From the article: "There is a growing shame and stigmatization associated with abortions,"

No there is an intrinsic shame associated with abortions. It's not a social construct.
Scott W. | 10.26.06 - 9:04 am | #

The fact that a woman feels shame after an abortion is a sign that she's still alive inside. If she can actually kill her own child without a qualm...
Christina | Homepage | 10.26.06 - 9:19 am | #

Scott: if it's intrinsic, why do so many people work so hard to reinforce it?
jfpbookworm | Homepage | 10.26.06 - 9:47 am | #

jfpbookworm - easy answer for you:

There is money to be made, power to be controlled and lust of the flesh to indulge.

What about the woman in England that was deeply offended when she found out that her own aborted child was being incinerated in the hospital trash incinerator?

I think she's beginning to wake up to reality.
Chris Arsenault | Homepage | 10.26.06 - 9:57 am | #

Ohmygosh, they have to relate every holiday and occasion to abortion rights? They don't get tired of it? I mean do they go to the supermarket :

"Oh, look, the supermarket is out of Frosted Mini-Wheats and only have normal Mini-wheats. The supermarket has taken away our right to choose, just like women lived before RvW!"

Good grief
Pansy Moss | Homepage | 10.26.06 - 10:21 am | #

I wonder what creative and inclusive ways PP will come up with for celebrating other occasions? Eid, for instance.
Peony Moss | Homepage | 10.26.06 - 10:43 am | #

Actually, PP isn`t being very original. Christian evangelicals have used the "haunted house" (including abortion scenes) for years, like this one:
http://www.lufkindailynews.com/f...cxsvc=7& cxcat=5
L. | Homepage | 10.26.06 - 10:49 am | #

I agree - the idea isn't very original, but it *is* a good one, because I don't believe that everyone understands how horribly our country is and has been affected by the erosion of family planning and women's health care. The idea of things getting worse scares me a lot.
Shelley | 10.26.06 - 11:59 am | #

There is intrinsic shame associated with abortions? How on earth could you know that?

And should we just not believe those women who say they felt "relief" after their abortions? Because we, even the men among us, somehow know better than they do how they feel?!?!? Women who get abortions are so nuts they don't even know their own minds?!?!?
The Happy Feminist | Homepage | 10.26.06 - 12:41 pm | #

Can we still say "Merry Pro-Choice Christmas"?
John J. Simmins | Homepage | 10.26.06 - 12:43 pm | #

*raises a hand*

I had an abortion and I felt an ENORMOUS relief right afterwards, and to this day I feel the same relief.
Shelley | 10.26.06 - 12:49 pm | #

John J. Simmins, I think you mean, "Choice on Earth."

Oddly, the year I sent out PP`s "Choice on Earth" Christmas cards, I didn`t get any feedback on them at all.

But the following year I sent out Japanese woodblock print cards depicting a Japanese Madonna and Baby Jesus, a few people were offended, because "Jesus wasn`t an Oriental."

Go figure.
L. | Homepage | 10.26.06 - 1:07 pm | #

There is intrinsic shame associated with abortions? How on earth could you know that?

Common sense. If there was a massive attempt to indoctrinate children on up that there was no shame in abortion, and all voices to the contrary were silenced, most would still feel shame. One can't make it go away by legislative or social fiat.
Scott W. | 10.26.06 - 1:23 pm | #

I had an abortion and I felt an ENORMOUS relief right afterwards, and to this day I feel the same relief.

I will pray for you and your dead child.

God bless.
Scott W. | 10.26.06 - 1:30 pm | #

Actually, it doesn't look to be a Planned Parenthood project, by the links provided.
Angela | 10.26.06 - 1:39 pm | #

... most would still feel shame.

You`re presuming that most feel shame now.

My experience living in Japan, a non-Christian country where abortion is even more common than it is in the US (and was almost standard, a few generations ago, during the postwar food shortages), indicates otherwise.
L. | Homepage | 10.26.06 - 1:46 pm | #

But the following year I sent out Japanese woodblock print cards depicting a Japanese Madonna and Baby Jesus, a few people were offended, because "Jesus wasn`t an Oriental."

We have been sending out Asian, African, Indian Madonna Christmas cards out for years and no one ever noted that it was not Mary and Jesus.

I honestly think people would be offended by a political agenda Christmas card reagrdless of what agenda.
Pansy Moss | Homepage | 10.26.06 - 1:56 pm | #

My experience living in Japan, a non-Christian country where abortion is even more common than it is in the US (and was almost standard, a few generations ago, during the postwar food shortages), indicates otherwise.

Yes, but Japan is also riddled with depression and suicide far beyond the US. Now before someone jumps on me, I'm not at all saying that abortion is causing it, but the fact they have lots of abortions does not necessarily mean that there is no sense of shame about it. Take the Netherlands as another example--a country that has bent over backwards to remove the stigma and shame of homosexual acts. So much so that they even make prospective immigrants watch a pro-homosexual video and all but tell them, "this is how it is, get over it or don't bother coming." Even after that, the instances of depression and suicide there among homosexuals are still through the roof.

I'll grant that shame at its causes are hard to analyze, but I think one can safely dispose of the idea that the shame about abortion is caused by a bunch of uptight Christians out to lay a guilt trip on the rest of us.
Scott W. | 10.26.06 - 2:28 pm | #

Shelley said I had an abortion and I felt an ENORMOUS relief right afterwards, and to this day I feel the same relief.

I know this may be slightly off-topic, but Shelley, I'm curious as to why you felt and still feel enormously relieved. I know this is rather personal, so if you don't feel like discussing it in an open forum, or for that matter discussing at all, that's fine by me.
Chris Arsenault | Homepage | 10.26.06 - 2:28 pm | #

btw, I realize I may be unclear with my terms and a distinction probably should be made between "shame" and "guilt". That however is not my main interest. I just wanted to show that social efforts to remove abortion stigma leading to happier and mentally healthier people is a brain fart.
Scott W. | 10.26.06 - 2:40 pm | #

No, Christina, it's all right- I am okay discussing something openly like abortion because I have a very close relationship with my supportive family and this happened so long ago that we've hashed it out so much already.

I was 21, got pregnant while I was in an abusive relationship, and the abuse got worse when "he" found out I was pregnant. I thought it would change things since at first he really wanted the baby, but he continued to beat me severely and still expected me to work two jobs (plus side bartending gigs) to support him while exhausted, bruised, and carrying his child. I started using crystal meth amphetamines in order to keep my jobs, and became further isolated because of all the stress and strain.
I told him I wanted to abort the baby because I was so physically ill and unable to cope, and he didn't seem to care as long as he was taken care of.
A co-worker took me down to get the funding from the state to pay for the abortion because I had no money, and barely could afford the bus fare to get to work, since my abuser stole all my money, including tips I made, and then would beat me for being so stupid as to not have any money.
I needed proof of pregnancy so I went to what turned out to be a CPC - and there I was verbally abused and told I was going to burn in hell if I decided to get an abortion. I don't know how those people get away with that - but compared to what I was already dealing with at home from my abuser they were small potatoes. I got the proof and got out of there.
I went down to the local clinic and it wasn't busy that day, thank goodness. The people did an ultrasound and the fetus was 11 weeks (this I knew) and male. I knew the choice I made to abort probably saved my life, because the abuse was getting so much worse every day that I was pregnant. I hear the stats about pregnant women being abused more often, and I can attest to that with my experience.

After the procedure I went into heart failure and it became known later that had I carried to term I most likely would have died from a rare heart condition I didn't even know that I had.

After I was finished aborting my baby I felt such a sense of relief that I would not be tied to my abuser for the rest of my life because of a child I never intended to conceive. I was able to eat again (I'd become anorexic and malnourished), and I put my abuser in jail and left him and didn't look back.

I know this is hard to understand but I felt alone and was unable to do anything but SURVIVE. If that makes me a murderer to the rest of you then I have nothing else to say except that you can take a flying leap. Until you've been in MY shoes, don't you DARE to judge me. I'm not ashamed of saving my own life over the life of a baby that would have killed me one way or another. I'm lucky to be alive and to have been able to escape that situation semi-intact.

That's all I have to say about that.
Shelley | 10.26.06 - 3:12 pm | #

Shelley -

What a horrible situation to have been in and I'm glad you survived.

Query: had you not been abused and since you didn't know about the heart problem, would you have kept your child?
Drusilla | 10.26.06 - 3:34 pm | #

So once again, we should encourage the killing of more poor and minority feti? What part of eugenics do they not understand?
C.J. | 10.26.06 - 4:57 pm | #

Wow, Shelley -- glad you made it through all that, and sorry you had to go through it at all.

Scott W., since I was the one who brought up Japan, I will just add that its sky-high suicide rate has risen since 1998 even as the number of abortions has slightly dropped, and that men account for about three-quarters of the total each year.

The country has just begun to pull out of a deep and complicated economic slump -- hopefully the rate will go down as the country`s outlook brightens.
L. | Homepage | 10.26.06 - 5:05 pm | #

Shelley,

I look at the images in Dawn's link to Priests for Life, and I have to judge.
Am I to ignore the horror of abortion and keep my mouth shut, lest I get too judgemental?
Leif | 10.26.06 - 5:58 pm | #

In the City Paper's description of the "Nightmare" presentation, we're told that some of the displays or events will "show gorier illegal-abortion scenes."

I suppose this is in relation to the legal abortions, shown in the Priests for Life link...
which are, what, not gory?
Leif | 10.26.06 - 6:12 pm | #

My experience living in Japan, a non-Christian country where abortion is even more common than it is in the US (and was almost standard, a few generations ago, during the postwar food shortages), indicates otherwise.

Japan has temples that do MASSIVE business selling rites to appease the aborted child; many, many people who have abortions perform these rites.
Mary | 10.26.06 - 8:04 pm | #

Drusilla: IF I hadn't been in an abusive relationship, and IF I didn't know that just giving birth could end my life, then yes, I probably wouldn't have been taking serious drugs that would harm the baby, and gone through with it.
Anyone who goes through with an abortion doesn't do it lightly, that's for sure. There are so many people who talk about using abortion as birth control, and I say those people have never had one. They are awful, terrible, invasive and painful procedures that hopefully everyone can avoid through the use of birth control, and in cases of rape, the morning-after pill. I would do anything to spare women the agony that I endured to save my own life.
Shelley | 10.26.06 - 8:18 pm | #

Japan has temples that do MASSIVE business selling rites to appease the aborted child; many, many people who have abortions perform these rites.

Interesting you should bring that up, Mary. Those Buddhist rites are for mizuko, which include not just aborted fetuses, but also miscarried/stillborn ones, as well as infants who die in the first few weeks of life.

After I had a miscarriage, I made my husband swear not to tell his mother, because I was afraid my mother-in-law would have a jizo statue erected somewhere -- and those things give me the creeps!
L. | Homepage | 10.26.06 - 9:51 pm | #

Hmm, and I wonder if they'd be also willing to show also the malpractice and negligence going on right under their noses during legal abortions? If anyone's interested in documentation, Christina's site is a good source
http://realchoice.blogspot.com
and I've doon some researching myself and returned results for malpractice during 2004-2006.
Rachael | Homepage | 10.26.06 - 10:34 pm | #

Arg, my typing is horrible :-P I ment to say "done", not "doon". Please forgive my mistype.
Rachael | Homepage | 10.26.06 - 10:35 pm | #

Shelley, yeah, it'd be horrible if things like this stopped happening.
Christina | Homepage | 10.26.06 - 11:32 pm | #

THF, Death Row is full up with people who have no remorse. Is that the kind of company we ought to be encouraging women to keep? Those who can kill without a qualm?
Christina | Homepage | 10.26.06 - 11:33 pm | #

Shelley, you were in a dreadful, horrible situation and I think it's a shame you had to resort to something as dreadful as abortion to try to cope.

Here's a parallel -- there were rumors going around in Nazi-occupied areas that relief organizations were giving preference to orphans when evacuating Jewish children. After hearing these rumors, many Jewish moms killed themselves in order to orphan their children and help them get out of the country and escape the Nazis.

Do we look at what those moms did and say, "Oh! Wow! Suicide is a good thing! We need to facilitate it and eliminate the stigma!" Or should we look at it a a sign that we need to prevent people from being put into such a horrible predicament in the first place?
Christina | Homepage | 10.26.06 - 11:39 pm | #

Anyone who goes through with an abortion doesn't do it lightly, that's for sure. There are so many people who talk about using abortion as birth control, and I say those people have never had one.

Shelley, I listened to years and years of National Abortion Federation meeting tapes. In one session, counselors were lamenting "repeaters" -- women that come in again and again for 6, 8, 10 and more abortions. One counselor complained that in her clinic, they regularly saw a woman who had simply selected abortion as her method of birth control -- she told them so up-front.

BTW, after the counselors had hashed out their feelings that this just wasn't right to use abortion so causally, the moderator gently but firmly scolded them for "judging". Any reason for choosing abortion, she reminded them, was just as legitimate as any other reason.

So yes, it does happen.
Christina | Homepage | 10.26.06 - 11:43 pm | #

Oh -- and the woman who had announced that abortion was simply her preferred method of birth control? TWENTY FIVE ABORTIONS. How her reproductive tract could have endured it is a mystery, but then some women have a dozen or more kids so I guess some women's bodies are more resilliant than others.
Christina | Homepage | 10.26.06 - 11:46 pm | #

Christina, I`m amazed that YOU, of all people, would compare having multiple abortions with having multiple children, in ANY way -- even just to innocently compare the strain on a woman`s body! :)
L. | Homepage | 10.26.06 - 11:57 pm | #

Quote: "Until you've been in MY shoes, don't you DARE to judge me. I'm not ashamed of saving my own life over the life of a baby that would have killed me one way or another."

I'm very happy you are alive, and also very sad your baby is not.

I have to tell you, I understand life-threatening consequences to a pregnancy, and so do my online friends. You see, I had a high-risk pregnancy this year; I could not eat or drink anything -- anything -- without vomiting it up, along with bile and blood. The condition is called HG -- you can find more info about it, and an online community of sufferers at www.helpher.org.

Many of my friends on that site have aborted much-wanted babies because they were going into renal failure, in the ICU, weighed less than 90 lbs, or many other life-threatening situations.

But more of us have mananged to pull through whole, and with our babies.

I have to say, though -- the women who aborted did so as an absolute last resort, trying everything posible to avoid it. And most feel intense grief about the decision.

So I have mixed feelings about your story. I have not walked a mile in your shoes, and can only imagine the horror you went through. But when my online girlfriends berate themselves for aborting because their kidneys had failed and dialysis wasn't working....

I don't know where I'm going with this, honestly. I'm pro-life, but after HG, I at least understand the motivation behind aborting to save your own life. But I'll close with this: I must point out the baby wasn't killing you, your circumstances or your heart condition combined with poregnancy was. This is a distinction we HGers make ALWAYS. It wasn't the baby's fault, but he paid the ultimate consequence. This fact breaks the heart of many a mother with a potentially fatal pregnancy condition.

I wish you well, and hope you will accept my prayers for you and for your little one -- safe in the arms of Heaven.
Cin | 10.27.06 - 2:30 am | #

I said in response to Scott W.'s statement that there is an intrinisc shame associated with abortion:

There is intrinsic shame associated with abortions? How on earth could you know that?

And should we just not believe those women who say they felt "relief" after their abortions? Because we, even the men among us, somehow know better than they do how they feel?!?!? Women who get abortions are so nuts they don't even know their own minds?!?!?

Scott replied:

Common sense. If there was a massive attempt to indoctrinate children on up that there was no shame in abortion, and all voices to the contrary were silenced, most would still feel shame. One can't make it go away by legislative or social fiat.

Short Scott: MY assumption about how women feel must be true because that's how I think they SHOULD feel."
The Happy Feminist | Homepage | 10.27.06 - 6:13 am | #

Shame requires a conscience.
Some have one, some don't, and some have a bit of one left that just requires a little refreshing of the values it needs for finding Peace.

Collin

http:// evangelicalperspective.bl...ve.blogspot.com
http:// philosophyforChristians.b...ns.blogspot.com
Collin | Homepage | 10.27.06 - 8:41 am | #

"The country [Japan] has just begun to pull out of a deep and complicated economic slump -- hopefully the rate will go down as the country`s outlook brightens."

Not to get too far off topic, but Japan also has the lowest child-per-parent ratio in the world. Japan, as well as most of Europe, is so far below the replacement birth rate that it is at a level from which no civilization has ever recovered.
Andy | 10.27.06 - 11:01 am | #

Shelley, what you have related is so very sad and it is painful to think about. It is also a much needed reminder that desperate women have often had precious few real choices. That is simply not nearly as true today and, as your story reminds us, we need to continue to make completely untrue.
Colleen | 10.27.06 - 1:17 pm | #

...a level from which no civilization has ever recovered.

This makes it sound as if the entire nation is about to vanish, when all it means is that it will change. Japan will have to get over all its cultural/racial purity hang-ups and allow in more immigrants. I`m doing my part, though -- we produced three little Japanese citizens. :)

By the way, according to a slew of surveys, the Japanese have the least amount of sex of any nation/culture on earth -- so their dropping birthrate is largely due to abstinence.
L. | Homepage | 10.27.06 - 6:43 pm | #

By the way, according to a slew of surveys, the Japanese have the least amount of sex of any nation/culture on earth -- so their dropping birthrate is largely due to abstinence.

And you want to move back there?

J/K. ;)
Pansy Moss | Homepage | 10.27.06 - 7:46 pm | #

Well, Pansy, my husband is Japanese -- so no matter where I go....there we are.

I`ve said before on this site that among our various forms of contraception, we rely mostly on our "barrier" method -- a four-year old sleeping right between us. I would bet that this supports abstinence more effectively than any relgious devotion.
L. | Homepage | 10.27.06 - 8:09 pm | #

I`ve said before on this site that among our various forms of contraception, we rely mostly on our "barrier" method -- a four-year old sleeping right between us. I would bet that this supports abstinence more effectively than any relgious devotion.

Tell me about it. :)
Pansy Moss | Homepage | 10.28.06 - 12:50 am | #

It struck me: PP's House of Horrors would be full of disabled and minority babies.
Christina | Homepage | 10.29.06 - 7:05 am | #

I've got to quibble with the "pregnant women get abused more" comment. I suspect what is missing in that stat is UNMARRIED pregnant women get abused more. I've been pregnant... with my husband's children... eight times now and never been abused in the least. He respected me enough to want to marry me and make a commitment before he got into my bed. A man with self control and love like that is WORTH making babies with!
federoff9 | 10.30.06 - 10:26 am | #