Her Husband Demanded An Abortion, Then The Abortionist Drugged Her
Her Husband Demanded An Abortion, Then The Abortionist Drugged Her
A woman tells her story of forced abortion.
In a collection of women’s abortion stories, one post-abortive woman wrote about how she was pressured into an abortion by her husband and abortion workers.
A Husband’s Demands
The woman’s husband, Ralph, insisted she get an abortion. Worn down by his nagging, she decided to go to the abortion facility and back out at the last minute. Then she could say she tried to get an abortion, which might appease her husband.
She says, “Looking back, I realize I was afraid of my husband.”
Pressured and Lied to by the Abortion Worker
A smiling abortion worker met her at the abortion facility, and she told the woman immediately that she didn’t want an abortion. The post-abortive woman recounted the conversation between her and the abortion worker:
We were led into a counseling room by a woman with a pleasant smile. After we sat down, I told her, “Deep inside my heart, I know there is no justification for an abortion.”
Ralph glared at me. He said, “She thinks she is carrying a baby and not just a blob of cells.”
The counselor assured me that my baby was “just a pinhead.” Both she and my husband argued with me.
Of course, a preborn baby, even in the first trimester, is far from “just a pinhead.” According to the Endowment for Human Development, a preborn baby’s heart starts beating at just 3 weeks and one day after conception.
At 6 weeks, the baby’s brain is already divided into 2 hemispheres. Between 6 and 7 weeks, the embryo responds to touch. At a little over 7 weeks from conception (the 9th week of pregnancy) the baby has fingers and toes.
So when the abortion worker said that the baby was “just a pinhead,” she was lying.
Refusing to Take No for an Answer
The post-abortive woman goes on, telling her story:
[The abortion worker] said, “You can do this. You don’t have to want it or like it. It’s best to make this sacrifice for the well-being of your two boys.”
My husband begged me, “Please do it!”…
“Wouldn’t you remove a tumor?” As she shoved the papers at me to sign, she told me, “You can stop the abortion at any time.”
Under pressure, the pregnant woman signed the papers, still intending to change her mind:
When it was time to go into the operating room, I crouched down outside the door and whimpered, “I can’t do this.” Two smiling women, one on each side of me, lifted me up and pushed me into the room. The doctor was upset with me because I was crying. Many times, I told him, “I don’t want to. I don’t want to!”
They gave her anesthesia, knocked her out, and did the abortion against her will.
This woman made it very clear to the abortion workers and the abortionist that she didn’t want the abortion. They didn’t care. Instead of respecting her choice, they gave her drugs to incapacitate her and then committed the abortion on her against her will.
Their actions make a mockery of the pro-abortion claim that abortion providers are selfless heroes who just want to help women. These “pro-choice” abortion providers didn’t respect this woman’s choice.
Many former abortion workers have said that the abortion industry is motivated by greed. Perhaps the abortionist and clinic workers didn’t want to lose the money they would get from the abortion.
Regardless of the reason, they violated the woman’s bodily autonomy by performing surgery on her against her will. This should offend both pro-choicers and pro-lifers.
Grief Delegitimized
That night, the woman cried bitterly, only to have her husband yell at her:
That night when my crying kept Ralph awake, he yelled at me, “What’s wrong with you? We got rid of the problem!”
The next morning, after a night without sleep, I urged Ralph to look on the Internet for what happened to women after an abortion.
He searched WebMD and found only one article. He showed it to me and pointed to one sentence: “Most women do not regret abortion.” He grinned knowingly and said, “You see? You’re crazy, you’re creating this problem. You’ll be okay.”
I cried.
The pro-abortion movement constantly promotes the narrative that women don’t regret abortion and that abortion causes no emotional harm. In this case, these claims were seized upon as ammunition and used against a grieving, post-abortive woman by her verbally abusive husband.
Post-abortive people who suffer after an abortion have their feelings delegitimized in our culture. This makes them feel isolated and alone. As with the woman above, they are made to feel that there’s something wrong with them, that they are “crazy.”
This is a great disservice to hurting people.
Methodological Flaws in Pro-Abortion Studies
The abortion industry and abortion supporters have released studies that purport to show only a small fraction of post-abortive people regret their abortions. These studies attempt to prove that post-abortive people don’t suffer from depression, guilt, or other negative emotions connected to their abortions.
Short Follow-Up Time
However, the studies contain major methodological flaws. For one thing, few studies follow the subjects longer than a few months or, at most, a few years. They therefore miss emotional trauma that surfaces later.
If you listen to the testimonies of post-abortive people who regret their abortions or who suffer emotional trauma, many of them come to experience emotional distress after a triggering incident in their lives.
This incident could be giving birth to a baby, which leads them to wonder about the one that was aborted. For other people, the trigger could be finding out information they didn’t know about fetal development. Seeing an ultrasound of a future pregnancy or losing a child through miscarriage can also bring to the surface repressed grief. These events may happen many years after the abortion and trigger long-lasting abortion regret and/or emotional trauma.
High Attrition Rate
There is another major flaw in all or most research purporting to show that abortion doesn’t hurt post-abortive people.
In every study I’ve reviewed, large numbers of participants dropped out after initially agreeing to take part. These participants filled out the first questionnaire, or the first few questionnaires, but then refused to fill out future questionnaires.
In all studies I’ve seen, there was no follow-up with the people who dropped out – they were simply cut from the study. Every study I’ve reviewed had a high attrition rate – in some cases, 50% or more participants dropped out.
We don’t know why they dropped out. However, some of them may have dropped out because they found it traumatic to think about their abortions.
How can any honest researcher come to any conclusion when only half the participants finish the study?
Selection Bias
Finally, most of the studies suffer from selection bias. First of all, many pregnant people who are approached at abortion facilities decline to take part.
For example, when abortion workers tried to recruit subjects for the Turnaway study, half of those they approached declined. According to an article by Nina Martin in the book Critical Perspectives on Abortion, it took three years to recruit 500 women who had abortions.
The study’s authors recruited from many abortion facilities. Far more than 500 pregnant people had abortions over those three years in these facilities.
This means that abortion workers didn’t ask every person coming in for an abortion to take part in the study. I’ve read elsewhere that many times, abortion workers don’t ask pregnant people who seem upset or troubled to enroll in studies. This is because they don’t want to upset the pregnant people any further.
If a pregnant person is ambivalent, then, or comes in crying and upset, they aren’t asked to participate in the study. This automatically screens out some of the people most likely to suffer depression or other mental health problems after their abortions.
And then there’s the question of those who are asked and decline. Are they more likely to suffer emotional trauma afterward? This is another group of pregnant people not represented in the study.
So it’s questionable whether these studies start with a truly representative sample.
Due to all these factors, these studies are unreliable.
Studies That Show the Reality of Post-Abortion Trauma
Studies that do show that women regret their abortions or that the suicide rate of women is higher after abortion have been published. However pro-abortion medical societies and the abortion industry downplay these studies, and many of them have been published outside of the United States because American journals don’t want to publish them.
Sources
Barbara Horak Real Abortion Stories: The Hurting and the Healing (El Paso, Texas: Strive for the Best Publishing, 2007)
Nina Martin “Amid the Abortion Debate, the Pursuit of Science” [originally published in ProPublica, January 7, 2014] in Anne C Cunningham Critical Perspectives on Abortion (New York: Enslow Publishing, 2018)