Abortion Advocacy Requires Ardent Antipathy Towards Preborn Children

When abortion-rights advocates even consider the question of whether mothers who have had an abortion experience a negative after-effect, there’s bound to be a rumble or two. And as Shira Saperstein, deputy director of the Moriah Fund, recently told a reporter, “big health funders” are not going to support anyone who even suggests the possibility that having an abortion has negative consequences. Saperstein made this comment in the context of discussing the difficulties pro-abortion outreach groups are having in raising money for programs addressing the experiences mothers have had after their abortions. The reason raising the money is so difficult, according to Saperstein, is the fact that those involved in defending women’s rights are a bit defensive about admitting that there can be problems among those who have had abortions.

As a matter of fact, the most interesting thing the article “The Abortion Counseling Conundrum” reveals is that when pro-abortion groups have attempted to foster programs providing a voice for women who have had an abortion, there is little to no interest in funding this effort. As one commentator said,

We have submitted proposals to several foundations for this funding and continuously get rejected for it. We’ve found that traditional reproductive health funders aren’t really connected to it. And foundations that might be more healthcare-related feel like the topic is too controversial. It’s hard to have people understand that women can have negative feelings toward their abortion and still feel abortion should be legal.

There is more than one piece of evidence in the news these days that attests to this incredible hostility toward merely acknowledging that there could be anything wrong with abortion. For example, in a recent issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology, a prestigious medical journal, the question of how physicians cope with stillbirth or neonatal death was addressed.

Two things came to mind immediately. The first and most obvious was that in the discussion of physician attitudes, attitudes toward abortion were not considered. Yet the article concludes that “perinatal death has a profound effect on the delivering obstetrician, and a significant number of participants in our study have even considered giving up obstetrics altogether. Improved bereavement training may help obstetricians care for grieving families but also cope with their own emotions after this devastating event.”

It is so hard to read this and realize that the same doctor who is overwhelmed with loss because a “wanted” baby has died either prior to, or at birth, could as easily have aborted that very same child if that had been the wish of the parents! Is grief reserved for certain kinds of babies? What kind of attitude emotes over one death yet ignores the horror of another death that is paid for and caused on purpose?

Well, perhaps the answer is found in yet another study that examined the efforts of Medical Students for Choice to get more doctors involved in committing abortions. Medical Students for Choice has sponsored a Reproductive Health Externship program. This is a project that “provides about 60 medical students with a month-long clinical experience in family planning clinics.”

The program’s purpose is to engender a more supportive attitude toward abortion, with the end result being, if all works out properly, more medical students choosing to commit abortions once their medical practice begins. The first thing we learn from this is that medical students who already had a rather ambivalent attitude towards abortion will leave the RHE program emboldened to not only accept abortion as part of their medical practice, but commit abortions as well.

The “intention” to commit abortions increases after such a program. Note, please, that the clinics participating in these programs include 30 Planned Parenthood clinics, 13 academic medical centers and 39 freestanding clinics. But the most revealing aspect of this study is that if you convince a medical student early on that it is in his female patients’ best interests to provide the full range of so-called reproductive health services, the more likely he or she is to commit abortions.

The “connective tissue” between the three reports I have recounted is that enhanced cerebral muscle is required for those who favor “choice” when that choice is to kill an innocent baby. In other words, one must be steeled to accept abortion as a good thing and to never admit that it causes a practitioner grief or that it causes an expectant mother pain and suffering.

This is precisely why pro-abortion groups that want to involve women in talking about their abortions are seeing their funding dry up. Nobody in the pro-abortion camp can admit that there is a downside to abortion.

This is why a prestigious medical journal will publish an article that addresses the human side of doctors who go through miscarriage or stillbirth with their patients, but not a single abortionist with second thoughts is mentioned.

This is why Medical Students for Choice must get into the heads of medical students while they are yet undecided about whether or not they want to make money by killing the preborn.

The moment any of these entities admits to the slightest possibility that abortion has a downside, we win, the babies are saved and respect for the dignity of the preborn human being begins to flourish! Oh, what a glorious moment that will be! And I predict that it will occur, and the momentum will build, despite the wild rhetoric and denial that exists in our culture today.

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