TRUTH #3 - Abortion Hurts Women—Now and in the Future

“Abortion hurts, deceives, and destroys,” wrote Julie from Georgia. “I was not told about the possible physical health risks, lifetime of depression, fear, anxiety, grief, guilt, and remorse or shame. I was not told of complications that could cause infertility.”

Tami from Wyoming submitted an affidavit to the U.S. Supreme Court describing her “severe problems with reproductive organs, scarring, bleeding, infertility, depression, pain” subsequent to her abortion.

Thousands of similar affidavits have been collected from post-abortive women. Numerous studies show that women who have undergone an abortion suffer an increased risk of depression, substance abuse, alcohol abuse, suicide, infertility, premature delivery, ectopic pregnancy, miscarriages, stillbirths, sexual dysfunction, cervical cancer, ovarian cancer, and breast cancer.

Despite the tremendous risks associated with abortion, more than one-third of American women will undergo one by the time they are 45. Few will be told the truth about the potential physical and emotional devastation.

Abortion remains one of the least regulated of all medical fields. Dr. Warren Hern, a well-known abortionist and author of the medical textbook Abortion Practice, has acknowledged,“There are few surgical procedures given so little attention and so underrated in its potential hazard as abortion.”

Dr. Anthony Levatino, a former abortionist turned pro-life activist, admitted, “I have perforated uteruses. I have had all kinds of problems—bleeding, infection. Lord knows how many of those women are sterile now.”

Abortion and Premature Death

The dangers of abortion are not limited to disease, depression, and addiction; abortion has also been linked to premature death. One study published in the Southern Medical Journal involving more than 137,000 pregnant women found that those who chose abortion were 62 percent more likely to die within eight years of the procedure than those who delivered a live baby. Researchers attributed this heightened mortality rate to increased incidences of suicide, accidents, and disease. A similar Finnish study found that post-abortive women were 252 percent more likely to die within one year of their abortion than those who gave birth.

In 2005, the South Dakota Legislature created a commission to study the impacts of abortion. After reviewing the testimony of 1,940 post-abortive women, the commission explained:

Women were not told the truth about abortion, were misled into thinking that nothing but “tissue” was being removed, and relate that they would not have had an abortion if they were told the truth. They almost uniformly express anger toward the abortion providers, their baby’s father, or society in general, which promote abortion as a great right … They are stunned by their grief and the negative impact it has had on their lives.

Academy Award-winning actress Ellen Burstyn told a radio interviewer in 2007 that having an abortion was the lowest point in her life. The movie star said it was “an extremely painful experience” that happened when she said she was “young and dumb” and didn’t want to have a baby. But,“It was the wrong thing to do and I really didn’t understand that ’til later,” she said. “That was very, very painful. That was probably the worst.” Ellen Burstyn (Newscom)

The U.S. Supreme Court has conceded that a post abortive woman is often forced to “struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound when she learns, only after the event, what she once did not know….”

“I Wish I Had Known”

Bottom line: abortion hurts women. For every activist stridently defending a woman’s “right to choose,” there are many more broken voices crying, “I wish I had known how much misery I would live in because of it.”

In an affidavit pleading with the High Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, Caroline from Florida confessed:

Abortion took my innocence. Robbed me of self-worth. Really made me numb. Alcohol use. Suicidal thoughts. Depression, anxiety. Unbelievable guilt. Shut my emotions down. I thought it would be over after one day, but fifteen years later, I’m still haunted by the memories and the tremendous guilt of … having robbed my children of life. I still feel like I’m going to vomit when certain thoughts surface.

TRUTH #2 - An Aborted Baby Dies a Violent, Painful Death

Dr. McArthur Hill, who performed first trimester abortions, confessed, “I have taken the lives of innocent babies, and I have ripped them from their mother’s wombs with a powerful suction machine…. There isn’t any way that you can say that there isn’t a human body inside of those containers when you can look and see the little arms, feet, and faces.”

Dr. David Brewer spoke about his experience doing saline abortions, in which a baby is chemically burned to death. “She was going to pieces; she was having a nervous breakdown, screaming and thrashing.… I walked in, and here was her little saline abortion baby kicking. It had been born alive, and was kicking and moving for a little while before it finally died of those terrible burns, because the salt solution gets into the lungs and burns the lungs, too.”

What Abortionists Do

In recounting a dilation and evacuation abortion, Dr. Anthony Levantino explained, “[A]s a doctor, you are sitting there tearing, and I mean tearing—you need a lot of strength to do it—arms and legs off of babies and putting them in a stack on top of the table.”

One nurse who participated in a late-term abortion recalled, “The baby’s little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his little feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors in the back of his head, and the baby’s arms jerked out …The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening and sucked the baby’s brains out. Now the baby went completely limp.”

Even the most graphic descriptions fall short of capturing the sheer brutality of an abortion procedure. Carol Everett, a former abortion clinic owner, told an audience, “There are no words to describe how bad it really is.”

Abortion proponents cloak the various procedures used to end the baby’s life in bland clinical terms, seeking to make the matter more palatable to the public. However, when you read the grotesque details of what actually happens behind clinic doors, it is impossible to minimize the horror. The procedure is not a neat surgical extraction of excess tissue; it is the violent dismemberment of a defenseless baby.

After reviewing testimonies involving just one method of abortion, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, “The method of killing a human child … is so horrible that the most clinical description of it evokes a shudder of revulsion.” Antonin Scalia (Newscom/Getty)

The horrific nature of abortion is only compounded by the mounting evidence that unborn babies are sensitive to touch and pain. After reviewing testimony offered to a congressional committee, Senator Sam Brownback told fellow senators, “We now know that unborn children can not only feel, but that their ability to experience pain is heightened. The highest density of pain receptors per square inch of skin in human development occurs in utero from 20 to 30 weeks gestation.”

Dr. Steven Calvin, perinatologist at the University of Minnesota ,explained that “neural pathways are present for pain to be experienced quite early by unborn babies.”

“Severe and Excruciating” Pain

Dr. Kanwaljeet Anand, a pediatrician from the University of Arkansas, testified that babies suffer “severe and excruciating” pain during second and third trimester abortions.

Many mothers can tell you stories about the reactions of their unborn children to stimuli from outside the womb—voices, sounds, pressure, and movement. One expectant mother, for example, recalled how the child within her jumped at the sound of a slamming door. Are we so naïve as to believe that these same babies are numb to the sharp, gleaming instruments of the abortionist?

The powerful movie, The Silent Scream, used ultrasound technology to film an actual abortion. The procedure was narrated by an experienced abortionist:

This suction tip which you can see moving violently back and forth on the bottom of the screen is the lethal instrument which will ultimately tear apart and destroy the child.… Now the child’s heart rate has speeded up dramatically. And the child’s movements are violent at this point. It does sense aggression in its sanctuary. It is moving away ...one can see it moving to the left side of the uterus...in an attempt ... a pathetic attempt to escape the inextricable instruments which the abortionist is using to extinguish its life.

We cannot—we must not—mince words on this subject. The truth about abortion is that it subjects a living human being to a grotesque, often excruciating death.

TRUTH #1 - It Is a Proven Fact: Life Begins at Conception

If you are alive and breathing and reading this blog, you once existed as a one-day-old embryo. You were not a “pre-human” mishap. Even your day-old DNA declared your humanity!

Sixty prominent physicians made that point with great clarity when they issued a declaration in defense of the unborn in the 1980s. The group included Bernard Nathanson, a former abortionist and co-founder of NARAL, a powerful pro-abortion organization; two past presidents of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology; and the former president of the American Academy of Neurology.

In their treatise, which was sent to President Ronald Reagan, they stated:

The developing fetus is not a sub-human species with a different genetic composition…. The embryo is alive, human, and unique in the special environmental support required for that stage of human development.

The American College of Pediatricians agrees, declaring in its 2004 official policy statement that it “concurs with the body of scientific evidence that human life begins at conception—fertilization…. Scientific and medical discoveries over the past three decades [since Roe v. Wade] have only verified and solidified this age-old truth.”

Timeline for Life

Nevertheless, abortion advocates continue to insist that abortion destroys nothing more than clumps of cells or excess tissue. Such arguments can and should be summarily rejected. Here is a timeline of a baby’s development during the first trimester of pregnancy:

Conception: The baby’s DNA (a complete genetic blueprint) is established. This determines the baby’s gender, hair color, eye color, skin tone, height, and more.

18 DAYS: The heart begins to beat.

19 DAYS: The baby’s eyes begin to develop.

FOUR WEEKS: Arms and legs begin to develop.

FIVE WEEKS: The baby’s mouth, ears, and nose are taking shape.

SIX WEEKS: The baby kicks and has measurable brainwaves.(A majority of abortions occur after the seventh week of gestation.)

EIGHT WEEKS: All body systems are present. The baby sucks his thumb and responds to touch.

TEN WEEKS: The structure of the baby’s entire body is formed, even fingerprints and eyelashes.

ELEVEN WEEKS: The baby’s organ systems are complete and functioning. The baby breathes, swallows, digests, sleeps, tastes, hears, and hiccups.

As you can see from the timeline, the slogan “Abortion Stops a Beating Heart” is entirely accurate. We are not discussing the surgical removal of a “clump of tissue.” Abortion is the killing of an unborn human being. The unborn child is a human life from the moment of conception, and that life ends violently, often painfully (as you will see in the next section), on the abortionist’s table.

The entire pro-abortion position hinges on denying the humanity of the unborn. If the supporters of legal abortion were to admit that human life begins at conception, they would be confronted with the fact that abortion is murder.

The Ayn Rand Institute, a pro- abortion organization, conceded:

Abortion-rights advocates keep hiding behind the phrase “a woman’s right to choose.” Does she have the right to choose murder? That’s what abortion would be, if the fetus were a person. The status of the embryo in the first trimester is the basic issue that cannot be sidestepped. The embryo is clearly pre-human; only the mystical notions of religious dogma treat this clump of cells as constituting a person.

Pro-abortion advocates stubbornly refuse to acknowledge the humanity of the child in the womb. The Supreme Court took a similar position in 1973, when it issued the Roe v. Wade decision, which swept away all state and federal laws prohibiting abortion. The Court ruled that “the word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn.”

Human From the Get-Go

Thirty years later, we know better. Attributing humanity to the unborn can no longer be brushed off as “mystical notions of religious dogma.” To the contrary, it is a widely accepted scientific fact. After reviewing mounds of evidence, one U.S. Senate committee declared:

physicians, biologists, and other scientists agree that conception … marks the beginning of a human being—a being that is alive and is a member of the human species. There is overwhelming agreement on this point in countless medical, biological, and scientific writings. The facts are incontrovertible; the unborn child in the womb is a human child.

What do you think about abortion?

I have felt led more and more lately to help contribute to the fight of anti-abortion.
The following posts are from Dr. D. James Kennedy. Coral Ridge Ministries. Please take the time to read through them and examine how you feel towards abortion.