January 31, 2010, Matthew Cochrane, Further Reflections on 37 Years of Legalized Abortion
Sorry I’ve been away for awhile. Since this month marked the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I thought I would share some more thoughts on legalized abortion:
In their gut-wrenching article “
Mugged by Ultrasound”,
The Weekly Standard’s David Daleiden and Jon Shields write about the intense emotional trauma the brutal practice leaves on those who perform abortions.
In general, abortion providers have censored their own emotional trauma out of concern to protect abortion rights. In 2008, however, abortionist Lisa Harris endeavored to begin “breaking the silence” in the pages of the journal Reproductive Health Matters. When she herself was 18 weeks pregnant, Dr. Harris performed a D&E abortion on an 18-week-old fetus. Harris felt her own child kick precisely at the moment that she ripped a fetal leg off with her forceps:
Instantly, tears were streaming from my eyes—without me—meaning my conscious brain—even being aware of what was going on. I felt as if my response had come entirely from my body, bypassing my usual cognitive processing completely. A message seemed to travel from my hand and my uterus to my tear ducts. It was an overwhelming feeling—a brutally visceral response—heartfelt and unmediated by my training or my feminist pro-choice politics. It was one of the more raw moments in my life.
Sadly, the article relates Dr. Harris is still in the abortion industry. Fortunately, many others are not. The
article continues:
In 1990 Judith Fetrow, an aide at a Planned Parenthood clinic, found that disposing of fetal bodies as medical waste was more than she could bear. Soon after she left her position, Fetrow described her experiences: “No one at Planned Parenthood wanted this job... I had to look at the tiny hands and feet. There were times when I wanted to cry.” Finally persuaded to quit by a pro-life protester outside her clinic, Fetrow is now involved in the American Life League.
Of course, there are many other converts from the abortion industry. Last fall, Abby Johnson gained national attention after she quit her position as a director of a Planned Parenthood clinic in southeast Texas after watching an abortion procedure via ultrasound. Mike Huckabee interviewed Johnson after her decision:
In an excellent
post, Kevin DeYoung lists laws in
all fifty 37 different states that define a person to include the unborn . He then concludes:
On January 22, 1973 the Supreme Court, in Roe v. Wade, determined that abortion is a “right in the concept of personal ‘liberty’ embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause; or in personal, marital, familial, and sexual privacy said to be protected by the Bill of Rights or its penumbras.” In the 37 years since Roe, 50 million unborn children have been killed in their mother’s womb–more than a 9/11 massacre for 13,514 straight days.
“They show that the work of the law is written in their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus” (Romans 2:15-16).
David Mathis tackles the high abortion rate of unborn babies diagnosed with birth defects:
Haiti happens every day in the world's abortion clinics, where 130,000 human lives are destroyed. In the United States 3,000 die daily, crushed in the earthquake of abortion (more than the 2,976 who died in the 9/11 attacks).
With the advent of widespread prenatal testing availability, a kind of "eugenics by abortion" is growing, as parents kill their disabled offspring at a horrific rate. As Wesley Smith writes, "Americans may heartily cheer participants in the Special Olympics, but we abort some 90 percent of all gestating infants diagnosed with genetic disabilities such as Down Syndrome, dwarfism, and spina bifida."
Dr. Russell Moore talks about the connection between abortion and adoption: