Dear Gina, You're Helping Women Kill Their Babies

I'm writing to tell you that your article hasn't helped women one bit. In fact, I think it's fair to say that it may have hurt many women who were unsure about having an abortion. Since reading your article, I've been wondering how you'd respond if a friend told you she was unexpectedly pregnant. I guess you'd wait to see how she felt about it before congratulating her. What if she told you she wanted to keep the baby? (Because, as you may be aware, the entity within the womb, whether it is embryonic, or foetal, is a baby. It's the fully-human offspring of its parents.) Sidewalk advocates see women like this fairly often: ambivalent women who are more likely to change their minds outside an abortion facility. Far from being absolutely sure that they want to go ahead with ending their pregnancies, women like these are there because they feel they have no other choice. They may be under pressure from boyfriends, husbands, parents or employers. No-one really wants to help them with a new baby. No-one cares enough to commit to standing by these women through their pregnancies. Everyone offers  the same, easy solution - abort the child.

So, what would YOU do?

Would you offer to drive her to her doctor? Would you phone her health insurance provider to see if she's  covered for the birth? Would you help raise the funds if she had no insurance - even to thousands of dollars? Would you drive her to Centrelink to see about her entitlements? What if you woke up to a text that says she wanted to reverse a medical abortion? Would you ring around and find help for that? If she was being thrown out of her home due to her pregnancy, would you offer to take her into your home? Would you find her baby equipment and clothing? Would you go to court with her if she was having legal issues? Or would you simply say, "It's your decision"? "It's your decision" lets you off the hook. No late-night phone-calls, no rearranging your schedule, no inconvenience to you. You may even have the making of another article about how you supported your friend through her abortion. Bonus.

The difference between the two responses above is the difference between the pro-life community and the pro-abortion one. The pro-life community offers women all those things mentioned above - either personally, or through our networks. We make sure that women have everything they need to continue with their pregnancies. Because deep down, that's what most women actually want to do. Strip away the feminist diatribe, the ranting about autonomy and rights, and you'll find the fundamental womanly desire to nurture life. Now, I know pregnancy can be scary. Childbirth can be very scary. So is the prospect of being a single mother. But, you know what? Lots of things in life are scary. Serious health issues are scary. Financial problems are scary. Divorce is stressful and scary. There are many, many very difficult challenges that human beings have to face throughout their lives. But we don't normally solve our problems by killing people. Except when it comes to tiny little pre-born people. Why is that?  

That Little Thing Called Science

At one point in your article - I think it was right between dismissing the pro-life Christians on the basis of their pro-life Christianity and mocking them for trying to help women - you called on an abortionist for her expert analysis of the Perth pro-lifers' literature. This doctor - someone who makes money from killing babies - went to great pains to point out that an 11 week foetus lacked some of the qualities of a fully-formed foetus. I'm sure my young children are capable of making that comparison. It's obvious that a child in the womb lacks certain features of a born child - that's why it needs to remain in the womb until term. But nothing about this phenomenon makes the foetus less than human. For example, below is a picture of a 10 week foetus, taken from the NSW Uni Embryology website. Of course, I wouldn't dare use any evidence from a pro-life website - somehow when we try and prove our position using science, empirical facts mysteriously morph into fake news. The little entity in this picture may lack certain features of a grown child, but it doesn't exactly scream 'blob of cells.' I can't just dismiss this as a non-sentient being who won't feel pain, should it be dismembered in utero. What about you? The Death of Journalism

Gina, I'm mourning the days of investigative journalism. Once journalists would expend their energy on researching facts and interviewing all those involved in a story. But it's far easier to throw together a quick article and add in a quote from a sympathetic abortionist or two. It's obviously way too onerous to search through the hundreds of pro-life websites to read the treasury of data collected there: testimonies of women who changed their minds right inside an abortion facility (there's one right here on my site), tragic testimonies by women whose lives were devastated by their abortion/s (eg this story), or stories by women who were helped by pro-lifers on their way into having their baby aborted (stories like this one). No, it's clear that there's an ideological abyss which makes it very difficult for abortion advocates and anti-abortion advocates to dialogue - let alone trust one other. Speaking from the anti-abortion side, I can say that in my experience, people who kill babies for a living aren't too worried about telling the truth. If you can justify dismembering babies, then the idea of absolute truth becomes fairly flexible. I've even sat in a courtroom, and listened to the 'expert testimony' of an abortion worker who repeated the same tired half-truths about pro-lifers. And I'm not the only pro-lifer to have witnessed this kind of thing. Those ideas are basically breathed in and out by indoctrinated progressives without a second thought.  

The comprehensive counselling that has a few holes.

I'll leave for the moment the fact that you completely discounted information printed by pro-life Christians, simply because they're, well, pro-life Christians. And I'm not going to touch the abortion-breast cancer link in this article. So let's just look at a couple of points which supposedly bring some credibility to those people who make money from infanticide - and don't think for a moment that any of these specialists are opposed to the idea of killing babies up to the day of their birth. Take the abortion-nurse, Leigh Clifton, saying that her staff aren't compelling women to abort. While that may be true in some cases, or even the majority of the time, many women tell the pro-life community after their abortion, that they had been visibly upset, even crying on the abortionist's table. Yet, the doctors still went ahead with the procedure. Do you think that's a responsible course of action? Others tell us that they would never had gone ahead, had they known how devastating the impact of an abortion would be: this was clearly NOT articulated by staff at the abortion facility. Instead, women are told they may feel 'a bit sad', but that this will be mixed with relief and not last long. Tell that to the poor women who suffer for years, even decades, after their abortion: they describe it as a pivotal event in their lives - and not in a good way. Then there is evidence of failure to adequately counsel, as given by the abortion providers themselves. In my article, "The Australian Abortionist Who Wants America's Dead Babies", I quote from an ABC documentary which followed the daily routine of a suburban Melbourne abortion facility. The interviewer asks,

“Is it part of the deal that if you trust people to make their own decision, that they might sometimes do something that you may not really like?”

The abortionist, laughs and answers:

“Absolutely! That is absolutely part of the deal. Like there are some times when you think, ‘given what you’ve told me about your life, I’m not sure personally that this is the right thing for you to do. But I absolutely respect your right to make that decision. And that you have much more information about that than I’. And that, ultimately, yeah, it’s her decision to make.”

Given that an abortionist stands to make between $600 and $7700 from aborting the child of the woman sitting in front her, it's little wonder that her 'counselling' is so superficial. Maybe a used-car salesman is happy to sell to the couple who are already up to their eyes in debt - it 's not his business how they make their repayments. Should there be any more pressure on an abortion provider to counsel ethically when the life of a child hangs in the balance? Abortion nurse Clifton continues:

"Our role is to provide the most accurate and up to date information applicable to their individual case and provide the counselling and emotional support in a non-judgemental setting for them to then make their own decision."

How strange that nowhere in this supposedly comprehensive counselling is information about the many support systems available for pregnant women - information which is provided by the pro-lifers standing outside the facility. This is the very information which is ridiculed and relegated to the bin by staff. 

What Pro-Lifers Actually Do

Gina, this has been written many times, but for your benefit I'm going to write it again: pro-life people aren't only concerned about babies. In fact, here is the link to an article by a pro-lifer that actually once appeared on Buzzfeed. Somehow, it has mysteriously disappeared from the site. Censorship much? Choice? Diversity of opinion? Or maybe it just didn't fit the narrative of the Hateful Christian Bigots and their intimidatory tactics? Yes, we sometimes stand outside abortion facilities, praying or approaching women and sometimes offer them brochures or flowers or chocolates or other gifts. This is exactly what you have condemned the pro-lifers outside the Midland facility for doing. They were simply trying to reach out to women who were unsure about their abortion. And often these women were given misleading information about what an abortion entails. This is a phenomenon that is way more common than the abortion industry likes to admit. Want yet anther example of the pitiful counselling given to women before an abortion? Read this article about the abortionist who referred to a black hole on an ultrasound image - but failed to mention the tiny baby resting there!

Let's not blame the journos.

Now, I don't blame you for promulgating these falsehoods. You've been schooled in the progressive curriculum of the age, and have been trained to discredit Christians without a thought. You may one day be the recipient of an award for Services to the Development of Safe-Access Zones. [On its back will be engraved 'Disservice to the Preservation of Free Speech.'] It's likely that you haven't spent much time either outside an abortion facility, or inside one, for that matter. You probably haven't seen the Sterihealth truck taking away the remains of so many tiny little human beings who weren't deemed worthy of remaining safely in their mothers' wombs. You also haven't seen the glazed-over look of the women who come outside after their abortion.  

While the Media Talks the Talk, Pro-lifers Walk the Walk

Gina, I hope by now you're starting to see that there's no way the pro-life community could be described as being just 'pro-foetus.' Everything we do is aimed at providing mothers, and sometimes fathers, with the support they need to continue with their pregnancy. Our assistance is tailored to the mothers' needs - whether she is a student, or working, or needs to leave a destructive relationship, or has legal problems. We don't separate the mother's needs from the child's needs - it is the abortion industry that does that. Their approach is the opposite of holistic - it is atomistic. As one Perth pro-lifer told me:

What woman dreams of having an abortion? They simply don’t. Women do not want to have abortions. The pro-life advocates that stand outside the abortion clinic offer one last life line to the mother to help her out of a situation she never wanted to be in.   Why would it be in the interests of the abortion industry to ensure that all the women that go into their clinics are fully informed of all their options? It’s most definitely not in their interest because that knowledge would cost them clients.

  Abortion destroys the bond between mothers and children by physically destroying the child. How anyone can think this would take no emotional toll an a woman is beyond me. Abortion advocates who lobby tirelessly for buffer-zones fail to acknowledge that no amount of distance between pro-lifers and abortion facilities will stop the suffering that women endure afterwards. Exclusion zones won't exclude abortion's aftermath. But beyond the adult detritus of abortion is an even grimmer picture: abortion is the biggest human rights catastrophe of all time. It is state-funded, state-sanctioned, eugenic killing. Maybe it's time to put that in a headline.