July 29, 2011 (HLIWorldWatch.org) – How many genuine rights do people exercise on a daily basis that lead them to feel painfully guilty?
One Dublin, Ireland mother who believes women have a “right” to choose abortion recently gave an inside look at the immense guilt and emotional pain that she experienced when an Irish Mail on Sunday reporter traveled with her to the UK to abort her child.
Lorraine (not her real name), an unemployed mother of two, says she chose abortion for financial reasons. According to the news report of her experience published in the UK’s Daily Mail, Lorraine repeatedly made statements that she believed she was doing the right thing and would not regret her decision, but that she felt extremely guilty about destroying the life inside of her.
“I have no choice,” she said. “I feel terrible about it now but I will get over it, it is the right thing for me to do. I have absolutely no doubts.”
“I’m in a state of abject terror now,” Lorraine later told the reporter. “I’m terrified about going through this. It’s been a rollercoaster – I’ve been sick all night. I’m totally covered in spots. I haven’t slept in weeks.
“I wish I was never in this situation. I don’t care what anyone says – you can’t judge someone in this position until you’re in it yourself. I know I’ve made up my mind but that doesn’t stop me feeling awful,” said the determined young mother.
After the procedure, she added “I feel hugely guilty – guilty for keeping it a secret and guilty for what I’ve done. But I don’t regret it. In time the guilt will go.”
Huge guilt without regret. This is the sort of schizophrenia required to rationalize the horror women suffer in the name of “reproductive health” and “choice.” What is insane is that the abortion industry promotes this schizophrenia in the name of “women’s health.”
Planned Parenthood tells women, “Most women feel relief after an abortion,” and that there is “no such thing” as post-abortion psychological trauma. Even though Planned Parenthood itself admits that “severe emotional disturbance” can follow an abortion in women who have “conflict over abortion,” they completely downplay this emotional harm in an effort to deceive women into thinking that abortion is no big deal.
Marie Stopes International, where Lorraine went for her abortion, similarly tells women that most will feel a sense of relief after the procedure.
Lorraine said the baby’s father, who is no longer with her, supported the decision: “He understood my decision but said he would support me either way but I know he wanted me to have an abortion, he just didn’t say it. No one ever wants to say something like that.”
This statement reveals two maddening clichés that deserve notice: both the unsurprising revelation that a man who used a woman for sex supports her decision to eliminate the natural consequence of sex, and thus his public culpability; and the fact that the other person who shares responsibility for the situation is treated as irrelevant by the advocate journalist. Feminism again exculpates the sort of men that make feminism attractive – men who use women and leave them.
Pro-abortion advocates are constantly trying to convince women who are considering an abortion that there is not a living person inside of them – that the baby is just a clump of cells, or that he is not even human until birth. On its website where it explains the abortion procedure, Planned Parenthood can’t bring itself to mention what every pregnant woman knows: that there is a human being already inside her.
“Either a hand-held suction device or a suction machine gently empties your uterus,” according to the Planned Parenthood site. Gently? And what exactly is removed?
Pretending that there is no baby, and that abortion does not end a human life keeps the abortion industry in business, and for some, it may help alleviate some of the guilt and suffering of having an abortion. But as Lorraine’s story shows, those who understand the reality of abortion, even supporters of the “right” to abortion, realize just how wrong it is, as manifested in Loraine’s severe guilt.
As the Blessed John Paul II tells us in Evangelium vitae, “To claim the right to abortion…and to recognize that right in law, means to attribute to human freedom a perverse and evil significance: that of an absolute power over others and against others. This is the death of true freedom.”
Reprinted with permission from HLI World Watch.