Although abortion is promoted as a “choice,” all too often pregnant people are pressured into abortion.

Two women who were in this situation wrote about their experiences in a pro-life book by Kathleen Winkler called When the Crying Stops: Abortion, the Pain and the Healing.

Legal Loophole Allows Abortion before Roe v. Wade

Maria is the first victim of a coerced abortion. Maria wanted her baby but was pressured to abort by her boyfriend. She says, “I told him that I didn’t think abortion was right and that it wasn’t what I wanted.”1

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Despite her wishes, he continued to argue:

I got daily pressure from Sam. “When are you going to do something?” he’d ask. “You have to do something soon, or it will be too late.” I remember at that point being terribly afraid that I would lose him because I wasn’t doing what he wanted me to do.2

This was before Roe v. Wade, but Maria was able to have a legal abortion anyway. All she had to do was meet with a psychiatrist:

[The psychiatrist] asked me a list of what seemed like standard questions. If I didn’t answer them “correctly,” he told me what I should have said and asked the question again…

He wrote on a piece of paper that I was incompetent to have a baby, and that’s how the illegal abortion became legal.3

Giving in to “Two Male Authority Figures”

At the abortion facility, Maria tried to back out:

I remember telling the [doctor doing the abortion] that this wasn’t really what I wanted, but he said that this was the best solution to my problem. “What would your  mother and father say if they knew?” he asked.

All through my growing up years I’d been taught to respect doctors, that they would always do what was best for me. I remember thinking that he must be right, that this must be the best solution to my problem.

I was mesmerized by these two male authority figures —  my boyfriend and my doctor — and I did what they told me to do.4

A Traumatic Abortion followed by Serious Complications

Maria had a saline abortion, a type of abortion that is seldom done today because it is so dangerous to the mother and resulted in so many live births.

In a saline abortion, a caustic salt solution is injected into the uterus, which burns and poisons the fetus/baby. The mother then goes through labor to deliver her dead baby.

Maria recalls being in a bed surrounded by other women waiting to deliver. She heard crying and moaning all around her. It took 12 hours for her to expel her child.

She recalls,

“I called the nurse; she put the baby into a steel container and took it away… I knew it was a boy.”5

After the abortion, Maria suffered severe complications. The saline solution caused a massive infection, and her kidneys failed.

She was rushed to the hospital and put on dialysis. Maria had wanted to keep her abortion a secret from her parents, but doctors doubted she would survive and suggested she call them. She remembers her father standing by her hospital bed, weeping.

When the dialysis tube was removed, Maria began bleeding internally. Her father called for a priest to administer Last Rites. When the priest heard her confession, the full realization of what she’d endured hit Maria.

She says,

“Suddenly I realized what I had done to myself, to my baby, to my parents, to the baby’s father. It was like dominoes, all the lives that had been affected by what I had done.”6

She was in the hospital for two months.

She later tried to cope by drinking to “numb the pain” and keeping herself “too busy to think.” Sam, now her husband, “kind of went crazy with his heavy drinking.” She believes guilt from the abortion and its aftermath is what led to his alcoholism.

When she and Sam tried to start a family, she discovered she couldn’t conceive. The infection had left her infertile.

Maria says,

“The guilt that I felt, guilt that I killed my only child, was extreme.”7

A Coerced Abortion by an Abusive Boyfriend

Lynette was also the victim of a coerced abortion. She was a junior in high school when she became pregnant. She says, “It was wonderful until I told Tom.” 7

Her boyfriend Tom demanded she have an abortion. Lynette protested:

At first, I was adamant. I told him that God had given me this child, put it inside my body, and I couldn’t do that to it.

That was the first time he beat me up. He told me, “You will either go and have this done, or I will beat it out of you. I’m not raising this child.”8

Even though Tom was abusive, Lynette was emotionally dependent on him. She says:

This boy was my life; I was totally committed to him… I was such a romantic. I had bought it all, hook, line, and sinker… It was going to be melodramatic and painful, but wonderful so long as we had each other. I trusted in that.9

She gave in, had the abortion, and married Tom, who continued to abuse her. Consumed with guilt, she felt she didn’t deserve a better relationship. Eventually, their marriage ended.

She married another man, and they wanted children. But she suffered an ectopic pregnancy. Doctors said the abortion could be the cause. She was unable to conceive, and her second marriage fell apart. Lynette suffered post-abortion trauma for many years. Eventually, she found healing.

An Abortion Clinic Security Guard Speaks Out

Others have noted the threat some men pose to their pregnant partners.

When employees at one abortion facility tried to pass a buffer zone law to keep pro-lifers away, the security guard who worked for them, Richard Seron, testified — in favor of the pro-lifers.

He said,

“I stood toe-to-toe with Operation Rescue. I never found their behavior objectionable in any way.”10

According to reporter Brian MacQuarrie:

[T]he former guard said, the group he considered most likely to become aggressive were the men who accompanied women to the clinic.

During his time as a Preterm [abortion facility] guard, Seron said, two young men had to be disarmed of a club and a sharp “impaling” object as they escorted women into the clinics.11

It wasn’t the pro-lifers who were a threat to women coming in for abortions, Seron said — it was their partners.

Pregnant people who abort under pressure may suffer from feelings of regret, anger, and loss afterward, as these two women did.

media, however.

Footnotes

1.   Kathleen Winkler When the Crying Stops: Abortion, the Pain and the Healing (Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Northwestern Publishing House, 1992) 118

2.   Ibid.

3.   Ibid., 118– 119

4.   Ibid., 120

5.   Ibid.

6.   Ibid., 122

7.   Ibid., 165

8.   Ibid., 165–166

9.   Brian MacQuarrie “Guard, clinic at odds at abortion hearing” Boston Globe April 16, 1999

10.  Ibid.

LifeNews Note: Sarah Terzo covered the abortion issue for over 13 years as a professional journalist. In this capacity, she has written nearly a thousand articles about abortion and read over 850 books on the topic. She has been researching and writing about abortion since attending The College of New Jersey (class of 1997) where she minored in Women’s Studies. This article originally appeared on Sarah Terzo’s Substack. You can read more of her articles here.