The Truth About Abortions

The first time I ever heard the word "abortion" I was eighteen years old. That was in 1973, the year the Supreme Court of the United States declared abortion not only legal; but a "fundamental right" of women according to the Constitution.

For 184 years the best legal minds in America had studied that same Constitution, and somehow no one ever saw anything about abortion in there. It was deemed an issue for the People to decide through their elected representatives before the ruling by the Supreme Court in 1973.

The Court couldn't find abortion in the Constitution either, but claimed they saw it in the penumbras and emanations of the document—that's clouds and gasses.

When I first heard about the Supreme Court decision, I had to ask: "What is abortion?" When I was informed, I was aghast. I come from a large family and had been around plenty of pregnant women in my day. They would invite me to "feel the baby kick" and talk about how "the baby is moving around a lot these days." Even the newly pregnant would say, "I'm going to have a baby!" with genuine excitement. I couldn't imagine any mother would kill her own baby. Kill them they did—55 million and counting.

As with the other evils that have befallen mankind, this one has at its roots some whopping lies. We know all about these lies now because the man responsible for making them up—and for killing 75,000 babies himself as an abortion doctor—has repented for his crimes against humanity and come forward with the truth.

Dr. Bernard Nathanson was the co-founder of the group credited with legalizing abortion, NARAL (National Abortion Rights Action League). This group began a propaganda campaign in 1969, and in only four years overturned the state laws against abortion that had been duly legislated.

Dr. Nathanson tells how he and his friends did it: "We persuaded the media that the cause of permissive abortion was a liberal, enlightened, sophisticated one. Knowing that if a true poll were taken, we would be soundly defeated, we simply fabricated the results of fictional polls. We announced to the media that we had taken polls and that 60 percent of Americans were in favor of permissive abortions. This is the tactic of the self-fulfilling lie. Few people care to be in the minority.

"We aroused enough sympathy to sell our program of permissive abortion by fabricating the number of illegal abortions done annually in the U.S. The actual number was approaching 100,000, but the figure we gave to the media repeatedly was 1 million. Repeating the big lie often enough convinces the public.

"The number of women dying from illegal abortions was around 200-250 annually. The figure we constantly fed to the media was 10,000."

About 440 women died per year during normal childbirth in hospitals, so the dangers of illegal abortions had to be blown out of proportion to sway public opinion.

Nathanson continues: "Another myth we fed the public through the media was that legalizing abortion would only mean that the abortions taking place illegally would then be done legally. In fact, abortion is now being used as a primary method of birth control in the U.S. and the annual number of abortions has increased by 1,500 percent since legalization."

One key ingredient to this propaganda was —as it always is with propaganda—to change the words used in the abortion debate. The basic idea was to change a crime into a "right." This is why Nathanson made up the term pro-choice to replace abortion rights; medical procedure to replace the word abortion itself; as well as the slogans "It's my body" and "Reproductive Rights." This is to allow people to mentally avoid thinking about dead babies by the tens of millions, and to focus instead on choice and rights and who decides. Nathanson says, "I remember laughing when we made those slogans up."

New technologies were developed in the 1970s, including the real-time ultrasound, which caused Dr. Nathanson to have a profound change of heart. I'll let him explain: "As a result of all this new technology—looking at this baby, examining it, investigating it, watching its metabolic functions, watching it urinate, swallow, move and sleep, watching it dream, which you could see by its rapid eye movements via ultrasound, treating it, operating on it—I finally came to the conviction that this was my patient. This was a person! I was a physician, pledged to save my patients' lives, not to destroy them."

Dr. Nathanson later made two incredible films that documented actual abortion procedures, The Silent Scream and Eclipse of Reason. The latter film shows a third trimester abortion as the living baby is torn apart in the womb piece by piece by surgical instruments (you have be physically strong to do this). The baby stops fighting for its life after its brain is sucked out and its head crushed. Then the parts are put together like a puzzle on a table to make sure they didn't leave any of the baby's body inside the mother.

Some babies are killed by a saline solution. This is a violent death, as the baby kicks and fights because he is being burned to death. Sometimes they are born alive and left to slowly die in a cold steel tub. Perfectly formed, beautiful little babies. One prominent abortion doctor quit after he began to feel like a paid assassin—a hit man.

Why would a sane people allow babies to be tortured and murdered in cold blood? Pro-Abortionists took a page out of Nazi Germany's playbook to obtain acceptance. Just as the Jews were dehumanized to the German citizenry; unborn babies were dehumanized to the American public. And therefore disposable. Pro-Abortion advocates are in deep denial.

The Supreme Court bears much of the blame for this "American Holocaust." By legalizing abortion they made it acceptable and moral to the public. Societal approval reduced or eliminated the psychic cost of terminating the unborn. To accept abortion you must accept that only if a woman wants the baby does he or she then suddenly have any value.

Partial-birth abortion involves a baby being killed while three quarters of its body is dangling outside the womb. It is killed by crushing its skull and removing its brain while still alive, and in unspeakable pain. One federal judge, after listening to days of testimony by medical experts, described this procedure thus: "the court finds that the testimony at trial and before Congress establishes that [partial-birth abortion] is a gruesome, brutal, barbaric, and uncivilized medical procedure."

Abortion doctors were asked by the judge if they ever considered administering anesthesia to the baby. He noted that "Some of the plaintiffs' experts testified that fetal pain does not concern them, and that they do not convey to their patients that their fetuses may undergo severe pain."

So the pain of the baby registered no concern; it did not matter; there is no empathy for the baby; the baby does not count. I find this interesting when we consider that Social Liberals do care about pain inflicted on animals, and even vandalism to inanimate objects, but not about horrific pain inflicted on purpose, with malice and forethought, onto human babies marked for liquidation.

The Democratic Party is the party of death. For decades they refused to allow candidates to run for office under their banner who were Pro-Life. This was not always so. In 1987, Al Gore wrote that abortion is "the taking of human life."

In 1971, Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy said this:

"It is my personal feeling that the legalization of abortion on demand is not in accordance with the value which our civilization places on human life. Wanted or unwanted, I believe that human life, even at its earliest stages, has certain rights which must be recognized—the right to be born, the right to love, the right to grow old. On the question of the individual's freedom of choice there are easily available birth control methods and information which women may employ to prevent or postpone pregnancy. . . When history looks back to this era it should recognize this generation as one which cared about human beings enough . . . to fulfill its responsibilities to its children from the very moment of conception."

The position of the Roman Catholic Church regarding abortion is: "Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. . . Since the First Century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and is unchangeable. . . Abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law. . . Life must be protected with the utmost care from the moment of conception: abortion and infanticide are abominable crimes." St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas both condemned abortion.

For this stance, the Catholic Church has come under constant attack from an outfit that named itself "Catholics for a Free Choice," founded by one Frances Kissling. This organization has spent tens of millions of dollars on propaganda that claims Catholics support abortion. But there are no Catholics in the organization. This is typical of leftist propagandists. They do not believe in truth and therefore feel no compunction to be truthful.

Catholics for Free Choice is supported by Hugh Hefner, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and other Atheistic foundations. Kissling stated: "I spent 20 years looking for a government to overthrow without being thrown in jail—I finally found one in the Catholic Church."

This subversive organization sends out pamphlets—that appear to be from a legitimate Catholic affiliate—to Catholic teenagers that declare abortion is not a sin, nor does it require Confession, the direct opposite of the teachings of the Catholic Church.

Robert George wrote: "At no point in its development was the human being that now is an adult a different substance, being or thing than he or she is currently." A human being is a human being from conception to death.

Not all Pro-Abortion people disagree with this assessment. Princeton professor Peter Singer argues for infanticide stating: "It must be admitted that these arguments [for abortion] apply to a newborn baby as much as to the fetus. . . If we can put aside the emotionally moving but strictly irrelevant aspects of the killing of a baby, we can see that the grounds for not killing persons do not apply to newborn infants."

Singer also thinks children should be bred to kill them in order to harvest their body parts. That is where this train is going.

Women who seek abortions change their minds two thirds of the time if they first view an ultrasound of their baby. This is why Pro-Abortionists have tried to block every attempt by state lawmakers to have women who seek pregnancy counseling to be required to see the ultrasound images. After all, women who do not seek abortions often tack the ultrasound photo of their children on their refrigerators and show them to all their friends. It is obvious that they consider the image to be that of their child.

As Dr. Nathanson observed: "There is no longer any serious doubt in my mind that human life exists within the womb from the very onset of pregnancy . . . human life of a special order is being taken in the process of abortion. . . Abortion must be seen as an interruption of a process which would otherwise have produced a citizen of the world."

Women who have had an abortion commit suicide six times more often than women who have never purposefully killed one of their babies. Abortion is not a solution to life's problems. Abortion is not worthy of our approval. Abortion hurts women. It does not free them; in many cases it enslaves them emotionally for life.

I have known a number of women who've told me that every year they light a candle, say a prayer, or spend the day in solitude because this was the due date of the child they aborted. Many times they named the child and they say to me, "This would have been Bobby's birthday."

Let's face it folks: the vast majority of abortions are merely the killing of babies for the convenience of the mother. It is practiced as an escape from a prime responsibility of life: the consequences of one's own actions.

I used many resources to assemble this Hub, including magazine articles from First Things and Touchstone. The primary book I used is The Politics of Abortion by Anne Hendershott. Another book I used extensively is The Marketing of Evil by David Kupelian. Here is what that book has to say about the unborn:

"A human baby, from the moment of its conception—and as the delicate and ethereal fabric grows with its tiny, perfectly formed fingers and toes, little heartbeats, little lips, little ears, shrouded peacefully in its mother's womb—is undoubtedly the crowning glory of creation. . . . It is indisputable that even in utero children have a nervous system and feel real pain. Their nerves and pain receptors don't suddenly switch on the moment they exit their mother's womb. They feel the abortionist's scalpel, forceps, suction devices, skull crushers, and other torture implements used in the various abortion procedures."

There can be no denying that abortion is killing. Try as you like, but what is inside a pregnant woman is most definitely alive; after an abortion it is dead. To say that this is nobody's business except the pregnant woman is to deny that historically to deliberately kill an individual has never been a matter of moral indifference.

It cannot be plausibly denied that what is killed is human. Non-human fetuses do not magically become human at the moment of birth. Abortion is the killing of a human being with unique DNA—a person with 23 chromosomes each from its father's sperm and its mother's egg. From conception to birth, to teenager, to adult to old age, it is not a series of different individuals replacing each other. It is not potential life but life with potential.

Some try to tell me that it is only a human person when it can survive on its own. How old is a child when it can truly survive on its own, 12?

Some try to tell me that abortion prevents children from being born who are illegitimate, or will only have a life of poverty and child abuse. But since abortion was legalized, the rates of illegitimacy, child poverty, and child abuse have increased dramatically, not fallen.

Some try to tell me that abortion is only used in cases where the mother is traumatized. But 43 percent of abortions are performed on women who have had at least one before.

A 1987 survey by the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute shows why women choose abortion. The number one response, given by 76 percent of the women is: I am concerned about how having a baby could change my life.

Less than 1 percent said they were a victim of rape or incest; less than 1 percent said the fetus could have health problems. In other words, the baby represents a potential social problem for its mother.

With the exception of rape, there is no such thing as an "unwanted pregnancy." There are women who wish they weren't pregnant; and men who wish their women weren't pregnant. But all pregnancies are the result of intentional actions that have found their natural, logical result.

Contraception does not change the nature of this action. In fact, it makes the actors more aware that what they are doing makes babies in accordance with the natural functions of sexual organs. The problem is not that the body has failed but that the body has succeeded.

The right to kill their babies is hailed by feminists as a great empowerment of women. Those empowered are actually men. Only after the right of all women to have as many abortions as they wish, for any or no reason at all, became the law of the land, could men separate sex from fatherhood.

Even a radical feminist such as Catherine MacKinnon recognizes this: "Abortion facilitates women's heterosexual availability. In other words, under conditions of gender inequality [abortion] does not liberate women; it frees male sexual aggression. The availability of abortion removes the one remaining legitimized reason that women have had besides the headache. . . . right to privacy looks like an injury got up as a gift . . . virtually every ounce of control that women won [from legalized abortion] has gone directly into the hands of men."

Many men are in favor of legalized abortion for the simple reason that they don't want to use condoms, which unquestionably diminishes sexual pleasure for men. This puts the postmodern woman in a trick box. If she tells her boyfriend she is Pro-Life, he may leave her for a woman who is Pro-Death, particularly if he is only interested in gratification and has no serious intentions with the woman. A Pro-Life woman is at a distinct disadvantage in the sexual marketplace. If she goes without the condom to compete with Pro-Death girls, she may get pregnant by a man who doesn't love her.

Abortion rights have directly led to the rampant promiscuity we see in America today. Since there is this way out from the natural consequences of hooking up with multitudes of near strangers, sex is expected of unmarried women as never before in human history.

Abortion rights have led directly to the explosion of sexually transmitted diseases among Americans. In the 2003 study "The Effect of Abortion Legalization on Sexual Behavior" its authors noted:

"Unwanted pregnancy represents a major cost of sexual activity. When abortion was legalized in a number of states in 1969 and 1970 (and nationally in 1973), this cost was reduced. We predict that abortion legalization generated incentives leading to an increase in sexual activity, accompanied by an increase in sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Using Centers for Disease Control data on the incidence of gonorrhea and syphilis by state, we test the hypothesis that abortion legalization led to an increase in sexually transmitted diseases. We find that gonorrhea and syphilis incidences are significantly and positively correlated with abortion legalization. Further, we find a divergence in STD rates among early legalizing states and late legalizing states starting in 1970 and a subsequent convergence after the Roe v. Wade decision, indicating that the relation between STDs and abortion is causal. Abortion legalization accounts for about one‐fourth of the average disease incidence."

Before abortion was legalized it was understood that if a man got a woman pregnant, he was obligated to marry her. Men feel no such obligation today. No wonder the Playboy Foundation has long been such a heavy financial contributor to the abortion cause.

Children have always been a natural consequence of sexual intercourse, even when contraception was available (since it fails quite often). Abortion changes everything. Now some men insist that it is a woman's "fault" if she allows an inconvenient person to be born—when she could have opted to kill it instead.

Eighty percent of these killings have been perpetrated by unmarried women. 4 out of 10 conceptions result in an abortion today. I find it interesting that the fathers of these babies—their natural heirs to carry on their genes and bloodline through the centuries—have no say in their extermination. In other words, if a child is killed it is none of a man's business—but if a child is born it becomes the man's business for another eighteen years in the form of child support.

Every medical manual states that the unborn child is a separate patient of the doctor. A baby is not a part of its mother; it is not an organ like a liver or a lung; it is to be protected inside of its mother during its period of gestation, but it is never a functioning part of a woman's body.

Abortion is the most common "medical procedure" in the United States today. Yet it is the only medical procedure not shown to the public on television. Photographs of what aborted babies look like are met with fierce wrath from Pro-Abortion people.

One of the most common reasons for an abortion is that the mother and father broke up recently. Ostensibly, abortion is committed for the health of the mother—but this can mean she would be depressed if she couldn't go to the bar as often with her friends while pregnant or after the child is born.

Even the old main line churches adopted official pro-choice positions after they stopped believing in the central tenets of their own religion (they are dying out as a result).

The war over abortion rages on. 52 percent of the American public are now pro-life—the highest number in decades. 41 percent believe abortion is a right of every woman. No issue has so divided America since slavery.

The Pro-Abortion side is so radical that they insist children have the right to undergo an abortion not only without the permission of their parents—but without their knowledge. Not only is serious psychological damage done to the mothers of aborted babies, but also to those in the abortion industry, and the forgotten victims of abortion—the fathers of the dead babies.

The 2004 Unborn Victims of Violence Act passed by the United States Congress and signed into law by President Bush, makes a child in the womb an additional victim of more than 60 crimes if it is injured or killed at any stage of development. The Pro-Death crowd fought furiously against this act since the only exception is abortion. Obviously, this means that the baby's humanity is only denied when its mother doesn't want it.

In his speech after winning the Nobel Prize in 1986, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said:

"I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."