My first patient in practice told me of her experience of being forced to have an abortion. In fact, of all the many women (and many you’d never guess) who had abortions, only one woman told me she was happy she’d done it and would do it again if she had the choice.

The majority of women say that parents, boyfriends, and worst of all, husbands forced the woman to abort the baby. The trauma is devastating and long lasting.

It is a lie that women are getting to choose. Many women are victims of abortion–it is used against them.

Please watch this video and share it:

So many terrified women in crisis just need one person who will say, “It will be okay.”

Just one person.

Thankfully, I see the younger generation turning against the abortion culture. They have lost siblings to abortion. It is real to them.

We need a return to honoring adoption. Adoption is a wonderful gift–both to the child and to the adoptive parents.

I have come to the conclusion that all abortion, legal or illegal, is a back-alley business. Yesterday, I saw a liberal decrying regulations on abortion clinics. You know, outrageous things like medical care for the mother and cleanliness in the operating room.

Today, research (a rigorous meta-analysis) confirms the self-evident: Women who have abortions have worse psychological outcomes than women who have their babies. LifeNews has the story:

A new study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry by leading American researcher Dr. Priscilla Coleman of Bowling Green State University finds women who have an abortion face almost double the risk of mental health problems as women who have their baby.

Coleman’s study is based on an analysis of 22 separate studies which, in total, examine the pregnancy experiences of 877,000 women, with 163,831 women having an abortion. The study also indicated abortion accounts for one in ten of every adverse mental health issue women face as a whole.

“Results indicate quite consistently that abortion is associated with moderate to highly increased risks of psychological problems subsequent to the procedure,” the study says. “Overall, the results revealed that women who had undergone an abortion experienced an 81 percent increased risk of mental health problems, and nearly 10 percent of the incidence of mental health problems were shown to be directly attributable to abortion.”

The peer-reviewed study indicated abortion was linked with a 34 percent chance of anxiety disorders, and 37 percent higher possibility of depression, a more than double risk of alcohol abuse (110 percent), a three times greater risk of marijuana use (220 percent), and 155 percent greater risk of trying to commit suicide.

When compared to unintended pregnancy delivered women had a 55% increased risk of experiencing any mental health problem.

Dr. Coleman said she conducted the study “to produce an unbiased analysis of the best available evidence addressing abortion as one risk factor among many others that may increase the likelihood of mental health problems. There are in fact some real risks associated with abortion that should be shared with women as they are counseled prior to an abortion.”

What I have seen in practice would confirm this theory. The death of a baby causes a woman much grief. The death of a baby at her own hands? Well.

Abortion advocates don’t like to talk about how women are victimized by abortions. They talk about the woman’s mental health as one of the reasons to have an abortion–the assumption being that the mother experiences great relief from being out from under, as President Obama calls babies, the burden.

The truth is usually quite the opposite. Because of this willful disregard for women, women often find themselves stricken and alone after an abortion. They are trapped by their own guilt. Often, they are trapped by the man or family member who forced her to have the abortion.

But don’t talk about this.

This abortion research was published in the most prestigious psychiatry journal. And yet, it will be either ignored or diminished by the very lucrative abortion industry.

Women are lied to about the risks routinely. An abortion risks damaging their fertility, harming their physical health and changing them forever emotionally. Abortion-lovers do a great disservice to women twice-over by abandoning them after enduring the abortion.

Meanwhile, women who work in Crisis Pregnancy centers know all about the risks to a woman’s mental health. They’re the ones doing the post-abortion group therapy — groups that are never empty.

The abortion business is anti-women. It’s a dirty business, with dirty little secrets.

Yet if making that choice was hard, the physical ordeal was only just beginning. At 18 weeks pregnant, I was too far gone for a surgical termination and would have to go through a labour and delivery, under the care of midwives at our local hospital.

The first step was to take the drug Mifepristone to block progesterone, a hormone vital to pregnancy. I swallowed the pill in a side room on the labour ward — the same room where I’d given birth to our younger daughter two years previously.

Over the two days that followed, I fought the urge to put my hands on my stomach when I felt the baby move. Knowing that he was slowly dying inside me was the very definition of hell.

After two days, I returned to the same room to take a second drug to induce labour.

What followed were the worst 16 hours of my life. They passed in a morphine-induced haze, but there was no dulling what was happening.

My baby was being forced into the world long before he could survive in it, and it felt unnatural — completely at odds with my instincts as a mother. My body seemed to be doing all it could to hold onto him, and the labour went on and on.

At one point, in the grips of what felt like a panic attack, I became hysterical. Gasping for breath and screaming, I demanded that Andrew tell me why we were doing this and why it was the right thing for our son.

What follows is her husband’s, her doctor’s, her family’s rationalization for aborting a baby that would have a difficult life.

Reading this sickens me. My own son was born severely premature and ended up with the diagnosis of autism. He was on medications, oxygen, etc. when he came home from the hospital four months later after surgeries and fears including blindness, palsy, mental retardation. We didn’t know what we’d end up with. For that matter, we still don’t know our son’s ultimate path.

You might think that makes me condemn this family for their decision to abort their baby. No. I’m too crushed to cast stones.

Their decision to abort is utterly, completely, and frightfully hopeless. There is no room for God. There is no room for hope. There is no room for the expansion of human frailty. And by frailty, I’m not talking about the disabled child, I’m talking about the parents–their selfishness, weakness, limitations of spirit. By aborting him, they’ll never fully know what they’re capable of as people.

I think about my own walk–parenting my son. The limitations, I can assure you, are mine, not his. My humor, my patience, my vision, my work-ethic are non-stop challenged and unfortunately, I fall short embarrassingly often.

Just when I think I’m going to lose it, there’s a break-through. I’ve had to expand beyond my pathetic, small, inwardness. My judgmental nature? Well, it’s still there, but the wings have been clipped. Cavalier condemnation, so easy for someone who has had the bramble-free path, that’s gone by the wayside, mostly. Thankfully.

My son loves professional wrestling. This family who aborted their son–what loves did they extinguish? What unique personality and hopes and dreams were killed when he died? And really, who are they to decide that this child’s future, as different as their own might be, is unworthy?

Parents who are able-bodied and minded project their own expectations for life on a disabled child. And while all parents do that with all their children, kids turn out to be their own people. They end up having their own hopes, dreams and ideas. The same is true for a disabled child.

How is it fair to take away that will from a child?

When we get pregnant, as ironic as it is, we relinquish control over our own lives and submit to the hopes and desires of this other life force. We spend the rest of our days negotiating this paradox. We expand our own world by making room for another person’s world. And we often do that by pruning parts of our world that we thought we needed to survive. We die a little so another can live and in the process, we live more.

As this family sees their able-bodied children grow up, they’ll see the fallacy of their thinking. I hope. It might be painful to see. Still, in front of them, if they have the eyes to see, they’ll witness a unique being straining to be his or her own person. They’ll realize how little control they have. They’ll realize that their own decision at the start most certainly began something that is now not theirs.

And for all their careful planning and protection, tragedy will strike. Evil befalls us all.

In some ways, I think abortion, just like the technology that prompted this family to abort their child, foists the illusion of control over life. As if by aborting the baby, the parent now has perfect control over her life. Life will be good, easier, better, more pleasant…guaranteed.

What if one of their children becomes paralyzed in a car accident (heaven forbid), for example? Is this child better off dead? And what do they tell this survivor about the worth and meaning of his life? How about people who sacrifice a limb for their brothers on the battlefield? Another meaningless life? How about the elderly parent with full faculties but incapacitated due to ALS or some other degenerative disease?

What life is worth living and who gets to decide this for someone else? Do these parents feel comfortable with their children making the decision to “abort” them when they reach an age where they’re no longer deemed useful…to the children? Maybe their children will project their ideas about living with deafness or blindness or incontinence or immobility or pain or paralysis and decide, prematurely, to end mom or dad’s life. Is their reasoning any different?

This callous disregard for the imperfect life rests on the premise that there’s a perfect life. Anyone who has done much living knows that’s not true. There are many shades of gray on the scale of life and value.

That’s why life, all life, must be honored and protected. That’s why we’re so careful about meting out justice. Life is valuable. To snuff it out is to end a potentiality and no one can know where a life will go or what an individual’s purpose on this earth is.

The family that aborted their eighteen-week gestated baby were surrounded by friends, family, doctors who all advised them to abort. This wasn’t just an individual or family decision, it was a societal one.

What have we become that this decision was encouraged?

That’s a question for another post. Today, it’s enough to grieve for the life of a boy with Spina Bifada who was killed inside the womb “for his own good.” It is a tragedy of epic and personal proportions. Who knows who the world is missing because he’s not here.

George. His name is George.

They found the dozens of unborn children killed in abortions who were frozen for decades. CBS 3 indicates they are now determining whether or not they may have been victims of illegal late-term abortions.

CBS 3 also reported that records from 1995 show Gosnell was publicly reprimanded by the State Licensing Board which found he ”employed a physician’s assistant that was not certified … saw at least one patient and treated him.”

So far, as a result of the abortion death, Gosnell’s medical license has been temporarily suspended, but he has not yet been charged with anything illegal. His abortion center is temporarily closed while the investigation proceeds.

Troy Newman, the president of the pro-life group Operation Rescue, told LifeNews.com that the suspension order described “deplorable and unsanitary” conditions at the clinic, indicating that “there was blood on the floor, and parts of aborted fetuses were displayed in jars.”

The order declared Gosnell to be “an immediate and clear danger to the public health and safety.”

Newman says the notion that legalizing abortion made it safer for women is fiction.

“This is not the exception to the rule in our nation’s abortion clinics. It is standard operating procedure,” he said. “This clinic is no better than a back alley abortion mill, and in fact may be worse.”

“Collecting the remains of dead babies over a 30 year time frame is reminiscent of the actions of deranged serial killers who keep body parts as trophies. It doesn’t get much sicker than that,” he added.

Don’t you wonder about abortion providers–especially those who “specialize” in late term abortions? What kind of depravity and psychological distance from the act must one engage to do such a thing?

There is a visceral repulsion to something so violent as killing a baby who could survive outside the womb, but it’s legal because the baby’s head is still in the mom’s body.

And there is something wrong with the mind of a doctor willing to engage in such a procedure. This Philly doctor is just more overt about the pleasure he gets from his kills. He belongs in prison.

In response to an open records request by the Alliance Defense Fund and Pro-Life Wisconsin, the Middleton Police Department and the Wisconsin Department of Justice, along with the Department of Homeland Security all refused on February 4 to release copies of the threat assessment.

Pro-Life Wisconsin officials told LifeNews.com that the assessment was “inappropriately shared” and should never have targeted pro-life groups.

“The majority of Americans identify themselves as pro-life, and the Middleton Police Department has shown they are out of touch with this peaceful majority,” said Peggy Hamill, state director of the pro-life group. “Pro-lifers are not a minority of the population, nor are they second-class citizens. We refuse to let our First Amendment rights be silenced.”

A few months later in 2009, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights concluded the investigation was an improper use of department resources.

The conclusion said the department inappropriately directed against activities protected by the First Amendment, in which law enforcement inappropriately engaged in “the collection, retention and dissemination of U.S. person information regarding protest groups which posed no threat to homeland security and… violated [DHS] Guidelines.”

Hamill said DHS destroyed its copies of the report, but the Middleton Police Department retained its copy.

In January 2010 the Alliance Defense Fund, on behalf of Wisconsin pro-life advocates, asked the Middleton Police Department for a copy of the report pursuant to Wisconsin’s open records laws.

The Middleton Police Department refused to disclose the report and further said that the DOJ similarly refused to authorize disclosure of the report, despite the fact that DHS had already determined that the report was an improper investigation of freedom of speech activities.

“This move by DHS illustrates the Obama administration’s goal of silencing pro-lifers. It is disturbing that a local police department has apparently tapped into the security apparatus of the federal government to potentially obstruct free speech,” Hamill concluded.

“Last year, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano unjustly included pro-lifers in a report on domestic terrorism, and here we see her words in action,” she said.

It’s almost like an enemies list, isn’t it?

Whiteriver, AZ (LifeNews.com) — A pregnancy center in rural eastern Arizona that serves a predominantly native American population was severely burned in what appears to be an arson attack. The Living Hope Women’s Center clinic has closed indefinitely as a result of a fire that gutted a portion of the building on December 20.

And this will adversely affect the community:

The center president told the newspaper that ATF officials asked her if the pregnancy center was involved in anything controversial that might have sparked a hate crime.

“The agent very gingerly asked if we were involved in ‘anything controversial’ in our ministry,” she said. “You can imagine what they hear about Crisis Pregnancy Centers, abortion clinic bombings and the like. I assured him that even though we are a CPC ), our work was mostly pre-natal and parenting and that the culture in Whiteriver is very pro-life.”

She told the newspaper the apparent arson will set the pregnancy center back quite a bit financially and logistically.

“When we think of everything we had in there it is a bit overwhelming. We had just gotten two new computers, a new ultrasound machine, a very large screen TV and of course our beautiful, huge Mommy Store. But these are things that can be replaced. One greater challenge will be where do we go from here?” Monahan asked.

She is concerned because the availability of buildings in Whiteriver is very scarce.

Monahan indicated the Whiteriver pregnancy center had 400-600 visits every month from the low-income people who live in the community.

“As our staff stood outside the building, clients would come and cry as they looked at the devastation,” she said. “This ministry is so loved by so many there. We are looking at our options, one which is to lease a large lot and build or place a modular on it. Whatever we do, build, remodel or use a modular, we feel strongly that the people of Whiteriver are the ones who should do it.”

Well, the crime, since it was on a reservation, is a federal crime. It will be interesting to find out who committed this attack.

I lived in the U.S. for many years and I was and am still pro-choice. Yet, when I returned to India as an adult even my pro-choice mind could not comprehend the absolute horror of the fact that in less than a century India has eliminated more than 50 million women from its population. It is targetted elimination and by definition a genocide. That’s when I started the 50 Million Missing Campaign. Our website is www.50millionmissing.in

And you are absolutely right Melissa. There is a big block in the west regarding female genocide in India. It is not an anti-abortion issue. The Soroptimist International just last week took on this cause. And I hope other feminist and human rights groups will.

More so it is not just about female feticide. There is infanticide, dowry murders, under 5 mortality rate and abortion related MMRs (1 woman every 5 minutes in India). I just published an article for the Australian journal Intersections. Here is the link:
http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue22/banerji.htm

At the link [Go read the whole thing]:

The public reservation, however, is with the actual likelihood of such a mass-scale elimination occurring. Occasionally one reads in Indian papers about baby body parts being found in a well in the compound of some clinic, or a young woman dying of burns under suspicious circumstances due to a supposed kitchen accident, but there is nothing in the news that suggests a blood-bath on the scale of a genocide. To drive home the point to my Rotary audience, I put up on the overhead a two columned table relating to the annual rates of female homicide in India. This slide included the means of elimination, and the estimate for the annual rate for each category.

Table 1. Annual Rates of Female Homicide in India

Female foeticide approximately 1 million[5]
Female infanticide approximately 25000 in the State of Kerala alone[6]
Dowry-related murders approximately 25000[7]
Preadolescent mortality 1 in 6 dies before 15 yrs (CRY)[8]
Mortality rate 40% higher for girls under 5 than boys the same age (UNICEF)[9]
Maternal mortality rate (MMR) 136,000
(1 woman dies every 5 minutes due to pregnancy-related causes) (WHO)[10]

# The number one means of elimination I pointed out, is female foetal abortions. An estimated 1 million female foetuses are selectively eliminated in India each year, and that number is expected to rise to 2.5 million within the next few years.[11] Method number two is female infanticide, a practice that has a long history in India. So far there has been no national average estimated for female infanticide, largely because it is difficult to track down with there being no administrative compulsion for citizens to register births. Nevertheless, existent data gives an indication of the scale of the practice. In the state of Kerala, one of India’s most progressive states, with a literacy rate of over 90 per cent, it is estimated that about 25,000 new born girls are killed every year.[12] In other states like Bihar, where the issue of gender bias is plainly discernable, one survey reveals that mid-wives interviewed admitted to being paid to kill almost 50 per cent of the baby girls they delivered.[13] As the number three method of elimination I listed dowry murders, also known as ‘dowry deaths.’ Despite the fact that a majority of dowry-related homicides of young married women in India are never even filed with the police, in the late 1990s it was estimated that at least 25,000 young married women were cold-bloodedly murdered by their husbands and in-laws in dowry extortion cases.[14] That number has continued to rise, as the practice of dowry itself spreads to communities, like tribal groups, that traditionally never had the custom of dowry.

What happens when an evil element of a culture meets up with technology? Genocide.

There is a disconnect for Western women. Because of cultural relativism and their own desire to have the power of life and death over another human, they avert their eyes when the same motivation is used on a grand scale to engage in the most misogynistic of ventures: killing women because men are better (and, in India, cheaper).

But the choice to eliminate a life for gender seems like just one reason among many to have an abortion. 90% of mongoloid children are aborted in America. In America, that child is viewed is dysfunctional, less than, and wrong. In India, women babies are viewed that way. It’s just a different culture. All over the world, people want the “useful”. In India, women aren’t very useful. In America, retarded children aren’t very useful.

At some level, mostly unconscious, Western women know they are little different than their Indian counterparts which is why they stay silent in the face of the biggest female genocide in history.

“State police at the Corunna post have confirmed a well-known anti-abortion activist was shot multiple times and killed this morning in front of Owosso High School. The victim’s identity has not yet been released but the shooting occurred around 7:30 a.m., after most students were off the buses and safely inside the building, said Owosso schools transportation supervisor Jayne Campbell.

State police also confirmed that a suspect was taken into custody about 8:15 a.m. at the suspect’s home.

Owosso High School secretary Wendy Smith said the students remain in lockdown this morning and confirmed that no students were involved and all are safe with classes going on as normal. The shooting did not occur on school property, Smith said. Meanwhile, police have completely ringed with police tape a section of North Street in front of the school.

A black car can be seen parked at the corner of North and Whitehaven streets, where a portable oxygen tank is lying in a front yard next to a large sign bearing the image of a baby and the word “Life.”

Elliot Institute director David Reardon, co-authored a Medical Science Monitor study of American and Russian women with the 64 percent figure.

His new report, Forced Abortion in America, documents cases of violence against women who refused to have an abortion.

It also highlights cases like the one in Maine, which saw a couple charged with abducting their pregnant daughter in an attempt to force her to have an abortion, and another in Georgia, where a woman forced her pregnant daughter to drink turpentine to cause an abortion.

Reardon says the cases are just part of an epidemic of coerced and forced abortions in the U.S.

Reardon said that cases of women being pressured, threatened, or subjected to violence if they refuse to abort are not unusual.

He pointed out that studies have shown that homicide is the leading killer of pregnant women in the U.S. and that women in abusive relationships are at risk for increased violence during pregnancy.

“In many of the cases documented for our ‘Forced Abortion in America’ report, police and witnesses reported that acts of violence and murder took place after the woman refused to abort or because the attacker didn’t want the pregnancy,” he said in a statement LifeNews.com received.

“Even if a woman isn’t physically threatened, she often faces intense pressure, abandonment, lack of support, or emotional blackmail if she doesn’t abort. While abortion is often described as a ‘choice,’ women who’ve been there tell a very different story,” he added.

It has been the rare woman in my practice who sought the abortion and feels no guilt years later. Most women were either pressured to abort or chose the abortion and feel guilt later and remorse later. It is the rare woman who truly “chose”. It is a rarer woman who has no regret over her choice.

I’d like to add a few more examples of the Feminists willful ignorance and determination of silence in the face of injustice. India has experienced a gendercide–that is millions of female babies have been aborted because they’re female. The same thing has been happening in China where single men looking for women become scam victims. All in all, the very tool the Leftist women worship (Bonnie Erbe, “Abortion is a rite of passage”) is used against women to annihilate the “lesser” sex. Leftists will stand around and wonder, however, what happened to 100,000,000 women–that’s the gender disparity now. Don’t say it ladies. Do not say it. Don’t condemn the tool used to create this disparity. And don’t condemn the religious and cultural foundation of hate for women. Don’t do it.

You know those women being stoned in Saudi Arabia for showing ankles? Crickets. You know the women beaten, have acid thrown on them, and are beheaded for shaming a man? Not a word.

No wonder the Feminists are okay with President Obama’s hideous Cairo speech. No wonder they stay silent regarding the hypocrisy of a President Obama’s moral equivalence while he kept his wife out of Egypt and out of a burqua.

And finally, why would Feminist women condemn the cyber-rape of women they believe have it coming when they won’t even defend themselves. Cassy Fiano writes of a Dutch journalist kidnapped and repeatedly raped by Islamists in Afghanistan who then goes on to defend her attackers who “respect her”:

This is a perfect example of the problems with so many liberals today. They are so terrified to call Muslim jihadists what they are — terrorists, murderers, monsters — not because they might be physically harmed in some way, but because they might be branded intolerant. People like Joanie de Rijke don’t look at themselves as sufferers of Stockholm Syndrome, they look at themselves as righteous and intellectual and open-minded and modern. What Mrs. de Rijke, along with so many others on the left, do not understand is that we do not call Muslim thugs and murderers (like the coward who abducted and raped her) monsters or terrorists simply because they are Muslim. We call them monsters or terrorists because they are murderers, rapists, and terrorists. Unfortunately, situations like this are black and white, even though liberals love the idea of moral relativism. There are no shades of grey. Murder is murder, just like rape is rape. A rapist cannot “respect” you, and rape is not something beyond a man’s control simply because of his “high testosterone”.

Also interesting is de Rijke’s description of Gul as a religious man, yet also a hypocritical one. She, of course, is holding Gul to Judeo-Christian religious standards, not Islamic ones. The truth of the matter is, that his actions would indeed be considered hypocritical (and monstrous) by Judeo-Christian standards. By Islamic standards, they are not only not hypocritical, they are expected and acceptable. Muslims are commanded in the Koran to rape and kill infidels, and de Rijke would be considered an infidel. Of course, that little nugget of truth does not fit very neatly into her enlightened liberal worldview, so she ignores it.

So backward and insane are feminists that they will abuse themselves, abuse other women, and annihilate their own gender to serve the ideology that there is no right or wrong and that there is no one better or worse. The only sin is the sin of judgment and intolerance. And these women are willing to tolerate nearly anything except anyone who points out the limitation of their belief system.

Please read the column here.

Addendum: Yesterday night, Media Lizzy and I talked about feminism, beautiful women, sex and much more on my radio show for RFC radio called Right Doctor. You can listen Monday and Wednesday nights and chat with me from 10 – 11 EST, 9 CST, or catch the podcast from iTunes. Subscribe to The Right Doctor on iTunes.

UPDATED:

Megan Carpentier editor of Jezebel contacted me and noted that she had written about the Playboy article. I had read her post but didn’t link the article since the website itself seemed more of a fashion and style website. Upon further investigation, the site covers news of the day, too. Megan deserves credit for giving voice to what many self-professed pro-women refused to do: condemn sexism. Read her piece here.