A survey was done of South Asian immigrant women recruited from a clinic that provides sex determination tests. This clinic was located in the US but catered to Asian women who wanted to find out the sex of their babies to have an abortion if the child was a girl.
It found that one third of the women cited past physical abuse and neglect related specifically to their failing to produce a male child.
Sunita Puri et al., “There Is Such a Thing As Too Many Daughters, but Not Too Many Sons: A Qualitative Study of Son Preference for Fetal Sex Selection among Indian Immigrants in the United States” Social Science and Medicine 72, 1169 – 1170 (2011)
Rape victim Jackie Bakker, who aborted her child conceived in rape:
“I soon discovered that the aftermath of my abortion continued a long time after the memory of my rape had faded. I felt empty and horrible. Nobody told me about the pain I would feel deep within, causing nightmares and deep depressions. They had all told me that after the abortion I could continue my life as if nothing had happened.”
David C Reardon Aborted Women: Silent No More (Chicago, Illinois: Loyola University Press, 1987) 206
Anastasia Wansbrough describes her abortion by pills in an article in Vice. The article said:
“Anastasia Wansbrough lived through a veritable horror show when she had a medical abortion in 2013.”
She did not bleed for two months, then went in for an ultrasound. The ultrasound showed that the baby was dead, but still inside her. Then she began to bleed.
Vice says:
“Painful cramps coursed through her; she took an extra strength Tylenol as the doctor recommended.”
Wansbrough describes her ordeal:
“I was wearing a tampon at the time when all of sudden the power of a contraction pushed the tampon out and blood splattered all over the floor. There was constant pain but at every 60 second mark I felt the most pain I have felt in my life. I couldn’t cry, I could barely moan. It left me breathless.”
“I continued to have sex and became pregnant for the second time, less than six months after my first abortion. This time I had a friend who was also pregnant, so we went to the abortion clinic together. … I remember everything about that day. I remember looking at the doctor’s face, and I remember that he never spoke a word. I remember how it felt looking around the cold, impersonal recovery room and seeing the rows of beds occupied by girls and women like me. I remember the nurse who went from bed to bed, making insensitive comments and jokes.”
Michelle Borquez Abortion to Mercy, (2013) Kindle edition
She had a third abortion a year later, and now deeply regrets her abortions .
One teenager who had an abortion said the abortion worker told her this when she was crying before her abortion:
“What’s wrong with you? Who told you about the procedure for terminating a pregnancy? Has someone been telling you this is wrong? It’s no big deal. It only takes about three minutes and that’s it. Three minutes and it’s over. Why are you crying?”
Julia C Loren The Note on the Mirror: Pregnant Teenagers Tell Their Stories (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1990) 63
Dr. Dennis Conneen, emergency room doctor in Orange County, California:
“The disadvantage girls have that go to a clinic for an abortion is the clinics close at 5:00 PM. Some girls travel to other counties to have abortions, and it’s difficult for them to get help from that clinic after hours if problems arise. So those women who do have complications come in on evenings and weekends into the emergency room.
Almost every month in the emergency room where I work, we see a woman coming in with a medical complication resulting from abortion. Out of those cases, I would say that one out of three requires hospitalization or a minor surgical procedure called a D&C. In some cases, the abortion is incomplete and there are pieces of the fetus in the uterus. These women usually experience a couple of weeks of cramping and bleeding after the abortion and decide to come in. Sometimes all they need is some blood and other fluids. Other times they need a D&C to scrape the uterus out.
One case involved a 24-year-old woman who came into the emergency room complaining of bleeding and cramps related to an abortion that she had had one week prior. She called the doctor who performed the abortion, and he said the abortion was complete and there should be no problems. He figured that the amount of tissue that he removed was sufficient for the age of the fetus. But sometimes, women do not give the correct conception date to the doctor who is performing the abortion. I took a look and saw the fetus’s head still inside of her. The baby’s head was as large as a golf ball! So I pulled it out.… You could see the trauma caused to the fetus by the abortion process. It was really beat up.”
Julia C Loren The Note on the Mirror: Pregnant Teenagers Tell Their Stories (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1990) 86 – 87
A woman who works at a crisis pregnancy center wrote:
“….we provide all services for free. They are for low-income pregnant and parenting women. We have free baby clothes, toddler clothes, shoes, maternity clothes, pregnancy tests, breast pumps, nursing bras, diapers, baby wipes, bottles, baby/toddler dishes, formula, food, toys, books, car seats, strollers, cribs, cradles, jumpers, and any other pieces of furniture or big toys when we get them. I have seen pretty much anything you can think of that deals with pregnancy or parenting, come into the clinic. We also give referrals to various social services, such as WIC…..
We don’t make them pay a single cent, unlike places like Planned Parenthood. So we truly offer purely free items for struggling families. Taking clinics like this away from all the people we have serviced, or trying to make it harder for us to provide these free items, is a gross attack on lower class people, especially since places like Planned Parenthood don’t bother to give *any* of these baby/toddler/maternity items to needy women. In fact you won’t find baby clothes or diapers or strollers or anything like that at any abortion clinic. Planned Parenthood doesn’t help you plan your parenthood at all, it just tries to eliminate it for you.
It takes a ton of privilege to be able to tell people that because you want every clinic that helps women to provide abortions, poor women aren’t allowed to have free baby supplies…
There is a lot of racial diversity in our clients as well. I have seen various people from all across the race and religion spectrum. People who are Pacific Islander, Arabic, Hispanic, Muslim, Ukrainian, Egyptian, African American, and so on and so forth. To take away free supplies from all these various minorities is racist and an injustice. They need help being able to afford these supplies and abortion clinics certainly aren’t going to help them. Higher rates of infant mortality due to systematic racism mean that every affordable baby supply is truly needed for a person of color. It is a privileged position to take that away.”
One woman who had an abortion as a teenager claims she doesn’t regret her choice. But she writes:
“It was a whole lot worse than anyone ever told me it would be or I ever thought it would be. They explain the procedure, but they don’t tell you how it will feel. They give you the choice whether to you want to be knocked out or just have the pelvic area numbed by local anesthesia so you can’t feel much. I went with a local, and it felt awful. The actual procedure hurt. It seemed like it took forever, but I guess it was only a three-minute procedure. While I was in there, I heard another girl totally freaking out. It was scary, man!
But I will never, ever forget the feeling I had when it was all over and everybody cleared the room and they told me to get dressed. I felt like dirt. I felt like the lowest thing. I went through the grieving process right then, feeling very alone. I was devastated emotionally… Having the abortion taught me that there are definite consequences for our actions. This was the first time in my life that I had to answer for anything. And you have to make a choice, you know.”
Julia C Loren The Note on the Mirror: Pregnant Teenagers Tell Their Stories (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1990) 70 – 71
In a hearing on abortion that took place in Brisbane, abortionist Dr. Carol Portmann says:
“Basically, for a late termination of pregnancy you just do not induce a baby: you must do a procedure where the baby passes away….
If we are talking about a late termination, then it also means you would want to have an evaluation of that person’s social and psychiatric wellbeing. If there is something wrong with the baby, then you need to be sure that what is wrong with the baby has an absolutely certain outcome. That takes time. Our feeling about it as well is that it is not something that you would choose to do at 39½ weeks with a woman in labour. One of the things we counsel a person is that, if our decision with you is not made before you go into labour, then we are not doing the procedure.”
PUBLIC HEARING—INQUIRY INTO THE TERMINATION OF PREGNANCY BILL 2018, HEALTH, COMMUNITIES, DISABILITY SERVICES AND DOMESTIC AND FAMILY VIOLENCE PREVENTION COMMITTEE, TRANSCRIPT OF PROCEEDINGS, 12 SEPTEMBER 2018, Brisbane, p 6
The process “so the baby passes away” is an injection of poison (digoxin or Potassium chloride) into the baby to kill him or her before inducing labor.
