had an abortion. He had to deal with the loss of a grandchild to abortion:
“My son was in medical school in England because he couldn’t get into a good medical school here… Then suddenly he was accepted at medical school here. And she [his daughter-in-law] decided to stay in England to finish up her masters before joining him. Rather than face the complicated mess, they decided it was not the time to have a child. And she had an abortion.
When they told us about the abortion just two weeks after they’d told us she was having a baby, it was crushing. I felt deep chagrin.… It’s a special thing, you know, a grandchild. It’s continuity. And if you have a strong family, which we do, then it’s the first dividend.
It’s more than a loss of family continuity, too. Jews are being screwed out of existence. Who uses birth control? Who gets all these abortions? We’re being physically wiped out. Now there’s one less. But even more, we lost our option for personal continuity. I feel dreadful.”
Linda Bird Francke The Ambivalence of Abortion (New York: Penguin Books, 1978) 219 –
The man facing loss of a grandchild to abortion mourns. Abortion touches many lives, even those of the grandparents.
Two lawyers comment on Roe v Wade, the decision which legalized abortion:
“The clerks in most chambers were surprised to see the Justices, particularly Blackmun, so openly brokering the [Roe V Wade] decision like a group of legislators. There was a certain reasonableness to the draft, some of them thought, but it derived more from medical and social policy than from constitutional law. There was something embarrassing and dishonest about this whole process. It left the Court claiming that the Constitution drew certain lines at trimesters and viability. The Court was going to make a medical policy and force it on the states. As a practical matter, it was not a bad solution. As a constitutional matter, it was absurd.”
George Kaluger and Meriem Kaluger Human Development: The Span of Life (St. Louis: The CV Mosby Company, 1979) 65 – 66
The following is from a paper by three British OB/GYN’s, which shares their views about the dangers of termination of pregnancy:
“If the termination of pregnancy were as safe as so many advocates of liberal abortion maintain, a patient suffering as a result of the operation could claim that professional negligence was responsible for her subsequent distress or disaster. Such claims would be grossly unfair. There would be great sympathy for a 16-year-old girl whose uterus was torn beyond repair; for the married woman with gut resection and peritonitis; for the mother in monthly distress following hysterotomy because of implantation endometritis in her abdominal wall, vagina or bladder; for the anxious infertile wife who knows the tubal damage now denies her the baby she desires is the delayed price she is paying for her teenage abortion. But the fact remains that none of these situations may be the result of negligence. They are complications which, though well-known to, and well documented by, those with wide experience of an operation which is neither simple nor safe, are seldom mentioned by those who claim that abortion is safe and merely an extension of contraceptive techniques.”
Quoted by Jeanne Head, RN in Alex Barno, M.D. Proposed Constitutional Amendments on Abortion “Hearings before the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, 94th Congress” (Washington DC, US Government Printing Office, 1976) 934
These are only some of the dangers of termination of pregnancy.
Marissa Ogle, M.D, wrote the following about the abortion pill, RU-486 and the adverse events connected to it:
“… There is a voluntary reporting of severe adverse events to the manufacturer. This leaves it up to the provider to decide which events are significant enough to report to the drug company, who in turn determines if it is reportable to the FDA.…
Considering the potential adverse events can be life-threatening or even fatal, the voluntary status of reporting is medically irresponsible. A 2006 analysis of adverse event reports (AER) released by the FDA described 5 deaths, 42 life-threatening hemorrhages, 46 serious or life-threatening infections and 17 undetected ectopic pregnancies… This same group of 607 cases required 513 surgical procedures for follow-up, 235 being emergent in nature with 93% of those performed to control hemorrhage. The AER’s discussed in this study relate to the use of mifepristone in otherwise healthy young women and document a significant risk of severe, life-threatening, or even lethal adverse effects.”
Marissa Ogle, M.D. Still Healing:(2016) 20
Study: MM Gary “Analysis of severe adverse events related to the use of mifepristone as an abortifacient” Annals ofPharmacotherapy 40. 2 (2006): 191 – 97
6 week old preborn baby, who could be the victim of an abortion by pill
Read more about the health risks of the abortion pill here
One pro-life author recalls a conversation she had with a woman at a Christian women’s conference::
“I met a mother in the spa dressing room at a Christian women’s conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, who had five daughters. She told the story that as a teenager, she became pregnant and chose to abort her first child. As the years went on and her girls grew up, she chose not to share her abortion experience with any of her daughters. Years later, after her girls had grown, married, and had families of their own, she discovered that each one of them had an abortion. Mother and grandmother was heartbroken as she realized that 12 lives were damaged or destroyed because of her silence.”
Teri Stanton Two Minus One: Our Abortion Story (Meadville, PA: Christian faith Publishing, Inc., 2016) 57 – 58
I’ve …noticed that supporters of legal abortion are having a difficult time engaging the current generation of young adults. A recent Rasmussen poll confirms that impression, finding that voters under 40 were less likely than other age demographics to find the abortion issue “very important” while voting and more likely to find the issue “not at all important.” Moreover, there is plenty of survey data which finds that the current generation of young adults is more skeptical about abortion than previous generations. The General Social Survey (GSS) has been collecting opinion data on abortion using the same battery of questions since the 1970s. During the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 were the least sympathetic toward the pro-life position. Yet since 2000, the GSS has consistently found that young adults are actually more comfortable limiting abortion in certain circumstances than are older Americans.
Other polling data shows that young adults are more likely than other demographic groups to support a 20-week abortion ban and are fairly comfortable with a range of incremental pro-life laws.
Leah, 22, who had an abortion, says it was a terrible experience:
9 week old baby. most abortions are done during this time
“It still was a terrible experience.… The biggest thing was just the horror of it; I’d be so scared [if I had another abortion]… go to that terrible hospital and have those sterile, terrible nurses and doctors looking down on me, just like I was in a production line with all those other women; that would be scary for me to have to go through that again, but I still feel real strong about my life coming first in a sense, and I’m not going to have kids until I’m ready, I’m just not and I feel that I have the right to make that choice… I still put the mother’s rights first, I just do, I just feel like I have to, even though I have little twinges in me that say, “Well, you know, what about the baby, what about the baby?” But, so what about the mother, I just feel like that’s more important.”
Judith G. Smetana Concepts of Self and Morality: Women’s Reasoning about Abortion (New York: Praeger Special Studies, 1982) 106 – 107
Although she focuses mainly on herself, this woman nevertheless feels guilt and wonders about her dead baby.
An abortion is also a terrible experience for the baby.
For a study, a 15-year-old girl named Beckie who had an abortion explained her feelings:
Q: When do you think, in the course of its development, that the fetus becomes a human life?
A: Three months.
Q. What makes it become a human life at that point?
A. Well, either when the heart starts beating, yeah, I guess when the heart stats beating, because that functions everything else, and I believe that starts around three months. Two and a half or three months….after that I consider it murder, whereas beforehand it’s not, you know. (51)
The heart doesn’t start beating at 3 months – starts beating in 3 weeks, and according to some research, even earlier. You can see a video of a baby’s heart beating 4 weeks in the womb. Beckie’s lack of knowledge of fetal development led to her having an abortion when she assumed the heartbeat started later than it really did.
The study also interviewed a woman named Barbara, who also had an abortion. She was also 15.
Q: When you decide that it’s a human being at three months, what things do you think make it human at that point?
A: It’s got a heart. It’s breathing, it’s got a brain, it moves.
Q: Do you think after that point it would be the same as killing?
A: Yeah.
Q: Do you think it would be the same as killing another human being?
A: Yeah. I don’t really think it should be done.
Q: In the first three month, why is it OK?
A: Because it’s just like an egg, inside of you. It’s just like a thing of fluid, almost. I guess that’s all it is. And it doesn’t really have any shape, it doesn’t really have a brain or anything.” (52)
This is what a baby looks like it 8 weeks in the womb. Brain waves start at 6 weeks.
Here is a picture of a baby’s fingers at at 7 weeks
Hands of baby at 7 weeks
Again, the study shows that a woman who had an abortion did so with a false view of fetal development
From another teen who had an abortion, Ramona, 17:
“Q: You’re saying it becomes a life around the fourth month?
A: Somewhere around, yeah, the fifth, sixth, and on. I mean that’s when it looks like something, you know. But I think that in the first three months, it’s a life, but it’s not, you know, really completely formed, or anything like that…in the lasts three months I don’t think it should be allowed.” (53)
Judith G. Smetana Concepts of Self and Morality: Women’s Reasoning about Abortion (New York: Praeger Special Studies, 1982)
The study shows how little these teens know about fetal development. Perhaps if someone had taught them more about how a baby develops, they would not have aborted.
When a woman called Joan Paton was seeking an abortion, her husband went to court to stop her. Author Mary Kenny describes how she felt when she heard on the radio that Paton had had the abortion.
“I remember sitting there and feeling a personal sense of loss. I felt it right there in my belly: a pang. I have had this feeling again since, when sitting in waiting rooms and clinics preparing to interview abortionists for this book. As women have come in, visibly pregnant, I have experienced a sense of melancholy that a life is about to be lost….
She tells the story of a woman who wrote an article in a prominent newspaper asking if she should have an abortion. She describes what happened, how many other women sent a letter:
And I know many women share it, whatever their intellectual views of abortion. In April 1983, a young woman called Lynn Reed wrote a short article for the Daily Mail under the headline “Should I Have an Abortion?” She was aged 35, divorced, and unintentionally pregnant by her boyfriend. The letters poured in – over 500 of them. Of these 452 pleaded with Lynn not to terminate the pregnancy, and many alluded wistfully to regrets about personal abortion decisions. The most common theme was loss, the most common coda to each letter was, “I have never really spoken about this before – please do not reveal my real name.” 59 letters were ambivalent. Eight letters argued for abortion.”
Mary Kenny Abortion: The Whole Story (London: Quartet Books, 1986) 5
From a woman whose boyfriend pressured her into an abortion:
“I went ahead and had the abortion and later married the man. Unfortunately, the marriage was not a success, and I felt a deep resentment against him when I was told that I was one of the few who, following an abortion, would never bear a child. This was the main reason for the failure of the relationship.”
Mary Kenny Abortion: The Whole Story (London: Quartet Books, 1986) 42
Some studies show up to 80% of all relationships fail shortly after the woman aborts.
