"Julie" speaks truth ("Abortion Should be a Personal Choice", 22 November) when she says "choosing to abort a child is a deeply difficult psychological choice that haunts women for the rest of their lives". In fact, research shows that many women (64% in one study) feel pressured into abortion. Problems multiply after the procedure. Studies find higher rates of suicide among post-abortion women (600% higher in two studies from Finland), higher probabilities of depression (65% in one American study), and greatly elevated rates of drug and alcohol abuse (500% higher in one study). Physical problems, including sterility and perforated uteruses, also come along with abortion. Indeed, abortion is hard on women. Julie is right that abortion can bring a "personal hell", physically and psychologically and spiritually.
Julie says that she would never have an abortion herself. That is good. She continues: "but my choice should not be inflicted on others." If you have the 22 November copy of the Times nearby, look at the photo in the centre of Julie's letter. It has a photograph of "A foetus sucking his/her thumb in the womb". The choice of abortion is always "inflicted on others"-namely, the child growing in her mother's womb. Abortion aims to kill that child. Abortion is an extreme form of inflicting a choice on others.
Julie says "there are millions of unwanted children who grow up to be unfeeling adults as they have never been cared for-no one loved them." In fact, the United States has a list one million couples long of husbands and wives who want to adopt a child. Approximately one million children get aborted in that country each year. I suspect that most, if not all, unplanned pregnancies could be absorbed by loving couples eager for a child. There are unplanned pregnancies; there are no unwanted children.
Let us spare women and children the trauma and death of abortion. Let us give women life-affirming support in crisis pregnancies. No to abortion; yes to life.
Rudy Poglitsh via e-mail
Here is some stuff we worked up but did not put in the letter to the Times.
Julie makes some interesting points, but I am not sure how valid some of them are. For example she says, "I believe in a woman's right to choose what happens to her own body and no one should interfere with that right." Now that seems to make a lot of sense until you think about other situations. What about if you have a woman with two healthy kidneys. For some reason she decides that she wants to cut out one of them and throw it into the garbage can. Is that a "right" that everyone would acknowledge? For her to excercise that right, can she force a doctor to do an unnecessary operation to remove that kidney? What about the doctor's right to only do things that help her patients? If someone wants to kill themself we don't say, "Oh, they have a right to choose what happens to their own body." We restrain them and keep them from harming themselves.
Julie also says that a woman should have a right to an abortion but "she should also be ready to take on the personal hell that abortion can bring. The karma associated with taking another life is a massive burden." I appreciate that Julie acknowledges that abortion is the taking of another's life, but I don't see how that should make it legal. On page 7 of the same paper (22 November, Thursday) a judge sentenced a man to jail for 35 years for killing one woman and raping another. If we applied the same idea that Julie is advocating, we would have to say that murder and rape will bring you personal hell and bad karma, but we should not restrict someone else from doing them. We should make it legal, but just encourage people to know that they will suffer a personal hell if they choose to excercise their right to murder or rape someone else.
Julie is afraid that an unplanned child will become an unloved child who will become a menace to society. But abortion contributes to unloved children. Many women who have had abortions suffered difficulties bonding with the children that they later have. The guilt and personal hell that Julie refers to affects not just the woman, but all of her children. A good friend of mine said that he felt his own life was so arbitrary because he knew that his mother had aborted a sibling. "It could have been me." This did not contribute to him growing up feeling loved or safe.
If someone wants to harm themselves and another person, the loving thing to do is to prevent the harm.
