Women – Victims of Abortion?
Lynda Allison Doty Ph.D
There was a day when abortions, like drugs, were illegal, expensive, and certainly not government funded. This discouraged most women from having them. There was so much cloak-and-dagger stuff, they gave up the idea and went on to have their babies and worked at being good mothers.
Hold on now while I open a vein. A long time ago, I had an abortion. Deep down, I really didn’t want it. But I didn’t think of it as murder. Fetal development is not something the typical person goes around thinking about, and I guess you could call me typical at that time in my life.
It was 29 years ago, funny that I haven’t forgotten it. No back-alley stuff for me. Ninety percent of illegal abortions were performed by doctors, and the man who performed mine was a highly reputable physician. In a safe and sterile office.
But a few hours later, the realization of what I had done overwhelmed me. The little “non-person fetus” (current terminology) I held in my hand had fingers and toes and a complete little male body, and–I’ve learned since then–a heart that had been beating and a brain that had been functioning. I also learned that my little son could feel pain and that he had suffered mercilessly.
When I turned and walked away from my abortion, I buried it deep within me. There had been no problems, no complications, so I expected that was the end of it. Actually, it was only the beginning, but I couldn’t know that then. My experience, along with counseling other women, has led me to this conclusion: if we have abortions, we are killing our own flesh and blood offspring. And if we kill our own flesh and blood offspring, we will one day come face to face with it. It does not matter one iota whether the abortion is legal or illegal.
So where are all these women like me, experiencing this devastation? We don’t know; we simply do not hear about them. And God forbid, we don’t want to hear about them. It breaks my heart to watch as “liberated” women are herded off like mindless cattle, thinking they are in charge–believing they are in control of their lives, their destinies, their decisions, when, in reality, they are victims of a paternalistic, oppressive society.
The so-called feminist leaders led us down this path once before, into La La Land. Too late, American women are coming to the shocking realization that we have been duped. Then, as now, it was easy to fall prey to feminist propaganda because we had been brainwashed all our lives into letting the authorities do our thinking for us. And so we over-reacted. We rose up and banged on our chests and shouted rah rah! We’re independent now! I am reminded of the little bumpersticker passing me up on the freeway. It said, simply, “Are we having fun yet?…”
Are we really independent when we follow so blindly? Seduced, coerced, intimidated into abortion when actually we might prefer to explore other options. Made to feel foolish and selfish, we let others take the reins of control. We permit them to determine what is “best for us,” all the while thinking we have a choice. What kind of choice? Between what, and what? Because after all is said and done, the choice is simply this: to have a dead baby or a live baby.
Some choice. In spite of pro-abortion propaganda, even the official Senate report of our 97th Congress (1981), concedes that physicians, biologists and other scientists agree that conception marks the beginning of human life. The abortion industry has had to invent its own terminology. You can’t tell a woman she’s going to be chopping up her baby, she’ll likely change her mind. So a baby becomes a “fetus;” kill becomes “termination of pregnancy;” abortion becomes “procedure;” and so on ad nauseam. Doublespeak.
Our country was founded on faith in God and on moral, biblical principles. These have been tossed by the wayside one by one, until America is rapidly losing her love for the sanctity for life. The ends are justifying the means. Where are we headed? Financially, abortion is a cheap way for society to sweep troubled women under the rug. Abortion is a women’s issue–not of rights, though, but of oppression. The fight to stop abortion is not an attempt to deny pregnant women their free choice, but rather it is a promise to care enough, and to take time enough to help them find better alternatives. It is a promise, it is a gem of hope that sparkles along an otherwise dark and dreary path. It is the way to integrity and feeling good about ourselves as women in relation to the world around us. That’s what it’s all about.
