A Healthy Abortion Regret

Written By: Mark Crutcher

President of Life Dynamics

The South Carolina legislature is considering a bill to require that every woman seeking an abortion be shown a sonogram of her unborn baby before the abortion is performed.

Naturally, the choice mafia is fighting this legislation viciously, having long ago recognized that it’s better to keep their customers in the dark until the money is in the bank.

One important benefit of this legislation is its ability to reduce emotional trauma in women.  Today, all across America, post-aborted women are coming forward to say how much they regret their decision to have an abortion.  In fact, there is a rapidly growing organization of these women called Silent No More Awareness.  Many of the women involved with this group say that if they had seen an ultrasound image of their baby before the abortion, they would have made a different decision. 

The abortion lobby responds by claiming that most women don’t regret their abortions. 

Of course, they offer no proof of this, but even if it is true it is irrelevant.  Lack of regret relates to the morality and the conscience of the person acting not to the rightness of the act.  If some pervert sexually assaults his neighbor’s five-year-old daughter, whether he regrets it or not has nothing to do with the fact that it is indefensible for grown men to have sex with five-year-old girls. 

Now, if we really want to see the role that regret plays in the abortion issue, I suggest we survey women who have dealt with unplanned pregnancies in their past. 

Let’s ask those who aborted if they now wish that they had given birth, and ask those who gave birth if they now wish they had aborted.

In fact, let’s challenge the abortion lobby to start publicly identifying women who allowed their children to be born but now say they wish they had killed them through abortion.  The result will be that for every such woman they trot out, we could produce an avalanche of women who are living with debilitating guilt and regret over their abortions.

Needless to say, abortion defenders are never going to accept this challenge, but that doesn’t really matter.  My point is proven by the fact that there are literally thousands of support groups in the United States to help women overcome the emotional train wreck of abortion, but no one has found it necessary to start even one support group to help women deal with the emotional trauma of letting their children live.

That’s because there is no psychological trauma associated with not killing your child.  After more than 30 years of legalized abortion, the one thing we know for certain is that regrets about abortion are only experienced by women who have them, not by those who don’t.

When women come forward to express their anguish over abortion, many reveal that they have needed years of counseling in order to deal with the guilt and regret of their decision.  In other cases, it is obvious that these women are still traumatized by their abortions and may be so for the rest of their lives. 

In a breathtaking display of gall, some abortion defenders say that the pro-life movement is responsible for these emotional problems.

Their argument is that these women would be fine if it were not for us constantly harping about abortion being the murder of a baby and showing pictures of the corpses.  Apparently, these people not only prefer their customers to be in the dark before their abortions they would also like them to be kept there afterwards.  They probably figure that having a bunch of women running around the country crying about their abortions could be bad for business.

For those abortion defenders who do not promote this “ignorance is bliss / the pro-lifers are to blame” philosophy, the normal reaction to women who say they were emotionally injured by abortion is to simply dismiss them.   Some claim these women had emotional problems before their abortions, while others assert that they developed their problems afterwards for reasons that had nothing to do with abortion.

To date, no one has explained how these people know all this.  Evidently, the rest of us are supposed to just blindly accept that the more enlightened members of our society (ie: those who are pro-choice) intuitively understand that emotional trauma following abortion is some sort of cosmic coincidence that only befalls women who were already a little loopy to begin with.

Meanwhile, the hidden irony in all this is that women who regret their abortions may actually be more mentally healthy than those who don’t.

Think about it this way. 

In modern America it would be all but impossible for any sane and intelligent person to be unaware of the biological fact that abortion causes the death of a child.  Given that, it is certainly reasonable to speculate that any woman who could submit to abortion and not be emotionally traumatized by the experience is either abysmally stupid, a psychopath, or someone with profound psychological problems.

This also applies to those people who have encouraged, arranged for, referred for, facilitated or forced women to have abortions.  Just because they may not express – or even feel – regret over the children they helped to execute, they are as responsible for their deaths as the women who climbed onto the tables and put their feet in the stirrups.  In fact, in some cases they are even more responsible.  The woman may have been tricked or forced; the same defense cannot be made for the enablers. 

In the final analysis, the question is whether America has degenerated into the kind of place in which adults can hire serial killers to butcher helpless children, have no remorse about it, and still claim to be both morally and mentally healthy. 

If that is where we are, then ours is truly a nation without hope.  Only God knows – and only time will tell – if that is the situation.  Until then, the pro-life movement will continue to fight this holocaust with all the resolution and commitment necessary for victory. 

As for the significance of regret or lack thereof, we should remember that Adolf Eichmann went to the gallows saying he had no regrets about his role in the Nazi holocaust.  However, his cold-blooded lack of remorse did not justify the slaughter of millions who perished in Germany’s death camps.  Nor will anyone’s cold-blooded lack of remorse over abortion justify the slaughter that continues to claim millions in America’s death camps.

This article was originally published on ProLifeAmerica.com under the name A Healthy Regret.