Women Denied the Right & Choice of Grief

Don’t Cry

The worst offender of women’s health & liberation is the abortion industry. One of the saddest aspects of modern society is the flagrant and callous disregard for women when it comes to the topic of abortion. Reflect on the fact that over 50 million women worldwide every year are not allowed to grieve for their dead children. It’s a big number, so just imagine that it’s your mother, wife, sister, or daughter who has lost a child she was pregnant with; but she was culturally forbidden to talk about or acknowledge that child or her struggle to cope with her loss and grief. Now imagine your best friend also has a close relative who was denied the right and necessity of deliberately mourning the passing of a member of her family from the intimate safety of her womb to the next life. NOW multiply that to 50 million personal stories of tragedy, tragically stifled and repressed. It’s a big number, but every single number is a sad story.

Yes, this is happening in the poorest parts of the world where democracy, social justice and civil rights are often trampled in a self-perpetuating culture of abuse, violence and corruption – places where women and children are commonly devalued and exploited for the advantage of others with more power. Equally tragically, but more surprisingly, denying the basic and irrepressible need to grieve a deceased child is also systematically denied to women in the “progressive”, enlightened and advanced societies where civilisation means equality, welfare, opportunity, empowerment, advantage and education for women and children – places like Australia, America, England and Japan. These emotions are natural and necessary, and must be processed healthily for the basic emotional and psychological health of the woman and her impact on the family and community around her.  So why are we telling women to not cry or grieve the children lost to abortion?

Why?

If you have had an abortion, or if you have been part of the decision or process resulting in an abortion, the most confronting and offensive thing to do would be to mourn the “termination”; because to do so would be to admit the facts abortion victims (providers, advocates, and families) are furiously trying to deny: there is a valuable human life within the mother’s womb – this is a child.  Without being intentionally insulting, facts are the last thing an abortion victim wants to deal with.  It’s an inescapable fact that the baby is human.  It’s an inescapable fact that life is present from the moment of conception, evidenced immediately by growth and phenomenal development, and additional evidences mounting very early in that development such as:

• Your baby has unique DNA from conception
• At 18 days old, your baby’s heart begins to beat.
• Your baby has a basic brain and spinal cord from 3 weeks.  Her own blood type is being pumped through a closed circulatory system.
• At 6 weeks old, brainwaves are measurable, his skeleton is complete, and reflexes are present.
• Your baby’s face, arms & legs, fingers & toes form and your baby can move and sense touch in weeks 5 to 8.
• At 11 weeks pregnant, your baby is breathing spontaneously, all body systems are present, and she can swallow, mover her tongue, and make a fist.
• At 18 weeks, this tiny, precious human life has working vocal cords and can cry.

The fact of human life from conception is basic science.  Many internationally-known geneticists and biologists have formally testified that human life begins at conception. In 1981 a USA Senate Judiciary Subcommittee held hearings on the very question: When does human life begin? Dr. Hymie Gordon, Chairman of the Department of Genetics at the world-renowned Mayo Clinic, said: “By all the criteria of modern molecular biology, life is present from the moment of conception.” Dr. McCarthy de Mere, a medical doctor and law professor at the University of Tennessee, testified: “The exact moment of the beginning of personhood and of the human body is at the moment of conception.” Dr. Jerome Lejeune, known as “The Father of Modern Genetics,” also testified that human life begins at conception before the Louisiana Legislature’s House Committee on the Administration of Criminal Justice on June 7, 1990. Dr. Lejeune explained that within three to seven days after fertilisation we can determine if the new human being is a boy or a girl. “At no time,” Dr. Lejeune said, “is the human being a blob of protoplasm. As far as your nature is concerned, I see no difference between the early person that you were at conception and the late person which you are now. You were, and are, a human being.” [source]

So What?

Grief and mourning following a death in the family is a universally expected experience. Abortion is a death experience in which one’s personal choice does not negate, but rather adds to the suffering. If this mourning process is blocked or impacted, there will always be negative consequences. But there is natural guilt and remorse associated with the decision to end a pregnancy. Every fibre of the mother’s being is naturally compelled to protect and nurture her children, never more so than in the womb – thus the perceived need to maintain secrecy. But women are pressured to present for an abortion during the first three months of the pregnancy because later abortions may not be available at the local abortion clinic due to their higher risk of complications, and also to safeguard her secret. As a society & community, deliberate violation of the sanctity of life is also naturally horrific, no matter how much “progressives” try to rationalise such realities away. As such, guilt and shame are equally natural, and not mere social constructs or culturally exclusive phenomena. In other words, it’s normal and healthy to feel bad about killing unborn babies. The unnatural denial of this grief and mourning is the fabricated and forced approach, and consequently has severe and lasting damages on the mother of the child.

The relationship with the father of her child, typically the most supportive relationship available to a mother, often ends abruptly because he does not know how to accept her in her distraught state, or because they see themselves as accomplices in bringing about the death of their child. Regularly occurring events such as Mother’s Day, the anniversary of the abortion, the date the child would have been born and subsequent birthdays, seeing a child of the age her child would have been, holidays with an empty place at the table, the birth of another child, another death in the family, may trigger an overwhelming torrent of grief, guilt and remorse. Society offers her no support for her grief. Unlike other deaths, there is no funeral service, no grave to visit, no consolation from friends and relatives who most often are unaware of her secret abortion, or may have even urged her to submit to the abortion and paid for it.

“Give sorrow words, the grief that does not speak
knits up the o’er wrought heart and bids it break.”
~ Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Act IV, scene 3

The abortion industry and its advocates are so manipulative in their war on women & children that they have to change the definition of words in an ongoing but inspired effort to deny the realities that demand they end their holocaust on the unborn. 50 million clinically murdered unborn children every year now is the greatest human rights atrocity ever perpetrated (no small accomplishment), and the last thing the regressives want us to do is to wake up to find this nightmare is real. So they change the language, and thus perpetuate a war of attrition on our social conscience with propaganda as the weapon.

• Instead of calling themselves “pro-abortion”, they call themselves “pro-choice“. They wilfully ignore the fact that of the two indisputable human lives involved only one is being given any choice, and it’s not the one whose life is at stake.
• Instead of acknowledging the personhood of the human life in the earliest stages of development within the safety of the mother’s womb, they dismiss the inalienable & transcendent right to life itself, and call themselves “women’s rights” advocates, consequently trampling on children’s rights.
• Instead of acknowledging the past and factually complete (from the moment of conception) event of reproduction, and the necessary destruction of that human life to effect a termination of the mother’s pregnancy, they prefer to describe the act of abortion as a “reproductive right” – as if time and reality can somehow be rewound like a video and the baby never have existed, and the reproduction have not yet occurred.  But that bell cannot be unrung, and that egg cannot be unfertilised.  The same people discard that logical fallacy the moment an endangered species of eagle has its nest robbed, now calling it destruction of life.

Why then does the abortion industry avoid discussing the health & progress of the woman’s baby? Because it’s bad for feminism, and it’s bad for business – and the abortion industry is very, very profitable.  The biggest abortion provider in the world, Planned Parenthood, exceeded a BILLION dollars in annual revenue in 2007 [source]. Everything about the abortion industry is frantically geared toward misinformation, disempowerment, and wilful ignorance of the multitude of negatives surrounding abortion. It’s a well-established and widely acknowledged fact that having an abortion significantly increases a woman’s risk of breast cancer. But despite the massive amounts publicised about breast cancer and awareness of detecting and minimising its occurrences, this is not included in the public education. There are many, many more negatives surrounding abortion, and I have quoted them below for your information – because surely if empowering women is the goal, making an informed choice is the method.

I’ve heard women discuss the secrets of childbirth, and comment on how the older women who had been through it failed to tell them about the gross and unpleasant things. They are seeking the credit for their ability to balance the facts and make an informed decision. How much more so should the champions of “choice” be telling women about the negatives of abortion?

How well did your abortion “counsellor” tell you about abortion grief/trauma? At present understood to be a type of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), abortion grief tends to (but not always) have a delayed onset of months and even years. The cardinal features are denial and suppression: most people do not consciously connect the problems they are experiencing with their abortion. Symptoms and severity will vary with individuals, but can include [source]:

Self destructive behaviours

• suicidal behaviours
• alcohol and drug abuse
• eating disorders
• self injury
• abusive relationships
• risk taking behaviours
• workaholicism
• setting self up to fail

Relationship problems

• marriage and family breakdown
• difficulty bonding with children
• child neglect / abuse / over protective
• sexual dysfunction
• domestic violence
• with friends/work colleagues

Replacement pregnancies

• repeat abortions
• the atonement child

Mental health problems

• postnatal depression
• anxiety attacks
• obsessive compulsive disorders
• addictions
• phobias
• depression, mood swings
• personality disorders
• emotional breakdown
• hallucinations – hearing voices or babies crying, seeing child at would be age.

Other symptoms

• chronic anger or rage
• frequent crying
• lowered self esteem
• chronic fatigue
• inability to concentrate
• headaches, chest or abdominal pains, gastrointestinal symptoms
• flashbacks
• feelings of impending doom
• sense of hopelessness
• self isolation
• inability to be around pregnant women, babies or small children
• unable to hold down a job / make decisions

It’s worth mentioning the ludicrous logic that an abortion will somehow improve the psychological recovery of a rape victim, which is a lie so pernicious it beggars belief how any conscience could be so seared as to seriously offer it as credible argument. This topic is too broad to begin to tackle the solutions as well in this article, which is primarily intended to highlight the issue around the ignored issue: the emotional health of post-abortive women.  However it is worth at least a brief paragraph on the very important issue.

Healing & recovery has its greatest possible foundation in the doctrine of Divine grace. The unconditional forgiveness found in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on Calvary. Don’t simplistically dismiss the potency and efficacy of the revelation that there is complete forgiveness and redemption in the atoning work completed on the cross. There’s nothing more we can add to this by our own efforts, and certainly nothing we can do to diminish it. Every counsellor worth their salt will agree that emotional health includes the foundational belief that, “I’m okay, and you’re okay.” That and more is the message of the Gospel of Grace. Simply receiving that forgiveness and resolving to make Jesus Christ your personal Saviour and Lord is the most profound step one could ever take to freedom from guilt and shame.

But before even that can aid the post-abortive mother’s recovery, the fundamental acknowledgement of the wrong done must occur before the consequential guilt, shame, hurt and wounds can begin to be healed.  And that is where the profitable abortion industry is the abortion victims’ greatest opponent.

 

A moving video highlighting the pain of memories actually lived by the leading lady involved:

Accurate imagery of the development of human life… if science is important to an informed choice: