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STATEN ISLAND, New York, November 26, 2004 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In a recent column, Father Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, reveals that, contrary to pro-abortion propaganda, abortion leads to a greater tendency to child abuse.  Abortion advocates’ “reasoning went something like this,” Fr. Pavone explains: “if unwanted children are aborted, then only wanted children will be born, and since wanted children are less likely to be abused, then child abuse will decrease in a land of abortion on demand!”

But “Since the legalization of abortion, child abuse has increased,” he says. “The promise had a fatal flaw in it, namely, the assumption that unwanted children are more likely to be abused.”  Fr. Pavone points to the work of E.F. Lenoski, who reported in 1976, that “the opposite is actually true. Abuse is more likely to occur among ‘wanted’ children.”

Fr. Pavone says Canadian psychiatrist Philip Ney’s work corroborates Lenoski’s: “When I investigated the relationship between child abuse and abortion and reported a direct correlation, people were angry and astonished,” Ney wrote in his book, Deeply Damaged.

“It appeared that the rate of child abuse did not decrease with freely available abortions. In fact, the opposite was true. In parts of Canada where there were low rates of abortion there were low rates of child abuse. As the rates of abortion increased, so did child abuse…Indeed, it is a vicious cycle. That is, parents who have been involved in abortion are more likely to abuse and neglect their children. Mothers and fathers who were abused as children are more likely to abort their child.”  Dismembering a child, born or unborn, is about the most horrific abuse possible, Fr. Pavone argues. “Allowing the abuse of an unborn child, then, creates an atmosphere in which—more quietly and secretly—we justify the abuse of born children,” Fr. Pavone writes. “The two forms of child abuse—on the unborn (abortion) and on the born—reinforce each other by a mutual causality.”  Fr. Pavone goes on to explain several reasons why abortion might lead to an increase in child abuse. Read the full column, in two parts:  https://www.priestsforlife.org/columns/columns2004/04-11-15abortionchildabuse1.htm   https://www.priestsforlife.org/columns/columns2004/04-11-23abortionchildabuse2.htm   tv