When Abortion Isn’t “Chosen”

Even though abortion is marketed as a woman’s choice, studies and surveys indicate that a large number of women are coerced…

Even though abortion is marketed as a woman’s choice, studies and surveys indicate that a large number of women are coerced or deceived into having abortions. Coercion comes in many forms. It can come from parents, husbands, boyfriends or others. It can come from circumstances.

Often, women in abortion clinics are denied access to the true facts surrounding abortion. Information on fetal development is denied to them. The physical and psychological risks of abortion are glossed over. Alternatives are not discussed, or are presented as being terrible. Many women are not allowed to make an informed choice.

Intimidation, coercion, and threats often compel women to choose abortions that they would never have contemplated had the situation been different.

An Overview: Forced Abortion in America

Most involve coercion, which can become violent, even deadly.

The Un-Choice:

— 64% involve coercion.(1)
— Pressure can become violent.(2)
— 67% not counseled.(1)
— 65% suffer trauma.(1)
— Suicide 6-7 times higher.(3)

Forced Non-Choice … .I’ll blow her brains out..

Intense pressure to abort can come from husbands, parents, doctors, partners, counselors, or close friends and family. They may threaten or blackmail a woman into abortion. These are not idle threats. Coercion can escalate to violence. Women who resist abortion have been beaten, tortured and killed. One husband jumped on his wife’s stomach to force an abortion. A mother forced her daughter at gunpoint to go to the abortion clinic. A woman was forcibly injected by the baby’s father with an abortifacient drug.(2)

Unwanted Non-Choice … Their Choice, Not Hers.

Reasons women give for having abortions:

— Forced by mother
— Father opposed
— Husband or boyfriend persuaded me
— No other option given
— Would have been kicked out
— Loss of family’s support
— Lack of support from society
— Clinic persuaded me

In 95% of all cases, the male partner played a central role in the decision.(5)

45% of men interviewed at abortion clinics recalled urging abortion, including 37% of married men.(6)

In the above study, men justified being the primary decision maker, regarding the abortion.(6)

64% of women who aborted felt pressured by others.(1)

Coerced Choice … Taken to the Clinic to Make Sure She Keeps the Appointment

A former abortion clinic security guard testified before the Massachusetts legislature that women were routinely threatened and abused by the boyfriends or husbands who took them to the clinics to make sure they underwent their scheduled abortions.(7) Many women are also pressured by clinic staff financially rewarded for selling abortions.(8)

Note: See Abortion Counseling Section

Forced Choice … Threats Can Escalate to Violence or Murder -the Leading Killer of Pregnant Women

The pressure can escalate. Many pregnant women have been killed by partners trying to prevent the birth, and being pregnant places women at higher risk of being attacked.(9) Murder is the leading cause of death among pregnant women.(10)

92% of women surveyed list domestic violence and assault as the women’s issue that is of highest concern to them.(11)

Uninformed Non-Choice … .When I learned the truth, I can’t tell you how betrayed I felt..

54% were unsure of their decision, yet 67% received no counseling beforehand.(1)

84% received inadequate counseling beforehand.(1) 79% were not told about alternatives.(1)

Many were misinformed by experts about fetal development, abortion alternatives or risks.(12)

Many were denied essential personal, family, societal or economic support.(12)

Unsafe Choice … American Voters Concerned About Coercion and Risks; Support Research and Screening.

Nearly half of voters believe coerced abortion is common. They will support candidates who advocate legislation holding abortionists liable for failing to screen for evidence of coercion.(13) Nearly 80% of abortions take place in non-hospital facilities, ill-equipped for emergency care.(14) Americans are kept in the dark about unwanted abortions, risks and risk factors.

The Aftermath. Women Pay a High Price.

Trauma.(1) Injury.(1) Grief. Death from All Causes.(17) 6-7 Times Higher Suicide.(3)

— 31% had health complications afterwards.(1)
— 65% suffer multiple symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.(1)
— 65% higher risk of clinical depression.(15)
— 10% have immediate complications, some are life-threatening.(16)
— 3.5x higher risk of death from all causes.(17)

The suicide rates are 6-7x higher if women abort vs. giving birth.(3)

Footnotes

1. VM Rue et. al., “Induced abortion and traumatic stress: A preliminary comparison of American and Russian women,” Medical Science Monitor 10(10): SR5-16 (2004).
2. See the special report, “Forced Abortion in America” at www.unchoice.info/resources.htm.
3. M Gissler et. al., “Pregnancy Associated Deaths in Finland 1987-1994 — definition problems and benefits of record linkage” Acta Obsetricia et Gynecologica Scandinavica 76:651-657 (1997); and M. Gissler, “Injury deaths, suicides and homicides associated with pregnancy, Finland 1987-2000,” European J. Public Health 15(5):459-63 (2005).
4. Frederica Mathewes-Green, Real Choices (Ben Lomond, CA: Conciliar Press, 1997).
5. Mary K. Zimmerman, Passage Through Abortion (New York, Prager Publishers, 1977).
6. Arthur Shostak and Gary McLouth, Men and Abortion: Lessons, Losses, and Love (New York: Preager Publishers, 1984).
7. Brian McQuarrie, “Guard, clinic at odds at abortion hearing” Boston Globe, April 16, 1999.
8. Carol Everett with Jack Shaw, Blood Money (Sisters, OR: Multnomah Books, 1992). See also Pamela Zekman and Pamela Warwick, “The Abortion Profiteers” Chicago Sun Times special reprint, Dec. 3, 1978 (originally published Nov. 12, 1978), p. 2-3, 33.
9. Julie A. Gazmararian et al., “The Relationship Between Pregnancy Intendedness and Physical Violence in Mothers of Newborns” Obstetrics & Gynecology, 85 :1031 (1995); Hortensia Amaro et al., “Violence During Pregnancy and Substance Use” American Journal of Public Health, 80: 575 (1990); and J. McFarlane et al., “Abuse During Pregnancy and Femicide: Urgent Implications for Women’s Health” Obstetrics & Gynecology, 100: 27, 27-36 (2002).
10. I.L. Horton and D. Cheng, “Enhanced Surveillance for Pregnancy-Associated Mortality-Maryland, 1993-1998” JAMA 285(11): 1455-1459(2001); see also J. Mcfarlane et. al., “Abuse During Pregnancy and Femicide: Urgent Implications for Women’s Health,” Obstetrics & Gynecology 100: 27-36 (2002).
11. “Is Your Mother’s Feminism Dead? New Agenda for Women Revealed in Landmark Two-Year Study” press release from the Center for the Advancement of Women (www.advancewomen.org), June 24, 2003; and Steve Ertelt, “Pro-Abortion Poll Shows Majority of Women Are Pro-Life” LifeNews.com (www.lifenews.com/nat13.html), June 25, 2003.
12. See Theresa Burke, Forbidden Grief: The Unspoken Pain of Abortion (Springfield, IL: Acorn Books, 2000) and www.unchoice.info.
13. “National Opinion Survey of 600 Adults Regarding Attitudes Toward a Pro-Woman/Pro-Life Agenda” proprietary poll commissioned by the Elliot Institute, conducted in Dec. 2002.
14. D. Reardon, Abortion Malpractice (Denton, TX: Life Dynamics, 1993)
15. JR Cougle, DC Reardon & PK Coleman, “Depression Associated With Abortion and Childbirth: A Long-Term Analysis of the NLSY Cohort” Medical Science Monitor 9(4):CR105-112, 2003.
16. Frank, et.al., “Induced Abortion Operations and Their Early Sequelae,” Journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners 35(73):175-180, April 1985; Grimes and Cates, “Abortion: Methods and Complications”, in Human Reproduction, 2nd ed., 796-813; M.A. Freedman, “Comparison of complication rates in first trimester abortions performed by physician assistants and physicians,” Am. J. Public Health 76(5):550-554, 1986).
17. DC Reardon et. al., “Deaths Associated With Pregnancy Outcome: A Record Linkage Study of Low Income Women” Southern Medical Journal 95(8):834-41, (2002).

From www.unchoice.info

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D&E Is a “Horrible Procedure”

Here is another quote on the D & E procedure:

“I do D & E’s because I think it is safer. It is a horrible procedure. Staff burnout is a major problem. But are you functioning in the interests of taking care of your staff or taking care of your patients?”

Dr. William Rashbaum, a gynecologist affiliated with Beth Israel

“When Abortion Becomes Birth: A Dilemma of Medical Ethics Shaken by Advances” New York Times Feb. 15, 1984

Read a doctor’s firsthand account of the D&E abortion here.

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The Sensations of Dismemberment

A D&E abortion is so gruesome that when it was first developed in the 1970s, a leading abortionist said:

“We have produced an unusual dilemma. A procedure is rapidly becoming recognized as the procedure of choice in late abortion, but those capable of performing or assisting with the procedure are having strong personal reservations about participating in an operation which they view as destructive and violent…Some part of our cultural and perhaps even biological heritage recoils at a destructive operation on a form that is similar to our own…No one who has not performed this procedure can know what it is like or what it means…We have reached a point in this particular technology where there is no possibility of denial of an act of destruction by the operator. It is before one’s eyes. The sensations of dismemberment flow through the forceps like electric current…”

Warren Hern, M.D, 1978: (Rachel M. MacNair Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress: The Psychological Consequences of Killing (Westport, CT:Praeger, 2002) 73

Diagram of a D&E:

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Abortion Versus War

War is a tragedy. Statistics that give the number of soldiers killed in war only show part of the tragedy.

They do not take into account the very human stress and suffering that the soldiers go through.

Still, it is disturbing to compare the statistics of war deaths verses the deaths of babies lost by abortion.

Here is one example of children lost to abortion at nine weeks:

Keeping this picture in mind, look at the chart below.

******

Estimated American Casualties

Each * Represents 10,000 People (or fraction) Killed

Revolutionary War – 4,435 deaths.
*

Civil War (both sides) – 498,332 deaths.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

World War I – 116,708 deaths.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

World War II – 407,316 deaths.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Korea – 25,604 deaths.
* * *

Vietnam – 58,168 deaths.
* * * * * *

Operation Desert Storm (Combat – 147)
*

Operation Iraqi Freedom to the present day (4,257)
*

Total killed due to abortion since 1973 – 48,000,000 (48 MILLION) deaths.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 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Nurse Tells of Baby Born Alive after Abortion

In a sermon at his church, a pro-life pastor related this story:

“A nurse in our church tells of a turning point in her own experience. When she was working the late shift at one of our local hospitals, a young girl was admitted with lower abdominal pain. Two days previously she had a saline abortion. She requested to be placed on a bed pan. The nurse when removing the pan, among the clots of blood and tissue, saw a fetus of about two months. In her words: “the little heart was beating and the cord was attached as the baby was still alive. I cannot tell you how terrible I felt. I began to cry. That was not just a blob of tissue, but a human life. If only women who are pro-choice could witness an abortion, things might be so different.”

Larry L. Lewis “Proclaiming the Pro-Life Message: Christian Leaders Address the Abortion Issue” (Hannibal MO: Hannibal books) 1997 page 52

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Doctor Puts Living Aborted Baby into Plastic Bag

An abortion clinic employee said she watched as the doctor put a living fetus in a plastic bag and in a bucket:

“And [he] just waited until it stopped moving.”

Yet another employee said that during late abortions, the doctor would walk in, close and lock the door, tell staff to look away when the fetuses were extracted, and warned that:

“If you see any movement or anything, you don’t see anything, you don’t know anything.”

New York times 4/29/84; Des Moines Register 5/5/84; El Paso County offense report number 00 – 380101; El Paso times, 9/22/83, 4/5/81 – 4/8/81, Dallas Morning News, 4/20/84; Dallas Times Herald, 9/29/83

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Baby Left Alone to Die

In her pamphlet “Children: Things we Throw Away” Melanie Green from Last Days Ministries quoted nurse Kathleen Malloy (From Jacksonville, Florida) saying the following:

“I’m a housewife and a registered nurse from Jacksonville. I worked the 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift, and when we weren’t busy, I’d go out to help with the newborns. One night I saw a bassinet outside the nursery. There was a baby in this bassinet – a crying, perfectly formed baby – but there was a difference in this child. She had been scalded. She was the child of a saline abortion.

This little girl looked as if she had been put in a pot of boiling water. No doctor, no nurse, no parent, to comfort this hurt, burned child. She was left alone to die in pain. They wouldn’t let her in the nursery – they didn’t even bother to cover her.

I was ashamed of my profession that night! It’s hard to believe this can happen in our modern hospitals, but it does. It happens all the time. I thought a hospital was a place to heal the sick – not a place to kill.

I asked a nurse at another hospital what they do with their babies that are aborted by saline. Unlike my hospital, where the baby was left alone struggling for breath, their hospital puts the infant in a bucket and puts the lid on. Suffocation! Death by suffocation!”

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Live Births Add to Abortion Patients’ Guilt

The authors of The Abortion Question, Hyman Rodman, Betty Sarvis, and Joy Bonar Walker (Columbia University Press: New York) 1987, say the following on page 59:

“However, delivery of a fetus that shows reflex movement even briefly may be a very traumatic experience for medical personnel and for the aborting woman. In some cases, the attending physician has been charged with murder or manslaughter because measures were not taken to keep the fetus alive. Such incidents usually occur because the woman has misinformed her physician about her stage of pregnancy, either deliberately or because her calculations were in error…Within the second trimester, prostaglandin-induced abortions are apparently more likely to expel fetuses which exhibit reflex ability.”

These authors gloss over the concept of moving, living infants by using the term ‘reflex ability,’ and unscientific euphemism. They even manage to blame the woman involved for these occurrences. However, they do admit that babies are sometimes born alive, even if they avoid that phrase.

An Australian author discussed the reaction of nurses to babies born alive:

“Abortion in these cases were procured by injecting saline into the uterus causing causing labor and subsequent expulsion of the fetus twelve to twenty-four hours later. Nurses working with patients having this type of abortion found it most disturbing to hold a well-formed aborted fetus with movement and with its eyes still alive…Holding a fetus, feeling it move, hearing it try to cry (something that happens only with older fetuses, those of around twenty weeks gestation or more) smelling its death, and the like, are not trivial experiences; nor are they pleasant ones.”

Megan-Jane Johnstone. Bioethics: A Nursing Perspective (Sydney, N.S.W. Harcourt Saunders) 1999 p 286

One abortionist quoted in an article argued for the practice of injecting an agent into the baby’s heart before inducing labor, in order to kill the baby before delivery. He says:

“The presence of signs of life in an aborted fetus creates many conflicts for the medical caregivers with respect to their responsibilities to patients, their own emotional needs, and the future rights of the child itself. Many physicians feel obliged, indeed, required, to resuscitate these infants even though they are well aware that the outcome may be futile. Also, the patients have opted to end the pregnancy , and, therefore, the life of the fetus. Prolonging the process can only be expected to add to their anguish and guilt as well as tax expensive, and at times scarce, resources.”

From “The Zero People: Essays on Life” edited by Jeff Hensley (Servant Publications 1983) Quoted by Magda Denes.

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“That’s Not a Baby, That’s an Abortion”

Another incident of a live birth was recounted in Linda Bird Francke’s book The Ambivalence of Abortion (New York: Laurel) 1982 p 53

This was an account from a New York nurse:

“We had one saline [type of abortion]born alive. I raced to the nursery with it and put it in an incubator. I called the pediatrician to come right down, and he refused. He said, “That’s not a baby. That’s an abortion.”

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Nurses Describe Handling Aborted Babies

From The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 1976 Sept 1, 126(1) 83-90.

“You have to have a feticidal dose” of saline solution, said Dr. Kerenyi of Mt. Sinai in New York. “It’s almost a breach of contract not to. Otherwise, what are you going to do – hand her back a baby having done it questionable damage? …”

The scenario Kerenyi describes did in fact happen, in March 1978 in Cleveland. A young woman entered Mt. Sinai Hospital there for an abortion. The baby was born live and, after several weeks of intensive care at Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital, the child went home – with its mother.

The circumstances were so extraordinary that medical personnel broke the code of confidentiality and discussed the case with friends. Spokeswomen for the two hospitals confirmed the sequence of events. Mother and child returned to Rainbow for checkup when the child was 14 months old, the spokeswoman there said, and both were doing fine.

The mother could not be reached for comment. But a source familiar with the case remembered one detail: “The doctors had a very hard time making her realize she had a child. She kept saying, ‘But I had an abortion.'”

“These more common methods for abortion after the midpoint of pregnancy use the instillation of either saline solution or prostaglandin. In these procedures, some of the woman’s nurturing amniotic fluid is drawn out of the womb by an injection through her belly and is replaced with the abortion-inducing drug. (The amount of fluid in the womb is kept relatively constant to make sure the womb does not rupture.) The two instillation substances work in different ways. Saline solution poisons the fetus, probably though ingestion, though the process is not completely understood. Usually within six hours, the fetal heartbeat stops. At the same time, the saline induces labor, though supplemental doses of other labor-inducing drugs often are given to speed this effect.

Prostaglandin, on the other hand, is a distillate of the chemical substance that causes muscles to move. It is thought not to affect the fetus directly but instead is potent at inducing labor. Fetal death, if it does occur, is from prematurity and the trauma of passage through the birth canal…

And the high incidence of live births [with prostaglandin] (40 times more frequent than with saline, according to one study) also has lessened its popularity. But saline is not foolproof either in preventing live births.”

Describing how they deal with abortion live births in one hospital, an unnamed obstetrician had this to say:

“As the infant is lifted from the womb, said one obstetrician, “he is only sleeping, like his mother…You want to know how they kill him? They put a towel over his face so he can’t breathe. And by the time they get him to the lab, he is dead.”

Some nurses discussed experiences with living aborted babies:

“Nurses are the ones who bear the burden of handling the human-looking products of late abortions. And when an unintentional live birth occurs, they are the first to confront the waving of limbs and the gasping.

Reluctant to talk about their experiences, most of those interviewed for this article did not want their names to be published, and out of professional loyalty, they did not even want their hospitals to be named.

They spoke of being deeply troubled by what they have seen of late abortions in American hospitals.

Linda is a nurse in her late 50s in Southern California. Hurrying out of a patient’s room one day to dispose of the aborted “tissue,” as nurses were taught to think of it, she felt movement. Startled, she looked down, straight into the staring eyes of a live baby.

“It looked right at me,” she recalled. “This baby had real big eyes. It looked at you like it was saying. ‘Do something – do something.’ Those haunting eyes. Oh God, I still remember them.”

She rushed the five-pound infant to the nursing station. She took the heart rate – 80 to 100 beats a minute. She timed the respirations – three to four breaths a minute. She called the doctor.

“I called him because the baby was breathing,” Linda said. “It was pink. It had a heartbeat. The doctor told me the baby was not viable and to send it to the lab. I said, ‘But it’s breathing’ and he said, ‘It’s non-viable, it won’t be breathing long – send it to the lab.’ ”

She did not follow the order. Nor did she have resources at her command to provide any life-saving care. Two hours later the infant died, still at the nursing station, still without medical treatment. It died in a makeshift crib with one hot water bottle for warmth and an open tube of oxygen blowing near its head.

The nursing supervisor, Linda said, had refused to let her put the baby in the nursery, where there was equipment to assist premature babies in distress. “She said to follow the doctor’s orders and take it to the lab. I kept it with me at the station. We couldn’t do an awful lot for it.”

This happened eight years ago, in 1973, but Linda is still upset. “I stood by and watched that baby die without doing a thing,” she said. “I have guilt feelings to this day. I feel the baby might have lived had it been properly cared for.”

Jane, about 50, is the head floor nurse in an Ohio hospital. She and her fellow nurses successfully petitioned their hospital in 1978 to stop doing late abortions.

Twice before that, she witnessed live births after abortions. She recalls vividly the 16-year-old patient who phoned her mother after her abortion and and said in an agonized voice, “Ma, it’s out – but Ma, it’s alive.”

That happened in 1975. Jane still speaks of it bitterly, her eyes flashing anger. A year earlier Jane saw the second abortion live birth in her experience. “I was called by the patient’s roommate,” she recalled. “When I got there the baby’s head was sticking out and its little tongue was wiggling. Everybody felt they couldn’t do anything until they called the doctor. It was a little thing – it only lasted about 15 minutes. But it was alive, and we did nothing. And that was wrong.”

It rankles, too, that she was routinely forced to handle dead fetuses, the size and shape of well-formed premature babies.

“Because of my position,” she said, “I had to pick them up off the bed and put them in a bottle of formalin [a preservative fluid]. Sometimes you had to have a very large container. Our gynecologists seemed to have a very poor ability to estimate gestational age. Time and again they would say with a straight face, ‘This woman is 20 weeks pregnant’ when she was actually 26 weeks.”

 

22 to 24 week fetus
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