Clinical Murder
January 12, 2011
ABBY JOHNSON is former director of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Texas. In her new book, The Ultrasound that Changed my Life, Johnson describes the day she was called in to assist with an ultrasound-guided abortion. An excerpt of her shocking account is now available on LifeSite News. Johnson, who worked for eight years for Planned Parenthood, is now an anti-abortion activist.
— Comments —
Youngfogey writes:
I was unable to read the article you linked to. It is too much of a horror show. I skimmed part of the worst section, just a few sentences and I am struggling to maintain my emotions.
What struck me most about the early bit of the article was the author’s reluctance to be present at a medical procedure she had spent years defending as healthy and moral. What torture pro-aborts must go through trying to keep themselves from being torn apart when their natural revulsion at what they advocate arises!
My question for you is why are so many ardent pro-aborts women? Think about this: this nation has murdered 51 million babies since 1973. For every one of those deaths, the only parent who could legally consent to that child’s murder was the mother. The father’s desires are legally irrelevant. It’s a woman’s choice.
Is this fact, do you think, an expression of women’s inborn nature? Or has our feminist culture twisted something in them to cause them to do such heinous things?
Laura writes:
No, it is not an inborn part of women’s nature. Only a culture that has killed or stifled inborn femininity would have many women acting this way.
It takes many years of indoctrination to bring this about, which is not to say that every abortion does not also involve a gravely immoral choice and an individual act of rebellion against God on the part of the mother and any father who does not attempt to actively intervene and prevent an abortion. As one reader wrote here:
[F]rom early girlhood we are told to have sex outside of marriage or else we have “problems.” We are told that being promiscuous will make us happy and liberate us from misery. We are never told both sides of the story and we are never given a chance to hear about chastity until marriage. And there really is no such thing as being “pro-choice” because in order to choose, to exercise choice, one must be fully informed. Women and girls are never fully informed. They are brainwashed and indoctrinated and then THEY are the ones that must endure the pain and hardship of reality while the feminists continue to bray their warped party line and spread their poison without one thought about the women they keep destroying.
As was pointed out in these entries here and here, many women suffer depression and profound remorse after abortion. This reality is ignored by the mainstream press. What amazes me is that feminists constantly insist women can do so much, handle all kinds of physical and intellectual challenges, even military combat, and yet they insist that women cannot handle the challenge of being pregnant for nine months when the pregnancy is not intended. There are tens of thousands of couples eager to take unwanted children.
As for Abby Johnson, and her failure to look at what she was doing before, many abortion advocates don’t just accept abortion as an unpleasant reality but think it is morally right. I imagine she thought unplanned motherhood is a terrible injustice and trial. The principle involved obviated the need for further investigation.
Hurricane Betsy writes:
For every Abby Johnson, there’s a 100 abortion front-line workers who will never repent because they are the walking dead. And for every “ordinary” woman who has an abortion, then suffers either emotional torment and/or sorrow for her actions, there’s countless more who never give a hoot and never will. How do I know? I am acquainted with a couple of women who are in that category and know of others. “That little thing doesn’t care whether it lives or dies!” Exact words. It was like “pulling a weed.” These women are well past the age where some kind of self-recrimination should have popped up. Terminal denial is all we get from them.
And there are countless women who are no unhealthier for having had an abortion than the ones who have the usual physical effects, both short- and long-term. What about the women whose bodies collapse either from too many children or for no obvious reason? That’s the harsh and ugly truth. This is the one issue I no longer fuss over. I no longer care whether abortion is 100% legal at any stage and 100% “free”; or whether abortionists and their customers are hanged at dawn. Time to wake up: this is one problem that only the hand of God Himself can deal with. It’s too big. We have to know what to get our fingers into, and what to leave alone.
Laura writes:
I saw a figure on a car bumper sticker that 94 percent of women who have had abortions come to regret it. But I don’t know where this figure comes from or if it has any basis in truth. Obviously, what you say is absolutely true. Some women never regret it.
But then some men never regret rape and some people never regret burglary or embezzlement. Does that mean we do not punish and prohibit these things? We have an obligation to speak out and express our revulsion, to try to change the laws that make abortion legal. Abortion is objectively immoral and evil. Abortion kills. Many women do experience emotional trauma and the only way to protect them is to fight abortion.
It sounds to me as if you have reached a state of fatigue on this issue. That’s understandable. But that doesn’t mean the fight itself is futile. To leave it to God is a form of complicity.
Jesse Powell writes:
I’m disturbed that in the discussion about abortion the rights of men and the harm done to men is usually ignored or at least treated as a trivial matter of not much importance. The slogan “it’s a woman’s right to chose” ignores the right of the unborn child to life and it disregards the right of men to be equal participants in the process of planning and deciding upon the number of children the man will father.
In a healthy social context, fathers are not considered less important than mothers in the raising of children and the sense of identity and purpose a man gets from being a father is not of less importance than the sense of identity and purpose a woman gets from being a mother. In the traditional family model it is indeed true that the mother will have more direct contact with the children but it must be remembered that it is the support and protection that the father provides to the mother that enables the mother to dedicate her efforts towards caring for her children.
The assumption that the mother is the “primary parent” or that children are a “woman’s thing” is a pathological assumption based on the premise that men do not care about children and that men will not put forth the investment into their children that they should. The important point is men neglecting their duties as fathers is not “natural” or “normal” or an intrinsic characteristic of men, it is a pathology that has developed in modern times as a part of the breakdown of the family.
By explicitly denying men their reproductive rights the message sent to men is that children are “none of their business,” that being a father is not important, that children are a “woman’s thing” that men shouldn’t get too involved with or care about too much. Not only is the cultural message about the meaning of fatherhood very much damaged by the discrimination against men in the field of reproductive rights but if a man knows his ability to predict or control the number of children he will have is impaired he will naturally invest less into the mission and higher purpose of being a father because he doesn’t know if the investments he makes towards being a good family man will be wasted.
It should be remembered, when the man acts as the breadwinner for his family, providing the material resources to allow the mother to stay at home to raise the children, he is doing so to provide for his children the best life possible; providing to the mother material benefits is a part of his investment in the well-being of his children. Since fatherlessness and the diminishment of men’s investment into the well-being of their children is clearly the biggest problem afflicting family life today it should be clear the harm done by denying men their reproductive rights.
Laura writes:
One of the most destructive consequences of abortion is the damage it has done to paternity and the institution of fatherhood.
Karen I. writes:
I know of several women who have abortions. Many men do not want to be fathers and do not mind if an unplanned pregnancy is aborted. It is easy to scapegoat the women, and they are 100% wrong for having abortions, but in the case of every abortion I know of except for one, the man responsible for the pregnancy either sat by and did nothing or actively encouraged the woman to abort, up to and including paying for the procedure and providing transportation to and from the abortion. The parents of one or both parties were also sometimes involved in the decision and thought that by aborting their grandchild, their daughter would have a better life.
I read the story in the link. Interestingly, there was no mention of a father in the piece. I wonder where he was while his baby was being aborted. In a sappy made-for-TV scenario, he would be crying over his loss and regretting the choice of abortion against his wishes. In real life, he was more likely relieved that he was not on the hook for child support for the next 18 years.
If a father really and truly does not want his baby to be aborted and the couple is not married, he needs to make a very loud and clear statement that he wants the child to be born. One way of doing that would be to marry the mother. If a parent has a daughter who comes home pregnant, they need to send her the message that they are totally against abortion. If a married man does not want his wife to have an abortion, he needs to make that very clear. Men who are against their children being aborted need to realize that if a woman is on the fence about having an abortion, their actions and words can save or end their child’s life. The worst thing anyone can do when it comes to such a situation is to sit back and figure “it’s her choice.”
In my Catholic Church, there is a very vocal pro-life committee and the issue of abortion is often addressed in sermons. What I never hear about is the sin of helping someone procure an abortion. I would like to see that happen, because without assistance and encouragement to go ahead with an abortion, many women never would.
Nora writes:
Even in the days before legalized abortion, it has always been easy to deny the humanity of unborn children because they are hidden inside the body of the mother. This is why infanticide has always elicited greater horror than abortion even though they are essentially the same thing. It is easy to deny the reality of something you can’t see, even if you understand it intellectually. And if you think that unseen something can ruin your life, denial is not only easy, but convenient to boot. Against those odds, the truth is almost guaranteed to lose out without strong moral principles to bolster it. I’m glad that ultrasound technology is forcing some of the willingly blind like Abby Johnson to open their eyes.
I agree with Karen I., and her comment squares with my experience as a volunteer at a church affiliated free clinic in a poor neighborhood. We don’t offer abortions or abortion referrals, but people who don’t know that often come in to inquire. Men coming in to ask about abortion services are just as common a sight as women. Weren’t herbs, potions and strenuous exercise used to induce abortions as far back as the Middle Ages, if not before? Desire for abortion isn’t unique to women who reached adulthood after the 1960s sexual revolution. It has existed and always will exist as long as people yield to temptation and want to escape the consequences, whether it is parental disappointment, social ostracism, or increased odds of living in poverty. I think that for the most part, there is nothing particularly twisted about the women who take this route, it’s just that they got themselves into a tight spot and desperately want to get out of it whatever the cost. Such women need help and moral support, not bad advice that could lead them to regret and unexpected health problems down the road.
What is pernicious about modern feminism is that it encourages behavior that leads to unwanted pregnancy, expresses strong disapproval of unwanted pregnancy, then tries to push abortion as just another “health care” procedure when it is anything but. Feminism, like its older brother Marxism, is an ideology embraced by those whose grasp of cause and effect is sketchy.
Josh F. writes:
To hold steadfast to the belief that one’s own mother had a “fundamental right” to intentionally kill said child in utero is the belief of the self-annihilator. Such a person would then ridiculously exclaim, “But I wouldn’t even know I was being killed.” So as long as one is murdered without knowing it beforehand, it’s cool. Such individuals do not deserve a seat at the table of humanity. Self-annihilators should be decisively marginalized or converted to pro-creators.
And although I agree with the general sentiment of those women who say that would-be fathers have a powerful persuasive case for leading a wayward female away from abortion, it is actually experienced and God-oriented women who have the most credibility in educating young females about what may be the most diabolical meme every devised by the human intellect: Your mother has a fundamental right to kill you in utero.
And you agree… to your own annihilation… at the hands of your only “mother.”
