Death of a baby, birth of despair

May 15, 2003

Years ago, I helped an unmarried friend through an abortion. It is something both of us will regret the rest of our days.

Prior to the procedure, she expressed misgivings. “Look, Janie,” she picked up her hospital gown as she spoke. “You can see the heartbeat.”

“That’s nonsense!” I fired back, hoping to reassure her.

After the abortion, when she was returned to her room, I expected to find her relieved. She wasn’t. Once more, she picked up her hospital gown and said, “Look Janie. The heartbeat is gone.” I pretended not to notice, believing that I was doing her a favor.

We had bought into the “glob of tissue” theory peddled by the abortion industry. If it were anything more, surely someone would have told us!

Prior to her abortion, both of us saw something that looked like a heartbeat. I now believe that what we saw was from pressure on her own aorta from her expanded uterus. However, the heart begins beating at just 18 days of life, so her baby’s heart was beating until his life was ended by that abortion.

I would like to be able to tell you that after a brief moment of regret my friend went on with her life and never looked back. I can’t. She has suffered severe emotional pain and chronic back problems, which doctors told her likely were the result of some deep psychological trauma.

It was years before we talked about her abortion again. Through tears she said, “Janie, if we knew then what we know now, I wouldn’t have done it and you wouldn’t have let me do it.”

Abortion often is presented as the end of the problem of an unwanted pregnancy. It isn’t.

As the host of eight documentaries on the subject of abortion, I have met many other women who carry these deep psychological scars. In fact, I have met so many that I now believe that there are only two kinds of women who have had abortions: those who have hit the emotional wall and those who will.

Abortion advocates dismiss these women. The American Psychological Association has been part of the abortion lobby and insists that abortion brings emotional relief to most women.

However, research on depression rates following abortion has been limited until now.

The latest issue of Medical Science Monitor published the results of a landmark study done by the Elliot Institute which shows that women with a history of abortion are at a significantly higher risk of experiencing clinical depression, than women who give birth.

Researchers used data on 1,884 women compiled by the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth who experienced their first pregnancy between 1980 and 1992 and found that, on an average of eight years later, women whose first pregnancies ended in abortion were 65 percent more likely to be at high risk of clinical depression.

The NLSY is an ongoing nationwide interview-based study conducted by the Center for Human Resource Research at Ohio State University and funded by the U.S. Department of Labor. It began in 1979 and participants are surveyed annually.

When you review the results, you will see that researchers controlled for age, race, marital status, history of divorce, income, number of years of formal education and a pre-pregnancy measure of psychological state.

Dr. David Reardon, who heads the Elliot Institute, believes the data are still inadequate to measure the true aftereffects of abortion due to the fact that researchers found only 40 percent of the abortions that could be expected in a sample that size.

Since past studies have shown that women who are most likely to conceal their abortions are the ones most likely to have depression, a 60 percent concealment rate is highly significant. The true impact of the emotional problems in abortion’s wake must be quite staggering!

When a woman’s body is preparing to deliver a child and that child suddenly is jerked from her, regardless of what she has been told, she instinctively knows that something is terribly wrong.

The so-called women’s rights groups, who fight against informed consent laws that would ensure women have all the facts before they make those choices to abort, and psychologists – who dismiss the pain caused by abortion – deserve our consternation.

Thank you, Dr. Reardon, for shedding some light on a very dark subject.

Adoption may not be a perfect end to an unwanted pregnancy, but it is a noble choice. It has to be a lot less painful for a woman than the knowledge that she is responsible for the death of her child, even though that decision often is made in ignorance.

Research links abortion to depression