Abortion Hurts - Silent Rain Drops

Testify!

2009-01-06T08:11:00.000-07:00

Pro-Choice Nun Remorseful after Silent No More Leader Unveils Tyranny of Abortion

By Kathleen Gilbert
CAMPELLSPORT, Wisconsin, December 9, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - When Julie Shockley read a nun's recently published defense of the "pro-choice" ideology as a reflection of God's gift of free will, Shockley was immediately reminded of her own abortion experience - one she says robbed her of that very gift...

The full text of the story is available at:
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/dec/08120909.html

The Fall of Russia From Abortion

2009-01-05T06:57:00.002-07:00

Russia is learning the hard way. We cannot survive on the blood of the next generation.

From Rachel's Vineyard Newsletter, Vine and Branches, January 2009
Visit www.rachelsvineyard.org for more information
****************************************************************

The Key to Increasing the Russian Birth Rate?
Healing the Traumatic Aftershock of Abortion.

By Kevin & Theresa Burke

The Russian government declared 2008 to be the “Year of the Family” to fight the decline in population resulting from the highest abortion rate in the world with nearly 70 percent of pregnancies ending in an abortion. Authorities in the southern Russian City of Novorissiysk scheduled a “week without abortion” in an effort to combat the country’s high abortion rate.

Government policies to encourage child bearing have had little effect to reduce the high number of abortions. Despite all the pregnancy perks and childbearing incentives now being offered, women in Russia are not biting the bait to breed.

Dr Theresa Burke the founder of Rachel's Vineyard Ministries explores the dynamics of “Traumatic Reenactment,” the repetition of traumatic themes, feelings and actions as a hallmark indicator of trauma in her book Forbidden Grief, the Unspoken Pain of Abortion.

Dr Burke explains:

In order to understand the Russian population problem, it is essential to understand the psychological dynamic of traumatic repetition. This is directly connected to the phenomenon of multiple abortions.

In the United States nearly half of all abortions are repeat procedures...in Russia the conservative estimate is that Russian women average between 3-8 abortions. While it is true that many Russians view abortion as a form of birth control, there is a deeper dynamic at work here.

During trauma the feelings and knowledge of what is happening are so unacceptable that the mind refuses to acknowledge them. The trauma becomes fixed at a certain moment in a person’s life - dissociated from consciousness - and provides the material for subsequent post-traumatic reenactment.

Without healing and grief work following the initial abortion loss and the degrading and painful procedure, women are susceptible to cope with their painful feelings through the use of drugs, eating disorders, alcohol, drug abuse and promiscuity. These behaviors frequently lead to another crisis pregnancy, and abortion is once again seen as the best solution. Repetition is the greatest indicator of trauma.

With each abortion the individual becomes increasingly numb, more detached from their hearts, more disconnected from hopes and dreams for the future and susceptible to patterns of relational abandonment, ambivalence over motherhood, depression and anxiety. With each abortion there can be a distorted sense of mastery over the traumatic feelings…they may not be aware of feelings of loss or grief and not even be aware of a deeply entrenched self-destructive pattern of aborting new opportunities for love and life.

In many ways, women really do experience their pregnancies and their unborn children as part of themselves. When the woman destroys her pregnancy and developing child, she is also destroying an extension of herself.

If those in power want to lower the abortion rate and allow Mother Russia to recover from the ravages of abortion’s toll, there is a need to drastically increase the number of healing programs like Rachel’s Vineyard so that women and men can begin to heal from this complicated grief caused by the loss of so many children. Incentives won’t make women want to reproduce. Only healing can do that – and bring resolution to the trauma.

Russian Retreats:

Magadan Contact: Fr. Mikel Shields Frmike@magadancatholic.org

Vladivostok Contact: Christina Pavlov 4232-44-54-04

Dying to be Born

2008-09-05T07:00:00.002-07:00

Please Note - this poem is not my work, but a contribution by another post-abortive woman who is suffering after her abortion - my comments follow.

Dying To Be Born

Did they put you in a jar?
or a tube?
before they tossed you aside
in some rusty old sink
like garbage....

I'd like to call up
God
and ask Him
why...

Why
my cries were
never heard
and why no one ever cared
and why I
was left
without you.

Why
you never
had a birthday
and no songs
were ever sung
and why
you never even had
a fighting chance.

And why
the only place
that I will ever
hold you
is in the hollow of my
heart.

Then,
I would beg God
to never be
forgiven...

Fearing if I were,
somehow that would mean
I would
have to let
you go.

Just like I did
on that day
when they put you
in a jar
or
a tube
and tossed you aside
in some rusty old sink
like garbage.

There are some
who say
it does not matter...
but
I do not agree.

For I know
I would have
loved you
had I ever had
the chance
to be
your
mother.

by Merry May Brickley

*****************************************************

Note by blog author:

This poem is graphic imagery at its best. Instead of assaulting the senses, and stimulating the amygdala, that part of the brain which processes sensory perception for emotional content at a sublevel, poetry and verbal depictions approach the mind at its higher levels. We can still "see" the outcome of abortion; but we see it in a way that allows us to process it in our minds first, and not in the state of alarm which graphic pictures and sounds elicit, a state of mind that temporarily shuts down any thought process not related to fight/flight/freeze in defense of what is perceived as life threatening.

It is also a "safe" way to approach those who have already been traumatized. It may trigger visual memories, but it does not necessarily recreate them, or re-represent them straight to the already perpetually alarmed amygdala. It is a kinder, less invasive, and more effective way to approach the traumatized brain, heart, mind, and soul.

And on another note, a counselor once told me that I should not define myself by my abortion; she was kind, and meant well. But she did not understand. We do not define ourselves by abortion; abortion defines us, whether we will it or not. Read the poem again, and hear the cries, anguish, and despair of the woman who aborts against her will, and who spends the rest of her life mourning her lost child. And if you still do not believe, and you have children, then try to imagine how you would spend the rest of your life if you lost one of those children. Do you think you would be defined by it? I think you would; there would be an emptiness, a vacuum that could not be filled. And if you had a part in the death of that child, I can tell you with certainty that you would never be allowed to exist outside of or apart from that experience. It would define you, too.

*****************************************************

What have we learned here is
Love tastes bitter when it's gone.
Past yourself, forget the light
Things look dirty when it's on.

Funny how it comes to pass
When all the good slips way
And there's no around
You can remember being good
To you.

Shame,
Shouldn't try you;
Couldn't step by you,
And open up more shame,
Shame, shame.

~ "Shame," Matchbox Twenty

The APA's Review of Abortion

2008-07-30T09:50:00.001-07:00

Speaks for itself:

http://wthrockmorton.com/2008/07/25/handicapping-the-apa-abortion-and-mental-health-task-force-report/

When Everything's Made to be Broken

2008-03-01T11:14:00.004-07:00

Ministry is service rendered out of love, and with a deep respect for the person served, after the model of Jesus. Ministry is never self-seeking; ministry is giving, and it is the kind of giving in which one loves the person one gives to. To bring joy, to bring relief from pain and sorrows, to end anxiety and fear, to share what enriches - this is ministry. Ministry is not an attempt to do someone over in some preconceived pattern. It uncritically respects the individuality, taste, and life choices of the persons served, freeing them to create themselves anew. It urges, inspires, shares, supports; it never forces.

~ Fr. William Bauman, The Ministry of Music (second ed.)

So tired of the straight life,
And everywhere you turn
There’s vultures and thieves at your back.
The storm keeps on twisting
You keep on building the lies
That you make up for all that you lack.

Don’t make no difference
Escape it one last time.
It’s easier to believe
In this sweet madness
Oh, this glorious sadness,
That brings me to my knees.

~ Angel, Sarah McLachlan

“One of our Priests for Life staff brought me an amazing story this morning. He was at an abortion mill over the weekend. A man, whose child was being aborted inside, came back to pick up the child’s mom, and a sidewalk counselor showed him one of the diagrams we distribute that shows the abortion procedure…….[link to graphic images deliberately omitted by blog author]

When he saw what abortion had done to his child, he literally fell to his knees there in the street, and wept inconsolably. Police officers had to help him up.

Friends, we have to break people’s hearts about abortion. We also have to remember, again and again, the power of these disturbing images. Never doubt they work to break denial and to bring repentance and conversion.”

Priests for Life, Gospel of Life Ministries, March-April 2008 Newsletter

“…we have to break people’s hearts….”

Do we? I am going to take issue with that, and with the way this “amazing story” was related. And more, and call it arrogance on my part if you like, I offer you a warning about using such language, and such stories, and about giving people the illusion that they have to hurt those who have already hurt themselves in order to bring about “repentance and conversion.” And as I do, you should remember what drives me; what defines my entire being: it is my own broken and aborted heart, and the memory, not image, but actual memory, of my own broken and aborted child, aborted against my own will when I was a child myself, vulnerable and alone.

First, we should know more about this man, and this “amazing story.” He “wept inconsolably.” Why could he not be consoled? Hadn’t you told him first about the consolation of mercy and forgiveness for sins, and that the Lord still loved him? Was he left in a state of despair? Where is he now? Do you know, or is this evidence of his brokenness enough for you to walk away satisfied? And where is the child’s mother, who was apparently left with an inconsolable partner who could not deny the reality of their child’s murder? Do you know what he has said or done to her, or for her, as his co-conspirator in the killing of their child? Was she told about the Lord, and about mercy, and about forgiveness, or is she now, too, weeping inconsolably, and alone?

Tell us how he was brought to “repentance and conversion,” because surely you don’t intend for us to break hearts without knowing how to help heal the wound. Did he accept Christ as his personal Lord and Savior? Is he in your care now, so we can be sure he does not remain in this inconsolable state of mind, and perhaps do harm to himself or others? Why is it that the police had to help him up? Where were the hands of Christ to help him stand, the hands that you say showed him his sin, shattered his denial, broke his heart, and brought him to inconsolable desolation? Why didn’t YOU help him stand up?

Where is the love of Christ in this "amazing story?" Is it Christ-like for us to approach those who have sinned and shove the evidence of sin in their faces until we break them into inconsolable little pieces, because we are so horrified by the little pieces of children we choose to use as weapons to pierce the heart, to break the heart, to shatter the sinner? Do we lead them to despair in order to lead them to Christ? Wouldn’t it be more prudent, and more loving, and more like Christ, to lead them to the Lord first, so they will not despair and weep inconsolably?

You are priests, and friends of priests. And I am Catholic. So let’s turn to the Scriptures. In the Gospel of St. John, coincidentally our Church’s Sunday Gospel reading recently, the Lord meets the Samaritan woman by the well. He asks her for a drink. This is the first thing He does. It surprises her, because Jews did not treat with Samaritans. So the first thing the Lord did was to treat her as a friend. Then He told her about the living water, the water only He could give, the water of salvation: “..but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life,” (John 4:14). And in what has been called a classic conversion story, the woman asks Jesus to give her this water.

His reply? “Go, call your husband, and come here,” (John 4:16). He knew she had no husband, and that she had been living in adultery with more than one man. But He did not tell her what they already knew. He made no attempt to shatter her denial of sin. He didn’t shove her sin in her face. He didn’t break her heart with accusations or punitive graphic depictions of her sins. He told her about the living water of eternal life that He had to offer her, and with a simple request, gave her the opportunity to either accept Him or reject Him by the truth in her reply – we call this free will, and God will never mess with our free will to choose or reject His love because He wants children, not slaves, and after all, what is water that quenches our thirst forever, if not love?

The Samaritan woman then chooses to accept the Lord, and the living and loving water, and she honestly answers that she has no husband. Now, and only now, the Lord says, “You are right in saying ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and he whom you now have is not your husband; this you said truly,” (John 4:17-18). After He had offered Himself to her, and she had accepted what He had to offer, and after she herself had confessed her sin before Him – then, He discussed how she had sinned; then, He told her the graphic details, right down to the exact number of men with whom she had committed adultery; but only after He had given her the strength she would need to bear it. And that was the end of it. He spoke of her sins no more. We don’t know that her heart was broken. The Scriptures don’t say the woman wept, inconsolably or otherwise, which might be evidence of that. In fact, His knowledge of her sins led her to more fervent belief in Him, as evidenced by her immediate reply, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet,” (John 4:19). Her words and actions thereafter in going back to her community and talking about Him portray a woman in awe from having met her Savior, not an inconsolable woman in despair over having to face her sins.

Consider two other prominent figures in the New Testament, both of whom had their hearts broken by their own sins: St. Peter and Judas Iscariot. We know that Judas did not love the Lord; he did not accept him as the Messiah, or he would not have conspired against him. Yet we also know that after he had betrayed the Lord, he was sorry: “When Judas, his betrayer, saw that he [Jesus] was condemned, he repented and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders, saying ‘ I have sinned in betraying innocent blood.’ They said ‘What is that to us? See to it yourself.’ And throwing down the pieces of silver in the temple, he departed; and he went and hanged himself,” (Matthew 27:3-5). Judas died in despair over his sins; there was no consolation for him from the chief priests and elders to whom he confessed. He had no concept of the mercy of Christ, because he had rejected His love. He died by his own hand, broken-hearted, inconsolable, in the despair of sin, and we are taught that he wrought his own eternal damnation.

St. Peter also betrayed the Lord, by denying Him three times. But St. Peter knew who the Lord was, and had already accepted Him as his Lord and Savior: In Chapter 16 of the Gospel of St. Matthew, in reply to the Lord’s questioning of the disciples about who He was, St. Peter said, “’You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.’” And Jesus answered him, ‘Blessed are you, Simon BarJona! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven,” (Mathew 16:16-17). St. Peter knew the love and mercy of Christ; He knew Him as his Savior. Yet, as the Lord predicted, when He was brought before the chief priests and elders, St. Peter denied knowing Him, three times. When the cock crowed, and he realized what he had done, “…he went out and wept bitterly,” (Matthew 26:75). His heart was broken; but because he already knew his Savior, he did not despair in his pain. His tears were the bitterness of repentance and sorrow; but not the inconsolable, suicidal tears of despair.

In the twenty-first chapter of the Gospel of St. John, the Resurrected Lord asks St. Peter, three times, if he loves Him. Three times he replies that he does; and with each response the Lord charges him to “feed my lambs,” “tend my sheep,” “feed my sheep,” (John 21:15-17). As far as we can see from Scriptures, the Lord never mentions St. Peter’s sin of denial to his face after the fact – His asking three times if He was loved was significant – but note how subtle, again, our Lord is in leading people to be mindful of their own sins, and only after He has offered Himself to them. St. Peter was sorrowful that the Lord asked him again and again and again; but he was not inconsolable. Because with it, here is the Lord’s love, mercy, and instruction to make reparation to ease the pain of St. Peter’s broken heart. Here is the Consolation in which he trusted, which kept him from the despair and suicide that overwhelmed Judas Iscariot.

So now, I ask again, where is the love in what was done to that man outside the abortion mill, when his heart was brutally man-handled, not by the Lord, who can see and know all ends, but by mere humans, who cannot see into his heart, who cannot save him from despair without Christ? And where is the love in directing others to go out and break hearts with no more explanation than what is reprinted above? Do you not realize that some people will take this direction, and actually do it just as you describe?

Christ directs us to love others as He has loved us; where, in this Great Commandment, does He tell us to inflict pain on our brothers and sisters? But you tell us that our job is to bring those who abort to their knees in despair, so that, in their pain, they will then repent and convert. But the Samaritan woman at the well was offered salvation, first and foremost. She was given the freedom to come to the realization of her sins by herself, and by the Lord’s offer of love and eternal life. Some may take your directions, and break hearts, inflict pain, without first offering the post-abortive mothers and fathers the living water that will cleanse them and save them from their sins, and from inconsolable despair.

Why have I been obsessed about this “amazing story” and the command to go break hearts ever since it arrived in my email box? The answer is simple, and erupts from the pain of personal experience: whether we are pro-life or pro-choice - our aborted hearts are already broken. We do not need mere, mortal, fallible human beings to believe they are breaking them for us, when all they are really doing is tearing them out of our chests to show them to us. We have broken our hearts ourselves by killing our own children. It is not, and never will be, you who breaks our hearts – such arrogance. And you are not entitled to demand we show you the evidence of our brokenness, no matter your zeal or your righteous purpose. You are not entitled to jab that spear into our chests until we weep inconsolably, or scream in despair; to rip open our skulls and take out that part of our brains that wants to deny our sins and protect us from the pain; and to do all of this for your own satisfaction so you believe you know the disposition of a man’s soul, which is known only to God. We are the Lost Sheep – He will leave the ninety-nine who do not go astray to find us, and He will not do it by giving us pain; He does it by taking our pain upon Himself; by enduring the scourging and the crown of thorns Himself; by carrying the Cross for us until it drives Him to His knees; by dying for us so that we may live; by loving us, as only God can.

And here’s another news flash, which no one should need to hear from me, a mere broken woman, who chooses to show you her brokenness, and whose unending pain and grief you should hear wailing and keening from this page, which is wet with tears, in defense of all who suffer from abortion: We do not need you to “shatter our denial.” We will use our denial for as long as we choose; we will hide from our pain in our own way until we either die in despair or find the Divine Mercy of God’s forgiveness, because the Lord Himself gave us this free will, to sin or not; to either accept Him or deny Him. Our Church teaches that Faith is a gift: those who have ears will hear; those who have eyes will see; and some will weep and gnash their teeth, of their own free will. Our purpose, and some of you have been ordained for this, is to reveal Him to others; to feed His lambs; to tend His sheep; to feed His sheep.

To tend is to care – to handle His sheep with care, which means to lead them to safe pastures, to salvation, and we do not do this with a cattle prod. Shepherds guide gently; they do not use brutal force, or pain, because sheep are vulnerable, fragile, and dumb creatures who will not understand these tactics no matter how hard they are applied. Feed His sheep – give them the living water when they thirst, and make sure they are fed by Christ. I believe your command to go and break hearts will be abused, and the Lord’s lost sheep will be hurt, perhaps permanently lost, because they will run from you, run from this pain, and run from Him, because they will be hurt by their brothers and sisters in His name.

When I made my first Confession after being forced to abort my child, I, too, fell to my knees, and wept inconsolably, which will satisfy many, I’m sure. But I was driven to the ground by the lead weight of my own sins, my own broken heart, and not because anyone pushed me down. My Confessor had only asked me to speak to him, and did not tell me what to say (even though he already knew what he should hear). And I was consoled. This Franciscan priest who heard my Confession wept with me and, at least for awhile, he carried the burden of my suffering (Father Clare, may you rest in the arms of the Lord for eternity). He told me about the Lord’s infinite capacity for love. He gave me the consolation of the living water; assurances of God’s most merciful and Sacred Heart. And then, by the power of God, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, he gave me absolution for my sins. His purpose, your purpose, and our purpose, is to be like Christ, and he fulfilled his purpose with such grace in perfect emulation of the Lord that he pulled me from the despair which had driven me to my knees; he helped me stand again, with the Lord’s strength. This is Love. This is how we deal with sinners, even the ones we are tempted to hate the most; the ones we want to see punished; the ones we want to see driven to the ground; the worst of the worst: the baby killers, like me.

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted,” (Matthew 3:4).

Round Here

2008-02-09T22:29:00.001-07:00

She says, "It's only in my head."
She says, "Shh. I know. It's only in my head."
~ Counting Crows, "Round Here."

Being Knocked Up Not So Funny to Planned Parenthood

2007-10-01T07:53:00.000-07:00

“I hit my head upon the chamber door
And all the marbles rolled on the floor
And all the psychos in the ward start screaming...

I'm alright, alright, I feel alright
I never been better in my life
You know the score"

~ “Alright,” Five for Fighting

“It seemed the filmmakers gave short shrift to Alison’s decision to carry the baby to term. There’s a brief scene in which her mother implores her to ‘take care of it,’ and that seemed accurate in depicting most family conversations about abortion. Euphemisms are used, and the details of the process are never mentioned. But given the circumstances and context of Alison’s life and career, it seemed odd how we never saw her consciously consider the various options before her. Of course, then it wouldn’t have been a comedy.”

~ Vanessa Cullins, medical affairs VP at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, as quoted in the September 28-30, 2007, issue of USA Weekend.

The film in question is “Knocked Up,” advertised as a comedy about a one-night stand that results in an unplanned pregnancy, and then the unlikely outcome that these two strangers who produced the child fall in love and live happily ever after. Well, that’s Hollywood. But the USA Weekend’s DVD Insider columnist, Jeffrey Ressner, decided to consult an “expert” to make observations about the movie, its theme and its relevance to real life.

Enter Vanessa Cullins of Planned Parenthood, who is said to have “an extensive background in reproductive health issues.” Her extensive background, however, doesn’t seem to include reading her own hype.

Let’s start with the quote from above, and pick on Cullins semantics, since she's so tired of euphemisms: “…Alison’s decision to carry the baby to term.” I’ve added the emphasis, of course. Webster’s defines a baby as “an infant or young child of either sex.” “Term,” as used here, is a noun defined as “a period of time having definite limits; time during which anything lasts; duration.” If Cullins is a reproductive expert, then she should have couched her language, as do most from Planned Parenthood, and talked about the decision to bring the “pregnancy” to term. Pregnancy is the process which is terminated in abortion in standard PP-speak. In fact, Cullins is one of those credited in early drafts of the Guttmacher Institute’s most recent report on “Abortion in Women’s Lives,” which, in Chapter 4, discusses the long-term implications of “terminating a pregnancy,” not a baby. The authors assert that “too often in the public discourse, abortion is talked about in isolation from its precipitating event, unplanned pregnancy,” (page 6). Cullins is going against the Planned Parenthood grain as quoted, stating the obvious, undeniable psychological truth: it is a baby we choose to abort, a baby that we conceptualize the moment we learn we are pregnant, and not the pregnant condition itself.

A second clue that Cullins may not be as well-versed in Planned Parenthood rhetoric as they might like her to be lies in this statement also quoted in the USA Weekend article: “…Seth’’s character, Ben [unborn baby’s father], did step up to the plate to be supportive of Alison, and that was a positive thing. I was glad to see that. Unlike what so often happens in real life, the man was not left off the hook.”

Hold on now, Cullins – since when are men left off the hook in making the decision to abort? On page 9 of “Abortion in Women’s Lives,” the Guttmacher authors (assisted by Cullins, remember), report that “six in 10 [women who abort] say that they consulted with someone, most often their husband or partner, in making their decision,” (emphasis added). And what hook might that be, anyway? Abortion proponents insist that it’s a woman’s body, a woman’s choice – men have little to do with it beyond donating sperm at an inconvenient time. Cullins sounds nothing like the modern pro-abortion feminist who insists on exercising authority over her own life and body, and certainly bears little resemblance to the Guttmacher stance that “the ability to determine whether and when to bear children has become a prerequisite for women’s full participation in modern life,” (page 4). Even the title, “Abortion in Women’s Lives,” leaves no room for male participation – therefore, I ask again, what hook?

And finally, the most revealing comment Cullins makes is in the last line of the article. If the movie had considered the reality of abortion as an option and described the process, in Cullins’ opinion, “…then it wouldn’t have been a comedy.” This is an odd statement, unless we understand Cullins apparent cognitive dissonance regarding abortion better than she does herself. In the report she helped draft, the Guttmacher Institute claims that “for most women, the time of greatest distress is likely to be before an abortion; after an abortion, women frequently report feeling ‘relief and happiness,’” (page 24). But according to Cullins, had this movie, “Knocked Up,” ended with abortion, there would have been no laughter; no happy ending, the anticipated result in all but the blackest of comedies. Where’s the joy and laughter that should accompany the free exercise of a woman’s choice to terminate her pregnancy (sorry, baby)? After all, isn’t laughter a universal response when we feel relieved and happy? Instead, Cullins actually acknowledges that there is nothing funny about abortion. Killing one’s own unborn child is serious business.

To give her some credit, Cullins has actually seen the movie. I haven’t, and don’t intend to. The basic premise is not comedic material for me, either, and I can empathize with Cullins when she says, “I must admit, this movie stressed me out. [Laughs.]” Oh, here she discovers laughter - apparently she found something funny about it after all, even if it was her own gallows humor at, in her opinion, a sexually irresponsible couple choosing to give birth to an unplanned child instead of ending its life prior to birth.

Amnesty International's Pro-Life Supporters Speak Up

2006-07-26T04:33:00.000-07:00

Do you remember this post, called "Pleading for Amnesty? Amnesty International wants to add abortion to the list of human "rights" to be defended.

The Consistent Life organization, a group dedicated to promoting peace and non-violence, has started a registry of Amnesty International pro-life supporters who want to object to this movement.

The statement of purpose reads as follows:

"We have contributed money or actions to Amnesty International, and want to be able to continue to do so in good conscience. We are distressed about the move to frame abortion as a right, rather than understanding it as a form of violence.

Abortion is violence against unborn children. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Child states that every child "needs special safeguards and care, including legal protection, before as well as after birth." [Resolution 1386(XIV) of 20 November 1959]

Abortion is violence against women. Unjust pressures on women become more likely with abortion availability, such as sexual exploitation and lack of services or workplace accommodations for mothers. Large numbers of women have indicated that their abortion was a major trauma for them.

We are afraid Amnesty International could lose its most important asset: its credibility. We support AI's advocacy against the death penalty for the guilty. Will the sincerity of this be discounted by some if AI supports legalizing it for the innocent? “Human rights” can be dismissed as partisan propaganda when used by people advocating some form of violence. Because AI's work is so crucial, the consequences of squandering its well-earned reputation are truly dire.

The proposed stand for medical care for women who have had botched abortions is reasonable, as for women who have suffered torture or rape or any other kind of violence. From our point of view, it is in the same category. The current stand AI takes against coerced abortion is also admirable.

Beyond these, since AI has another large constituency that would keep it from taking our position, the previous long-standing position of neutrality on abortion is a reasonable compromise."

If you want your voice heard, please visit the registry and sign on.

What Abortion Really Looks Like

2006-05-19T04:18:00.000-07:00

Julie,

You have my total permission to re-print my story. If it helps stop any one from making this horrible mistake, or helps anyone who has made this mistake, I am all for it.

Hello whoever you are,

I guess I'm just reaching out to tell my story, or maybe get this off my chest, to warn other people. I am a " sinner, baby killer and whore". I was never told how much I would hurt after this. I was never told that I would re-live the event everyday. I was never told I could feel the life being sucked from my womb. They made it sound easy, simple, painless and made it sound all right.

It is regret. It is feeling dirty.

Had I known it would hurt so much emotionally. I would not have proceeded. Had some one told me, that this would be stuck with me forever. I would never have entered the clinic.
It has only been two days since my mistake.

Friday night my now ex boyfriend was arrested for domestic violence charges against me. He had hit me several times. I was six weeks pregnant. I was given council about what I could do and what not. I had spoken with a "friend" and she said " Get an abortion, you'll hate the kid forever"

Saturday morning I found myself outside of the planned parenthood facility. It was the day before mother's day. It was a fact that hit me moments before entering. There were many people trying to hand me literature. One with a rosary, one young lady yelled at me " It's ok, you can be a mother". Her words ran through me like electricity. It made the decision so much harder.

After being in the clinic for about two hours I was finally called in. I could not afford the anesthesia, so I was awake the entire procedure. They told me I would feel a little pressure. It felt as if someone was ripping me open. "You'll feel a little prick and numbness" I felt the needle, and still felt the pain. I screamed. I tried to hold the nurses hand, but she had pulled away. I felt every move that doctor made. I heard them vacuum the child from my womb. When it was all over, and too late, they just handed me a maxi pad and a damp cloth and walked out of the room. Having a bad reaction to the Novocain they injected into my cervix, cramping beyond no pain I've felt before, I put my clothes back on, silently. I was then escorted into a recovery room.

I was provided a pill that would shrink my cervix back to normal, and two extra strength Tylenol. Every other woman in the room was in shock. We laid there, heating pads over our stomachs, all regretting what we did. It was a common feeling in the air. Tears were shed. The nurses, they attempted to lighten the room. It made no difference. We killed our children. We gave into this horrible idea that it wasn't a person, that it was ok to murder.

I sit here today, incapable of going to work. I see people walking down the street, I know they have no way of knowing, but I still feel so awful.

If someone would of only gotten to me before I even was pregnant, before I even graduate high school. It would be different.

I wanted that child. It was never a mistake, a child is never a mistake. Getting rid of it was.

I wish I knew about your site before this.

Pleading for Amnesty

2006-05-11T06:12:00.000-07:00

Amnesty International is considering adopting a policy regarding reproductive freedom, which may include acceptance of abortion as such. In response, although I am not a member, but only an interested party, I sent the following letter. I urge my readers who are in accordance to do the same.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

As an ordinary citizen who has heard nothing but positive things about the admirable work of Amnesty International, I read with trepidation about your proposal to formulate a policy regarding a woman's right to have access to abortion.

Oddly enough, I heard of this in the same week that I read the article entitled, "Running Out of the Darkness" in the May 1, 2006, issue of Time Magazine, which describes the efforts of an underground railroad to rescue individuals from oppression, forced imprisonment and torture in North Korea. The article begins with the story of Kim Myong Suk, a twenty-year old woman who was imprisoned while five months pregnant. Kim was tortured by means of abortion:

"Hwang [Myong Dong, a North Korean prison guard] referred repeatedly to the baby as 'the Chink,' because the father was a peasant from northeastern China, where Kim had fled earlier that year. As she lay on the prison floor, Hwang demanded that she abort the fetus herself. She refused, so the guard began kicking her in the stomach. Then he beat her and, as her sister screamed, continued beating Kim until she blacked out. When she regained consciousness, she says, she 'was taken to a clinic in the camp, and in the most blunt manner, they removed {the fetus} from my body.'"

The potential for oppressive governments to use abortion as a means to torture women should be of great concern to Amnesty International; and this abuse must take precedence over taking any stand to promote abortion by allegedly-free choice. While women's civil rights remain oppressed, we will never be able to guarantee each woman the right to choose birth and be free from this form of torture.

May I also mention that it is not just in oppressive countries where abortion is abused? I, myself, was forced to abort when I was a sixteen-year old girl who made the mistake of getting pregnant. Those who should have supported me used the legality of abortion to solve their own problem, and used the threat of abandonment to force me to do what I did not want to do. This is not reproductive freedom, and my right to choose was not protected. No one beat me, but that does happen to girls and women who do not want to comply with the coercion of others to abort their unwanted children, as evidenced by the fact, offered to us by the National Organization of Women, that homicide is the leading cause of death among pregnant women. From this, we see that violence against women who are with child is a serious problem.

I respectfully ask you to refrain from supporting abortion, a violent act that succeeds only in further enslaving women. Even in cases of rape and incest, abortion is not a solution for abused women. All too often, it is the one who has initially victimized the woman who uses abortion to hide his crime; this will happen more often than not in nations where women's rights are already suppressed. The best possible stance for Amnesty International to take, and the position that is most consistent with its goal to protect human rights and human life, is one that opposes the violence of abortion.

Thank you very much for your time and your consideration of my letter. It is my hope that AI will take the high road, and choose to protect women, and to protect life from its very beginnings.

Feel-Good Propaganda from the Guttmacher Institute

2006-05-05T10:39:00.000-07:00

Everywhere someone’s getting over
Everybody cries, and sometimes
You can still lose even if you really try

Talking ‘bout the dream like the dream is over
Talk like that won’t get you no where
Everybody’s trusting in the heart
Like the heart don’t lie

~ “All I Need,” Matchbox Twenty

For most women…the time of greatest distress is likely to be before an abortion; after an abortion, women frequently report feeling “relief and happiness.”

~ “Abortion in Women’s Lives,” a report from the Guttmacher Institute, p. 24

The Guttmacher Report offers the survey results mentioned above as evidence against the development of post-abortion psychological problems, particularly post-traumatic stress disorder (aka post-abortion stress). The authors of this report would like us to believe that these good feelings of relief and happiness are proof that abortion does no harm to us psychologically. But since we first defined the disorder, we’ve known that emotions after a traumatizing event do not, in and of themselves, tell us whether the victim has been traumatized to the point of illness and whether they can or will develop PTSD.

To understand the nature of how post-traumatic stress disorder develops and the criteria for its diagnosis, we will try to understand how trauma is defined within the context of the illness; what factors precipitate development of the disorder (emotional responses are not strict indicators); and some examples of other traumatizing events that can leave us suffering from PTSD right alongside feelings of relief and happiness.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV), defines a traumatic event as follows: “The person experienced, witnessed, or was confronted with an event or events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others,” (Scaer, p. 1). As Dr. Scaer relates, that which is traumatizing has violated the boundaries of self:

“Violent physical assault in any form needs no rationalization to qualify as a survival-threatening event. The sense of safe separation between the assaulted person and the real world is shattered, especially if associated with physical pain and injury. Although a life-threatening illness presents a less physically tangible assault on one’s sense of self, the safe haven of our body is ruptured and redefined…witnessing a violent event involving life-threatening bodily injury of death may redefine what constitutes a safe boundary for us, may shrink that boundary, and therefore constitute a threat to our survival,” (Scaer, pp. 4-5).

According to the DSM-IV definition, that which is traumatic threatens the integrity of our bodies or our selves in a life-threatening manner. However, the DSM-IV definition does not reflect new research into the occurrence of PTSD. As stated by Dr. Glenn Schiraldi, author of The Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Sourcebook, “consensus is emerging…that a variety of secondary factors can increase the risk of developing PTSD following exposure to traumatic events. These factors become more influential as the severity of the traumatic event decreases,” (Schiraldi, p. 37). Dr. Scaer maintains “…that the definition of a recognized response to traumatic stress must include not only those symptoms related to reexperiencing, arousal, and avoidance defined in the DSM-IV, but also must address comorbid, associated, and somatic symptoms known to be related to past exposure to trauma,” (Scaer, p. 132), and further, “…numerous studies support the concern that prior life traumatic events and psychiatric morbidity are associated with a higher risk of developing PTSD after a new trauma, and that this vulnerability may result in an enhanced traumatic reaction even with less intense traumatic exposure. As a result, even minor nonviolent societal trauma should not be dismissed as a source of significant trauma in selected populations,” (Scaer, p. 139).

What should this mean to the Guttmacher reporters? They tell us, “most abortion…occurs in the context of an unwanted pregnancy, and it is very difficult to tease apart the effects of these two events. Psychological problems that develop after an abortion may not be caused by the procedure itself, but instead may reflect other factors associated with having an unwanted pregnancy, or those unrelated to either the pregnancy or the abortion, such as a history of emotional problems or intimate partner violence,” (p. 24). In their efforts to separate abortion from any psychological problems that result, the Guttmacher authors ignore a significant and growing body of research that urges us to consider a history of trauma, including the trauma of the unwanted pregnancy itself, as a trigger for a traumatic response to abortion.

There are other factors in addition to a history of traumatiziation that come into play in the development of the disorder, risk factors that can make “ordinarily” stressful events assume life-threatening proportions. According to Dr. Glenn Schiraldi, author of “The Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Sourcebook,” these risk factors include (Schiraldi, p. 38):

• Underdeveloped protective skills, problem-solving skills, self-esteem, resilience, creativity, humor, discipline, ability to express emotions to others, ability to tolerate distress.

• Personality and habitually negative thought patterns (e.g., pessimism, depression, introversion).

• Biology. Some people appear to have overactive nervous systems. Heredity and a history of drug abuse appear to influence this factor.

A poor family environment during childhood that does not support a child's safe exploration of boundaries may result in our failure to learn what constitutes these boundaries, and can also make us more susceptible to developing PTSD as a result of stressors that would not ordinarily be viewed as life-threatening (Schiraldi, pp. 38-39). An accumulation of stressors can also weaken our defenses against serious illnesses such as PTSD, and include divorce, illness, financial pressures, or losing a job. Dr. Schiraldi calls all of these risk factors “pre-trauma vulnerabilities,” (ibid).

At the time of the traumatic event, PTSD is more likely to occur if the victim dissociates, perceives that she is responsible for the event or responded inappropriately, and/or feels alone or isolated. After trauma, PTSD is more likely to occur if the victim is still isolated; cannot talk about the pain she experienced; or is “…disbelieved, stigmatized, shamed, or shunned,” (Schiraldi, p. 39), particularly by those who are supposed to help the victim instead of inflicting further harm, as when a rape victim is asked whether she could have prevented her assault; and as happens when a physician …”minimizes the symptoms, belittles [the] one seeking assistance, or even refuses to render treatment,” (Schiraldi, p. 40).

Having defined what constitutes trauma, and the factors that can contribute to the development of PTSD even in the absence of an actual threat to life, let’s look at other known traumatizing events to determine whether emotions of relief and happiness have any bearing on whether the trauma victim will develop the disorder.

Surgery is an excellent example, and is listed in the DSM-IV as a potentially traumatizing event. Even if anyone would agree to surgery without expecting to benefit, few surgeons would operate if they did not anticipate offering the patient some relief. For example, if surgeons amputate a gangrenous leg, the patient may report feeling relieved and happy, because her life is no longer threatened. However, she remains vulnerable to PTSD, according to the DSM-IV which specifically lists amputation as a traumatizing event. Removing a burst appendix saves the life, but violates the integrity of the body; a hysterectomy may remove a source of cancer, and a threat to life, that can leave a woman feeling relieved and even happy; but it can also result in post-surgical psychological trauma.

Police officers who kill in the line of duty are not bound to negative emotions as a result. Their actions may have saved the life of another, or earned the regard of their peers. As Dr. Rachel MacNair writes in Perpetration Induced Traumatic Stress: The Psychological Consequences of Killing, “The officer’s traumatic symptoms are viewed as a sign of virtue and sacrifice for being a good officer…if it happens to a good officer doing his or her duty, acknowledging psychological difficulties is no insult….It is perceived as one of the reasons to be sympathetic to police officers.” Yet, no one would argue that police officers can’t develop PTSD because they have done their duty and may have positive emotions as a result; we often treat them immediately after a shooting in an effort to preempt the disorder. But as Dr. MacNair points out, “…as with all cases of Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress (PITS) [a form of PTSD], there are confounding possibilities on having PTSD before the incident…The extent to which PTSD symptomatology already exists before a shooting incident complicates the study of the etiological nature of the shooting itself,” (MacNair, p. 58). In fact, PTSD can develop in spite of an officer’s actually having been rewarded by his peers and society for his bravery; trauma and the illness that can result do not take such rewards into account.

PTSD was first identified, and early research focused on, the experiences of combat veterans, who, like police officers, kill in the line of duty and may receive honors for having done so. The most extensive work done on the psychological effects of killing and trauma in combat is On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman. Grossman defines the stages of emotions that result after the traumatizing act of killing:

“When soldiers kill the enemy they appear to go through a series of emotional stages. The actual kill is usually described as being reflexive or automatic. Immediately after the kill the soldier goes through a period of euphoria and elation, which is usually followed by a period of guilt and remorse. The intensity and duration of these periods are closely related to distance. At midrange we see much of the euphoria stage…If a soldier goes up and looks at his kill – a common occurrence when the tactical situation permits – the trauma grows even worse, since some of the psychological buffer created by a midrange kill disappears upon seeing the victim at close range,” (Grossman, pp. 111-112).

Consider this in relation to a phenomenon reported by the Guttmacher authors in an effort to show us that we must ensure women have access to early abortion procedures:

“Thirty-four percent of women who have had an abortion at or before six weeks’ gestation would have preferred an earlier procedure; this proportion increases to 74% at 9-12 weeks and 92% at or beyond 13 weeks,” (p. 17).

The authors give us several reasons why women delay obtaining an abortion procedure, which I will cover in another article; however, they make no effort to explain why women who had later abortions more often reported a desire for an earlier procedure. They do not purport that these women suffered from more complications than women who had earlier procedures, although that is a risk. So why do the women who waited wish they had had the procedure earlier? Was it increased proximity to the kill, as Grossman would call it? According to the American Pregnancy Association,

“Some moms can feel their baby move as early as 13-16 weeks. These first fetal movements are called quickening and are often described as flutters. It may be difficult to determine whether this feeling is gas or your baby’s movements, but soon you will begin to notice a pattern. First-time moms may not feel these movements as early as second-time moms. Some moms, especially those in their first pregnancy, may not feel movement until 18-20 weeks...There is a broad range of when the first detection of movement can be felt, ranging from 13-25 weeks."

The independent movement of the fetus is an indication that what we lose in abortion is not an extension of ourselves, but a live being with an existence separate from our own. This would increase the likelihood that the late-aborters had an opportunity to consider the unborn as a child. This identification may increase our proximity to the kill, or traumatizing event, a factor that increases the likelihood that PTSD will develop. Additionally, the post-thirteen week abortion is likely to be surgical and/or painful. Surgery, as we’ve already noted, is invasive and threatens the integrity of the self, as does severe pain. Are these “preferences” reported in the Guttmacher report indications that these women were negatively affected by their abortions? But if abortion results in our feeling relieved and happy more often than not, why wouldn’t we be relieved and happy at any stage of the procedure? And why wish that a past event would have happened differently, an emotion we often call regret?

We can feel some or all of the entire human array of emotions after abortion, including relief, happiness, sorrow, and regret. But however we feel, it doesn’t matter, because we are still vulnerable to developing post-traumatic stress disorder, perhaps because the procedure or act of abortion violates the integrity of self/body, or because we have past experiences or conditions that predispose us to developing the disorder, or because we have been isolated, shunned, and shamed – and not just by those who disapprove of abortion, but also by those who provide them.

The Guttmacher report is blowing proverbial smoke, asking us to believe, contrary to the accepted diagnostic criteria for PTSD (and the growing body of research), that the report of a positive emotional response precludes the development of this neuropsychological illness. This misuse of information is detrimental to women’s health. Propaganda is defined as “information that is spread for the purpose of promoting some cause.” We will continue to evaluate this particular piece of same in future segments.

Guttmacher Report Supports Abortion-PTSD Link

2006-05-03T08:12:00.000-07:00

“Since the APA panel’s review of the scientific literature, there has been a new wave of analyses that report correlations between a history of abortion and a range of conditions, including psychiatric treatment, depression, anxiety, substance abuse and death…Many of these studies, however, have methodological shortcomings that make it impossible to infer a causal relationship. None adequately control for factors that might explain both the unintended pregnancy and the mental health problem, such as social or demographic characteristics, preexisting mental or physical health conditions, childhood exposure to physical or sexual abuse, and other risk-taking behaviors. (Childhood exposure to physical or sexual abuse, for instance, is known to be associated with unintended pregnancy and abortion, and also with risk for a psychological disorder.) Because of these confounding factors, even if mental health problems are more common among women who have had an abortion, abortion may not have been the real cause.”
~ Abortion in Women’s Lives, a Guttmacher Institute report (emphasis mine)

Reading this report by the Guttmacher Institute (an arm of Planned Parenthood), “Abortion in Women’s Lives,” is much like reading about the health effects of cigarette smoking as prepared by RJ Reynolds. In other words, the fox guarding the hen house isn’t about to tell us he has a conflict of interest, so we must read with care. HT: to Annie Bano of After Abortion, who sent me the link to this report. It serves some useful purposes – the fox is the only one who can tell us how many hens he is guarding. However, as a guide to whether or not there are dire psychological consequences related to abortion, the report is wishy-washy. On the one hand, the authors want to dismiss the relationship between abortion and PTSD because it is not proven as causal; and on the other hand, they offer information that supports the existence of a correlation.

Any first-year student of psychology can tell us the difference between cause and correlation. Yet, the report’s authors expect us to read the above paragraph as stated without regard to the definition of these terms, and without explaining that reaching conclusions about causal relationships in psychological research is always problematic. Most relationships drawn in psychological research are correlative because psychology is not a hard, objective science like physics, or mathematics, where certain laws exist that are apparently immovable – drop an apple from a tree on planet Earth, and it will fall to the ground because of gravity. However, not everyone who experiences trauma will develop PTSD – a + b does not always equal c in the subjective social sciences.

The “new wave of analyses that report correlations between a history of abortion” and psychopathology are doing just that – reporting correlations. Remember that the majority of PTSD sufferers have experienced multiple traumatic events – identifying one “real" cause is difficult, because it is the cumulative history of trauma that is most likely responsible for the onset of illness. Still, the report’s authors are leveling criticism against these studies on the basis that they cannot show a causal relationship. This implies a lack of understanding of the nature of post-traumatic stress disorder itself, at a very basic level that should make us suspicious about whether the report’s authors are qualified to discuss its existence as a consequence of abortion beyond the mere reporting of statistics.

For expert advice, let’s turn to Dr. Robert Scaer, MD, author of “The Body Bears the Burden: Trauma, Dissociation, and Disease.” I have no difficulty finding evidence of his qualifications to speak about trauma – Dr. Scaer is a neurologist and psychiatrist who has done a great deal of research into the kindling effect of multiple traumatic experiences on psychological and physical health (See this article, “One, Two, Three Strikes – You’re Out!” for a description of kindling theory). It is evident that a history of trauma weakens our defenses against developing PTSD. For example, studies show a higher incidence of PTSD among combat veterans with a history of trauma; past experiences, and our subjective understanding of them, contribute to the way we deal with current stressors. As Dr. Scaer notes, “The female victim of incest or rape predictably might develop acute PTSD after an experience of transient fondling on a crowded bus, whereas a previously nontraumatized female might respond with anger and fear, but not dissociation,” (Scaer, p. 129).

But the Guttmacher authors grudgingly admit to the correlation between traumatic history and psychological problems before and after abortion: “Certain factors are more common among women with a history of unwanted pregnancy and abortion than among other women, and health outcomes that might be more common among women with a history of abortion may be the result of these unmeasured factors that preceded the abortion. For example, a history of childhood sexual abuse, emotional problems, intimate partner violence or high levels of stress may be more common among women who have unintended pregnancies (and thus abortions), and may also lead to later psychological problems,” (p. 23, inset).

So, women with a history of trauma, particularly in childhood, may be at a higher risk for psychological problems after abortion, but not necessarily as a direct result of their abortions; instead, the Guttmacher authors tell us that the abortion added fuel, or kindling, to the fire, and these problems are appropriately associated with a series of traumatizing events. It isn’t exactly a causal relationship, but then, “….people are primed to respond to a variety of stressful events based on a myriad of predisposing factors. What may produce surprise and perhaps consternation in one individual may induce shock and dissociation in another. The potential for an event to be traumatizing depends in part on the meaning of the event to the person experiencing it,” (Scaer, p. 132). Prior traumas are part of our medical history, and "studies of PTSD and other psychiatric disorders implicate the patient’s past emotional health in the development of these disorders,” (Scaer, p. 147).

To blame the occurrence of PTSD after abortion on a history of psychological, emotional, and/or social problems does not refute the possibility of its developing after abortion and as a result of abortion(note that the report does not state that it is impossible for abortion to be interpreted as a potentially traumatizing event); indeed, the Guttmacher authors are giving us evidence to support the relationship between PTSD and abortion, even if that relationship cannot be strictly defined as causal, because they are telling us that women with a history of trauma more often seek abortions than those without that history, and they confirm that this history predisposes women to develop psychopathology after (additionally, in telling us that many women who seek abortion have preexisting psychological and/or social problems, they are calling into question whether the act of seeking an abortion is intrinsically a choice made by women in their "right" minds).

But they do so in a way that suggests we should ignore the medical history of women who seek abortions, which suggests that they are unconcerned with the consequences of adding burdens to those who have already been traumatized. They blame the victims for having preexisting conditions which they would like to ignore. But as Dr. Scaer cautions, “It certainly behooves us as the caregivers and healers who attempt to lessen the ravages of unresolved trauma not to contribute to its effects through procedures, institutions, traditions, and behaviors that unknowingly serve to initiate or perpetuate trauma,” (Scaer, p. 156).

Dear Zelda

2006-03-24T07:02:00.000-07:00

In response to my last post, Zelda writes:

I don't have a problem with gays raising children because they're gay, but because the parenting qualities inherent to members of the opposite sex are absent from those children's lives. But if it is a choice between aborting children and having gay couples raise them, I think the whole argument becomes moot.

As for the pictures of aborted babies, I am truly sorry you are traumatized. And I'm sorry for all the other women who thought they were left without an option. It will never be the case as long as there is anything I can do about it.

I don't know that those pictures help women who are considering abortion, but they do help reinforce the humanity of those babies to the population at large. And it is the population at large who will decide whether they want that blood on their hands. I hate that they add to your trauma almost as much as I hate the fact that they exist. But people have to know. From young men who might get their girlfriends pregnant, to parents who might force their daughters to have abortions. Everyone has to know what abortion is, and so many are completely oblivious.

This is a thoughtful comment. It merits a thoughtful response, which I hope I can provide.

I am struggling to understand Catholic Charities, and how Pope Benedict's remarks regarding parenting by homosexual couples translate into action by denying them the opportunity to shelter the homeless (I haven't been able to read his remarks in full, just the snippets reported by the media). Are orphanages, group homes, and foster care more desirable? Are we so without hope and faith that we don't believe people can overcome a difficult and problematic upbringing? Do we deny sinners the opportunity to parent because they remain obstinate in sin? (If so, then none of us is qualified to raise a child.)

As to images of our shredded children, I understand fully that some people are made aware of the reality of abortion when they see them. Your point that the general population will decide the issue is also well taken. Unfortunately, the statistics show that a large segment of this general population is post-abortive (over 40% of all women in this nation of reproductive age); further, at least one in four of these will suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder to some extent. And the numbers are still underestimated. With the more frequent use of chemical abortions, many more women will have the experience of seeing their dead children, and if they found this traumatizing at the time, images of same will surely trigger a traumatic response. We have the capacity to understand the phenomenon of trauma reenactment, but we ignore the facts, and the suffering, and the consequences, which too often include repeated abortions.

More importantly, though, we need to consider the population that is aborting. Nearly one in two of the women who will seek an abortion today have already had one or more. These images are often displayed near the doors of abortion clinics. While the population in general may decide the legality of abortion, it is these women who will determine whether individual acts take place, nearly four thousand of them each day. In using potential triggers for a traumatic response, activists are ignoring, hurting, and likely alienating half of their target market.

The justification for using these images is that those who display them hear from people whose hearts and minds have been changed by them. First, they aren't likely to hear from those who have been traumatized instead. Second, this is a denial of faith, which requires us to act as God wills without giving any thought to human respect or regard, or even verification that what we do is working. People who claim to be of faith must work on that faith alone.

The impact on society in general must also be taken into consideration. We have been bombarded with images of violence in the media, especially in the last four decades. All of the experts agree that we become desensitized to violence by exposure to it; it is the basic argument against violence in films and video games. Photos of dead babies might provoke a desire to become actively pro-life in some; in others, these images become part of the general scene of violence and their significance is lost. I remember the popularity of "Dead Baby" jokes from the late seventies and early eighties all too well. They were symptomatic of gallows humor, and most likely an attempt to deny the horror before our eyes. Our society has not become less violent, but more so. Are we changing hearts and minds or are we desensitizing a nation already exposed to too much imaginary but realistic blood and gore by the entertainment industry, and the very real blood and gore that accompanies acts of war and terrorism?

Additionally, I question the desirability of the response provoked by the images in those who don't know what abortion is. If honest, these people who say they learn the truth in this manner will admit that the emotions they engender are anger, hatred, and a desire for retribution. Is this the response we want? Does it make it more difficult for these individuals to consider the plight of women seeking abortion with compassion and sympathy, or does it perpetuate their anger that anyone would consider such an atrocity? And how will these negative emotions come into play in the future, which I hope will be free of legalized abortion, when we must learn to live side by side with people who have committed atrocities? I believe it will make reconciliation more problematic; without recourse to forgiveness by society, those who commit atrocities become intractable in their position. We cannot win them over in a manner that ignores their need for mercy.

And lastly, is there another way to show the humanity of the unborn child that does not generally incite a negative response? Yes. We have the technology to show the living child in the womb, in 3-D images that show an unmistakably human and living form. We have abortion survivors who will live their entire lives with undeniable evidence that at one time, their mothers sought their deaths. We have the abortionists' descriptions of what it is like to perform an abortion on an unborn child. A narrative engages the thinking part of our brains, while images are processed with other sensory input by that center of the brain which engages when the fight/flight/freeze (traumatic) response is provoked. Images of dead babies will provoke a defensive response; images of living children generally do not, although there will still be a segment of the post-abortion population who find all baby images aversive. There is a better way, and if we would only try it, we might learn it is more successful.

Thank you, Zelda, for your compassionate comment and your resolve to assist women and children in need.

Better Off Dead?

2006-03-15T07:35:00.000-07:00

In a recent news item, I learned that Catholic Charities of Boston decided to end its participation in adoption placement because they could not obtain an exemption from state laws banning discrimination against homosexual couples who wish to adopt.

Several times over the last two years, I have pleaded with a certain Catholic pro-life organization to discontinue using images of aborted children in their efforts to prevent abortion. My request was reasonable and personal. At least one in four women and girls who abort will develop post-traumatic stress disorder as a result. One trigger for a traumatic response is an image of an aborted fetus, for me and for many women in my position. Considering the fact that nearly half of all women who seek an abortion today have aborted before, a symptom of trauma reenactment, I have appealed to their sense of reason. It is not logical to engage the trauma center of someone’s brain and then ask her to make a life or death decision based on rational thought. But like other pro-life groups who are so attached to this weapon, I have been told that anything goes when it comes to saving the life of a child from the abortionist.

Anything, that is, except allowing the child to be adopted into a gay family. If there is any evidence that gay parents raise gay children, I haven’t heard of it. And gay children are more desirable than dead ones. I am ashamed of Catholic Charities, and ashamed of a mindset that says the ends justify the means, unless the means involve homosexuals raising children who would otherwise be aborted. Apparently, dead is better than gay.

Author's Note, added on May 11, 2006:

I've given the issue further consideration, and I believe I have a better understanding of what Catholic Charities is trying to do. It is inconsistent with Church teaching against homosexuality to cooperate in a manner that would suggest the sin is condoned. I understand this now, and the need for consistency.

My objection remains, however, against our getting out of the adoption business altogether as a solution to the problem. In the Southwest, in particular, Catholics who work in any capacity to serve the poor and disadvantaged were encouraged to conscientiously object to any immigration legislation that would criminalize offering assistance to illegal aliens. It would have been more courageous for Catholic Charities to do this as regards placement of adopted children as well; or to fight the battle in court, if it has not already been challenged to its limits and denied. I consider this a case of religious freedom, which does not protect the government from relgion so much as it should protect religion from government. As long as Catholic Charities is not subsidized by tax dollars, I disagree with any law that would force this institution to violate its own belief system while performing acts of mercy in accordance with the faith.

Breathe

2006-01-15T13:20:00.000-07:00

2am and I’m still awake writing this song.
If I get it all down on paper it’s no longer
Inside of me, threatening the life it belongs to.

And I feel like I’m naked in front of a crowd,
‘cuz these words are my diary screaming out loud;
And I know that you’ll use them however you want to.

But you can’t jump the track,
We’re like cars on a cable.
And life’s like an hourglass glued to the table.

No one can find the rewind button now.
Sing it if you understand.

~ Anna Nalick, “Breathe (2am)” (scroll to end for complete lyrics)

“In recent years, researchers have learned much about PTSD and its successful treatment. The prospects of overcoming or lessening your symptoms today are quite hopeful, especially with skilled, appropriate treatment.”

~ Dr. Glenn R. Schiraldi, “The Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Handbook,” emphasis his.

A pro-life worker recently told me that she has doubts about whether post-abortive women are able to work well within the pro-life movement. We are unstable. We are too emotionally invested; and we are so defensive, particularly about things like the use of graphic abortion pictures, that we hamper their movements. She had temporarily forgotten to whom she was speaking, which has happened to others. I didn't hesitate to remind her of that, and of a few other things.

Of course, I took her doubts to heart, because I would like to figure out where I am going with all of this verbage. Will I continue to research and journal it here, or should I become more of an activist against abortion, within the pro-life movement? It was enough just wondering if I was called; now I had to consider whether I was able.

I finally had to conclude that I am not. Take away my mask, the written word, and we are left with one seriously pissed-off bitch, and I’m not sure I’m fit for polite society, let alone pro-life society. I still need to gain control over my symptoms. The post-abortive women who can and do work effectively within the pro-life movement have achieved something that has eluded me: healing.

Dr. Glenn Schiraldi, author of The Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Sourcebook, tells us that “Healing occurs when traumatic memory is processed or integrated,” (Schiraldi, p. 50). Traumatic memories associated with the brain damage of PTSD are not like other memories which we recognize as past events. They don’t really behave like memories at all; they are alive, triggering the fight/flight response in the brain as if the trauma was ongoing, in the present, in the here and now. When I talk about abortion, I am still on the table. I am still in gynecological stirrups, eyes fixed in horror at pale gray shapes that shouldn’t be there, outside of me and unmoving, and in pieces. What should be memory is active input to my brain screaming that this is happening, now.

Healing involves processing these traumatic cues into memories:

“We re-evaluate the triggers and see them simply as reminders, not a repeat of the trauma. The traumatic event is viewed as part of the past, not the present,” (Schiraldi, p. 51). Dr. Schiraldi covers several treatment approaches; but he also cautions against venturing into the dark territory of traumatic memory work if we are not “stabilized and functioning reasonably well. It [memory work] should not be tried if any of the following conditions are not under control:

substance addiction

self-destructive behavior (self-injury, suicidal tendencies, eating disorder)

threats of violence or homicide

life chaos (the likelihood that the trauma will be repeated, abuse is ongoing, no home or income, etc.)

mental illness, especially schizophrenia, bipolar disorder (manic depression), or other illness needing medication

the threat of mental health being overwhelmed

…memory work should not be undertaken if:

- there is not a strong therapeutic alliance with a mental health professional
- there is no support system
- severe rage, nightmares, flashbacks, and irritability are uncontrolled.
- the individual is not ready

Remember, you are the one who is in control. You determine when to begin. You set a safe pace and say when to stop. Stop or ease up at any time you feel overwhelming or dangerous emotions, such as extreme or dangerous anger or panic. Likewise, ease up if you dissociate, experience psychotic episodes, or encounter strong physical upset – such as nausea, pain, dizziness, or panic attack.

~ Schiraldi, pp. 62-63

If you are, like me, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of abortion (also called post-abortion stress disorder, or PAS), what are your options in healing programs? For the most part, the post-abortion healing program model is based on group-therapy, where the patients essentially treat each other by bonding over similar traumatic experiences. This is a proven-effective treatment for PTSD; however, there is a caveat – group therapy is not for everyone at every stage of this disorder. Dr. Schiraldi says, “The frank discussions of groups might trigger troubling dissociated material. An individual should not, therefore, enter a group until he is in fairly good control of his symptoms. He might, for example, seek individual psychotherapy until he is comfortable confronting traumatic memories,” (Schiraldi, p. 67).

Care must be exercised by the patient who seeks post-abortion healing. Contrary to what we might hope for if this condition is as serious and as real as purported, there is no concerted effort to ensure those who counsel the post-abortive are qualified to ascertain what treatment approach is best. Counselor training methods vary in nature. "Training" can consist of purchasing a set of DVD’s purporting to teach one how to counsel the post-abortive. There’s no requirement for an advanced degree in any of the social sciences, or for licensing to practice therapy in order to counsel the post-abortive. Our standards in this area are not simply sloppy. They are non-existent, and counseling is being done by any individual who sees the need. But we aren’t always talking about grief, sorrow, and other strong emotions. One in four women seeking post-abortion counseling will have post-traumatic stress disorder, a neuropsychological illness that requires professional treatment.

Post-abortion counselors should either be or work with professional mental health clinicians who are qualified to diagnose the disorder and to assess the appropriate treatment method, including medication when necessary. Post-traumatic stress disorder is brain damage, a neuropsychological disorder of the mind, body and spirit. It is not a political cause. Those who work in the pro-life industry to end abortion might want to think twice about moonlighting as post-abortion counselors; perhaps your agenda is too broad. Furthermore, even the best-intentioned amateur pro-life worker can unwittingly come up against a post-abortion woman in live trauma and, because she is not qualified, she will not recognize the trauma victim’s symptoms as such. Instead, she will paste a label on the post-abortive woman and bemoan what a hindrance she is to the pro-life movement (making them use fewer graphic images and walk on eggshells).

According to Dr. Schiraldi, “Before settling on a psychotherapist, ask questions such as the following (a therapist who is unwilling to discuss these important issues is not likely to be a good match for you):

- What is your training and experience in treating PTSD?

- What is your approach to treating it?

- What are your views about dissociation and its treatment?

- Do you have experience treating those who have encountered traumatic events similar to
mine?

- Are you experienced in treating the associated conditions that I experience (such as drug addictions, eating disorders, depression, generalized anxiety, or panic disorders)?

- What are your views about the use of medication in the treatment of PTSD? If needed, can
you prescribe it, or do you have a working relationship with someone who does?

- Do you provide family counseling or have a working relationship with counselors who do?

- What are your policies about calling you during the week should I need to?

(Schiraldi, pp. 63-64)

As for what I am called to do next, well, it’s clear that I need work on my fear-addled brain. I’m going to keep researching, asking questions, and whining about the answers here, and I’m going to take Dr. Schiraldi’s advice regarding psychotherapy. And, because it is intriguing, I just might see if I can relearn how to breathe (http://www.signchido.com/).

Anna Nalick

"Breathe (2am)"

2am and she calls me cuz I'm still awake,
Can you help me unravel my latest mistake?
I don't love him; winter just wasn't my season.

Yeah, we walk through the door so accusing their eyes,
Like they have any right at all to criticize.
Hypocrites, you're all here for the very same reason.

But you can't jump the track,
We're like cars on a cable;
Life's like an hourglass glued to the table.
No one can find the rewind button, girl.
So cradle your head in your hands.

And breathe. Just breathe.

May, he turned twenty-one on the base of Fort Bliss,
Just today he sat down to the flask in his fist;
Ain't been sober since maybe October of last year.

Here in town you can tell he's been down for awhile,
But my God, it's so beautiful when the boy smiles.
Wanna hold him; but maybe I'll just sing about it.

Cuz you can't jump the track,
We're like cars on a cable.
Life's like an hourglass glued to the table.
No one can find the rewind button boys,
So cradle your head in your hands.

And breathe. Just breathe.

There's a light at each end of this tunnel you shout,
Cuz you're just as far in as you'll ever be out.
And these mistakes you've made, you'll just make them again.
If you'll only try turning around.

2am and I'm still awake writing this song,
If I get it all down on paper it's no longer
Inside of me, threatening the life it belongs to.

And I feel like I'm naked in front of the crowd,
Cuz these words are my diary screaming out loud.
And I know that you'll use them however you want to.

But we can't jump the track,
We're like cars on a cable.
Life's like an hourglass glued to the table.
No one can find the rewind button, now.
Sing it if you understand.

And breathe. Just breathe.

Moments in the ER

2005-12-29T13:40:00.000-07:00

In her book, Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood, Naomi Wolf writes with naïve surprise about being “infantilized” by the medical community. She is highly critical: “The medical establishment too often produces a birth experience that is unnecessarily physically and psychologically harmful to the women involved, even according to its own standards of measurement,” (Wolf, p. 6). She found her obstetricians condescending and reluctant or unable to give specific answers to questions about such matters as episiotomy and epidural rates. Being Naomi, she attributes this condescension, disrespect, and disregard for the patient to the condition she was in at the time (pregnancy). I would be surprised to find Naomi had much experience in the medical system prior to this, her first, pregnancy. If so, she might have been more inclined to use her journalistic skills to find another cause than her pregnant condition. In this quiet interim between Christmas and the New Year, I’m going to go off the topic of abortion for a moment to tell you a story – a few of my own, Naomi-like observations.

Late one evening several years ago, I was ordered to the emergency room by the neurologist who was treating me at the time. I was told he would call ahead and make the arrangements for me to be admitted, as it was time for a course of tests to determine the exact nature of my malady. The first lesson I learned that night was not to listen to one’s physician if he or she is dispensing advice with the clinking of bar glassware in the background. The second is that sending one’s patient to the emergency room after hours is a favorite tool of doctors. I would guess there are two reasons for this: first, there’s no money in an after-hours phone call to dispense advice to the patient, and only the patient’s impressions to go by to evaluate urgency. Second, there’s too much potential liability in not doing something, and malpractice premiums are an issue.

I did not want to take up emergency room space; but apparently, this is the only way one can be admitted to a hospital. I suspect there are far more insurance rules than health objectives that mandate this, but that’s par for the course. There I was on a busy night in the emergency room, with no emergent condition to speak of, surrounded by at least seventy-five other people in various states of emergency and non-emergency, and Dr. Flintstone, my possibly-tipsy neurologist, had not called ahead. We waited in chairs; well, I sat in chairs while my husband stood. Naomi complains that pregnant women get uncomfortable in hard, plastic waiting room chairs. Naomi, those chairs don’t do much for anyone waiting in an emergency room.

In the row perpendicular to ours sat a middle-aged man holding his sloppily-bandaged left hand. He had had an accident in his workshop, and had a pretty bad gash. Nurses kept coming out from behind the treatment area, hidden by thick walls cut with round submarine windows, but nirvana for those of us waiting in chairs, to check on his wound and apologize for the long wait. He had already been there for four hours when we arrived, but there was no one to stitch him up. He was in the best of spirits, smiling with understanding, and with a kind nature shrugging away any offers of sympathy for his condition. He had been bleeding, so we could all see his pain, and how it warranted attention.

I had been told to expect to stay, so I had packed a small “hospital” knapsack. It contained my toothbrush, my own toothpaste so I wouldn’t have to pay $15 for a hospital tube, my cosmetics, of course, and pajamas, and whatever else I may have grabbed in my numb state. I did not want to think about a hospital stay of my own, but I remembered my mother’s frequent visits and the things she needed then, so I relied on that rote memory to pack. A heavy-set young woman in the row of chairs in front of me had also come prepared with a small bag of her own. A nurse came out to finish her triage session, and asked her what her problem was, in earshot of at least ten people, including curious me. The young woman told the nurse in a bored voice and memorized words that she was bleeding down there, from her “vagina and urethra.” She was asked if she needed assistance with her bleeding, and said no. So, the nurse, who was carrying the patient’s very thick file, made a note on her admittance form, told her she’d be seen “as-soon-as-we-can-but-we’re-backed-up” and returned to nirvana. The young woman, oblivious to me and anyone else who was watching, reached into her bag and pulled out some provisions: a bag of raw vegetables and a novel. She started munching her veggies and seemed to settle in for a long read.

There was a slight commotion from behind us, and then a very thin young man dashed in between our rows. The veggie-lady looked irritated as she jerked up from her novel, jaws still moving, tucking her short legs under her plastic seat, squeezing as far back as she could. He stood looking back and forth at the floors and the walls, then ran toward the corner to my right, speaking breathlessly in Spanish I didn’t understand, until finally I could make out in my high-school Spanish, “Aqui, aqui!” His wife, a tiny woman, was scurrying directly behind him carrying a machine that looked bigger than she. Then I noticed for the first time that the man was cradling a small child. It was a boy of about three; he was wheezing. His mother bent over the electrical outlet that his father had located, and plugged the breathing machine in. The ER was under renovation; they had been unable to find any electrical outlet for the boy’s asthma treatment machine from where they had been standing, near the outside doors. Between the two of them, the young parents had the machine hooked to all of its complex hoses and outlets and to the child in seconds, and his medicinal breathing treatment began. “Holy cow, asthma,” I thought with alarm, and I looked around for the rush of ER personnel, a gurney, Dr. Welby, or anyone who would immediately rush this child into nirvana immediately. But all was still behind the submarine windows, and the doors didn't stir. Those seated near the outlet were kind enough to surrender their seats to the young mother, who sat rocking the child. As quiet waiting returned, he settled into sleep, the machine hissing gently. His father paced in silence, stopping often to peer into his son’s face.

Off and on, my husband had been calling Dr. Flintstone, who wasn’t getting any further from the clinking glasses. Eventually, we were allowed into nirvana, even though we protested that it seemed so unnecessary; wasn’t there a place just to be admitted? There was a man out there bleeding, and a child who couldn’t breathe. But no, I was to be taken to that special place where, even though I would still wait, at least I could do so under the watchful eye of medical workers. At many times while we waited, I battled the temptation to leave; but the longer we waited, the more time we had invested, and Dr. Flintstone had given us reason to be concerned.

I was placed on a gurney in the hall, because there were no available rooms. I didn’t mind, because I hoped I wouldn’t be taking up space for very long and I had no intention of needing privacy in the ER. My husband stood next to the gurney, and we people-watched for the next couple of hours. To my immediate left was another gurney set-up, but this one had a mobile privacy curtain. Across from me was an empty room that awaited a patient coming in from an auto accident, according to the chatter of staff, who always speak as if the patients can’t hear. Down the hall to my right, there were various rooms, and they all seemed full. There were a few more gurney set-ups like mine at that end of the hall, too. The staff was oddly slow. From our vantage point, we could see what I would call the nurses’ station. It was always surrounded by people in scrubs who sat, stood and talked, with occasional break-aways who would disappear into various rooms, then return to sit, stand and talk again. They seemed uncomfortable; but not occupied.

From behind the curtain to my left I heard a plaintive female voice call, “Nurse?” It was tentative and soft, at first, as if the responder was expected to be near. A few moments passed, and then more loudly, “Nurse? Nurse?” A maintenance man with mop and bucket was passing. He stopped on his floor-cleaning journey, and said to the Curtain, “I’m the janitor, but I’ll tell ‘em you need ‘em, Miss.” Moments later, we saw him stop down the hall at the nurses’ station, talking and pointing back toward the Curtain. Then he continued with his mopping rounds until he disappeared from sight. In the moments that followed, scrub-adorned staff members walked back and forth, up and down the hallway in front of us. Sometimes, the Curtain’s hoarse, “Nurse?” would be timed just as one went by; other times, she called to an empty hall, and us. We waited for the janitor’s message to get a response from the nurses’ station. A few more minutes passed, then my husband made the walk down the hall. He told a group of people standing at the nurses' station that the woman near us was calling for help. He returned to my side, and within a minute a male nurse came to attend to the Curtain. They spoke unintelligibly for a few minutes, and then he left her again, with some kind of return promise of something she needed, it seemed. The Curtain became quiet for awhile.

From the big double doors at the left end of the hall came a commotion; a gurney with many people around it. This was the motor vehicle patient. From what we would soon overhear, we learned she had been to imaging, and serious injuries had been ruled out. However, she was not exhibiting full consciousness, so she needed observation. Several staff members wheeled her gurney past us, into the room opposite. As they did, it was clear her hospital gown and blankets were seriously askew, and gave her no privacy. No one noticed or corrected the indignity as she was maneuvered into the doorway, first in, then out because they didn’t have the angle, then in and out of the doorway again. Finally, her bed was properly aligned, and she was out of sight. We looked at each other in relief, and then heard from our left a plaintive, “Nurse?”

The crowd that had installed the woman opposite us disbursed, leaving three men standing in the doorway. One seemed to be a nurse; the other was obviously an emergency responder, relieving himself of the responsibility of the patient; the third was Tom Bergeron.

“She’s a head case,” was the first thing the fireman said, consulting his clip board. “The cop says she drove off the road on purpose. Seems she’d left a suicide note for her family. Social worker called ‘em, and they say she’s going through a messy divorce. They can’t find anything wrong with her upstairs; but they sent for a neurology consult. She won’t wake up, but they think she might be faking that.” The male nurse nodded all the while. Tom Bergeron smirked. We watched and listened, openly. No one seemed to care or notice. The Curtain called, “Nurse? Nurse?”

The fireman left, and the other two men went into the Head Case’s room. I saw that it wasn’t really Tom Bergeron, cheesy host of both Hollywood Squares and the latest version of American’s Funniest Home Videos. He looked like him, and wore a similar almost-a-leisure-suit suit. He carried his own air as if he was important, and I soon figured out from their conversation that he was the emergency room doctor. The only one, it seemed, so that did make him important. From our position, we could see Dr. Bergeron bent at the waist over the Head Case’s bed, but we could not see the patient. He cupped his mouth and pseudo-yelled into her ear, “Yoo hoo! Are you in there? Hell-ooooo?????” We heard a soft murmur, much like a reluctant sleepy child would make on an early school morning. Dr. B. and the nurse chuckled at each other, shaking their heads in private understanding as they left the room. They walked over toward the crowd at the nurse’s station, as the Curtain pleaded weakly from the opposite direction, “Nurse? Nurse?”

The neurology consult finally arrived, and I wasn’t at all surprised to see he looked exactly like Howie Mandel. In appropriate triage, Dr. Howie went to see the injured woman in the room across from me first. Shortly thereafter, Dr. Bergeron came scooting down the hallway, sliding around the doorway on his shiny shoes to join Howie at her bedside. Dr. Bergeron told Dr. Howie about the patient’s history, including his opinion that she was faking it to get attention. Dr. Howie called to her, more gently than Dr. B. had. He asked her various questions; but the Head Case would not, or could not, speak. Dr. Howie took more than a few minutes to review her file. Apparently, there was nothing in her tests to explain this and she had a psych history, Dr. Bergeron pointed out over his shoulder. Her family could be called and asked to pick her up. Dr. Howie headed off to the nurse’s station to contact the social worker.

In the meantime, Dr. Bergeron paced the hallway in front of the Head Case’s room, and in front of my husband and me. He whistled casually. As he walked by the Curtain, she called with more hope than I’d heard in a while, “Nurse?” “No, Doctor,” he sang in response to the Curtain, smirking and snorting, then looking at us to share the chuckle. We stared back at him. He looked into my husband’s face, and he suddenly had something to check on at the nurse’s station. He scurried off in a rush. I thought I heard a very soft, stifled sob from the Curtain.

Then Dr. Howie Mandel was standing in front of me. We went through what was by now a litany of why we were there, and how we got there at the advice of Dr. Flintstone. We explained that I had no emergent problem, but a need for a complete neurological evaluation under hospital conditions. This is what we had been told by Dr. Flintstone, anyway. But now there was some conflict between what we had heard and what Dr. Flintstone had told Dr. Mandel, who had called him at our insistence. Unfortunately, it was now getting close to last call in Dr. Flintstone’s world. This was appropriately enough the final straw in this farce, and more than I could take since now I was convinced that Dr. Howie would whip off his thick glasses and expose the Candid Camera-style trick at any moment.

We simply walked out of the emergency room shortly after my conversation with Dr. Howie, and we got more attention in that thirty seconds than any patient received in the hours we had been there. Scrubbed personnel waving paperwork suddenly knew who we were. But we had had enough, and under no circumstances would I check in there. Apparently, I survived. And it will be the last time I ever go into an emergency room unless a.) I’m bleeding beyond the control of Band-Aids or b.) I’m unconscious and can’t say wait, let me see if duct tape will work instead. But I present this story to you not so you will feel sorry for me. I am the least of the characters in it. I still wonder what became of the Head Case, and if she ever found some reason to want to speak again. I can still hear the particular timbre of the voice from behind the Curtain whose condition I never knew. I was able to see the asthmatic little boy and his parents be admitted to care in nirvana right behind me, and saw a nurse go into their room to stay. That was a relief. But when Naomi complained about the medical community’s response to its pregnant patients, I was reminded of this night at the ER.

Fountain of Sorrow

2005-12-23T12:59:00.000-07:00

Fountain of sorrow, fountain of light
You’ve known the hollow sound of your own steps in flight.
You’ve had to hide sometimes,
But now you're all right.

~ Jackson Browne, “Fountain of Sorrow”

But finally Roger had had enough. He looked at her and calmly, coldly, said, “Have you ever had to kill anyone?”

~ Unidentified Vietnam Veteran

The blogger whose text I quoted in my last post has more grace than I; she had already reconsidered the choice of words that led to my angry and defensive tirade. In her defense and mine, “Faithful Blogger” is not a real person, although I used someone’s real words. “Faithful Blogger” is a composite of many voices. I came upon one sentence that summed up the attitude that was bothering me, so I pounced on the words of that individual in order to attack a mindset. It reverberated like a personal attack, though, which is where my defensiveness shows most clearly. I even considered deleting that post, but decided against it for several reasons. First, my book report on Naomi Wolf’s Misconceptions stands as is. Second, my last post is a perfect illustration of what is essentially a two-word answer to the question, “How does one speak to the post-abortive?” Answer: very carefully. And I’m letting it stand because it says at least as much about my own weaknesses as it does anyone else’s. There they are, and the young blogger who took it on the chin has my gratitude. If she can hold up under my ranting, then she is probably ready to talk to the post-abortive.

But in order to talk to and about the woman who aborts, we have to understand the nature of abortion. We cannot say in one breath that abortion is both a traumatic experience and an act of selfishness; not in such general terms. The issue is complex. Yes, especially from the theological perspective, it is selfishness to deny God His will in determining who lives and dies. But in human terms, we have to remember that by definition, that which is traumatic is also threatening; many women who abort do so in response to a threat in their own lives. Is it always selfish to act in self-defense when one is threatened?

What can we know about the pregnant woman who is feeling threatened, which is echoed in the defensiveness of the post-abortive woman even decades later? We’ve discussed the fight/flight/freeze response to threat before. In his book, On Killing, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman tells us that “when we examine the responses of creatures confronted with aggression from their own species, the set of options [fight/flight] expands to include posturing and submission,” (Grossman, p. 5). The tiger on the jungle path cannot be reasoned with by his human prey because we don’t speak Tiger. Human beings, however, can communicate and negotiate, even when no words are used:

“There, not more than 15 feet away, sat a Viet Cong eating a handful of rice from a pouch on his lap. We looked at each other for what seemed to be an eternity, but in fact was probably only a few seconds…After a moment, he put his pouch of rice on the floor of the tunnel beside him, turned his back to me and slowly started crawling away. I, in turn, switched off my flashlight, before slipping back into the lower tunnel and making my way back to the entrance,” (Grossman, p. 2).

Posturing is the display of our capabilities. Peacocks are posturing when they show their plumage. The "rebel yell" of the Confederacy was posturing, a non-violent act intended to convey a threat. King Kong beats his chest, saying clearly enough “Leave me alone. I'm more powerful than you.” Among creatures with a social order, in particular, submission is used to end a conflict without violence. One creature gives in and acknowledges the authority of another. Sometimes we social humans submit in response to a threat of violence from another:

I was always told I would never have children due to severe endometriosis; imagine my surprise when I discovered I was pregnant. I was so excited and couldn't wait to tell him about it. I was about 6 or 7 weeks along. I told him and he seemed very upset. He told me there was no way he was going to have a child. Being totally against abortion, I told him no way. We seemed to get into more arguments, and the abuse seemed to get worse. I was determined to have this baby. I was about 12 weeks or so when the worst came. He told me if I didn't go get an abortion he would kill me. He actually held a gun to my head. We drove to some place in New Jersey.

Sometimes we submit to the will of others, and may not know why or even how:

I can recall being awestruck as the lady told me that I was going to be a mother. I wept and I shook all at the same time. The joy was more than I can detail in mere words. When I told Edward he was pleased and we were both anxious to share our good news with his family. His family reacted with concern yet with love over our blessed news. Later that day Edward and I spoke of marriage. We spoke about our futures together. All seemed well.

It was time to tell my family, the family that had raised me in a supposed Christian environment. I was scared. I was afraid to do what had to be done. I knew in my heart that I had to tell the truth. I had to tell them. So I did. I confronted the issue alone. I attempted to explain as I sat there and heard something that I will never forget. The decision was that I was to abort my baby. I was told that this is what was best for all concerned. I didn’t know what to say. Thoughts raced through my head of Sunday sermons denouncing such a procedure. My mind raced as my mother explained to me that I had to use my own money. I was told to take the money out of my savings and to have Edward drive me to the city. I had done the damage. I had to fix it. I feared abandonment, having no home or support. I was told that I would be thrown out into the streets. So, I did what my mother demanded.

In my case, the positive pregnancy test hit me like a sledge hammer in the chest. I sank to the floor of the bathroom (where else does one do these tests?), and struggled to cry. It seemed too big to cry about. Then I started to laugh at my own stupidity, and when I did, I also wept. I thought, “Hello, Baby,” and “I don’t know if (how) I can keep us alive.” I started to lose my mind just about then. I understand in a very personal way that an unplanned pregnancy can, in and of itself, be traumatizing. I do not, however, understand abortion as the remedy.

What is happening hormonally, on a neuropsychological level, when a pregnant woman is threatened? To learn that, I started trying to find information about how hormones affect behavior in pregnant women. I didn’t find nearly as much as I hoped, so I’m going to wing it. I found quite a few sweeping and generalized statements that women who are pregnant are under the influence of hormones, but not a lot of information as to how this influence is manifested. Naomi Wolf writes that obstetric psychology as a field of study is widely known in Europe and Australia, but virtually unheard of in the United States.

So for now I’ll try to reason it through in a simplistic, but perhaps revealing, way. The goal of the species is twofold: the survival of the individual and the survival of the species. In mammals, and only in mammals, these goals become intertwined in a remarkable way when the female is pregnant with the next generation. They cannot be separated. When the survival of one threatens the survival of the other, then this is a sign that something is wrong.

It also makes sense for the pregnant mammal to be more alert while she is pregnant, because of this twofold goal to secure survival. From a neuropsychological standpoint, this is a unique time. The pregnant woman’s brain is being bathed by hormones, mainly estrogen and progesterone. According to the British Society for Neuroendocrinology, oxytocin, which will play a major role in labor, birth, and maternal bonding, is being stored up during the first and second trimesters for that purpose:

“The adaptations in neural circuitry in the mother's brain are prepared by actions of pregnancy hormones. While the neural circuits for birth, maternal behaviour and lactation are ready for sudden action at term, they must be restrained until birth. So the circuits have powerful inhibitory as well as excitatory controls.

Oxytocin builds up in the posterior pituitary during pregnancy because less is released and more is produced. Oestrogen stimulates the oxytocin gene when progesterone secretion falls, though we do not yet know how the oestrogen receptor expressed in oxytocin neurones regulates this gene. Oxytocin neurones are strongly inhibited by three mechanisms which prevent them from releasing the stored oxytocin prematurely.

First, progesterone, acting through an intermediary, intensifies actions of the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA on oxytocin neurones….brakes on. Second, stimulated oxytocin neurones produce nitric oxide, which diffuses from the cells and their terminals, restraining oxytocin cell activation and secretion….more braking. During pregnancy, oestrogen and progesterone increase neuronal nitric oxide synthase (nNOS) activity and also activate the third mechanism, which uses brain peptides with opiate-like activity. These opioid peptides restrain oxytocin secretion first via receptors in the posterior pituitary and later at the nerve cell bodies….safety stop?

The brakes come off….when progesterone secretion collapses near term: GABA is less effective and the nNOS gene is turned down. However, the opioid restraint remains, stopping the oxytocin neurones from running out of control, as excitation now predominates. A boost is given by oxytocin itself, breaking out from the nerve cell dendrites and driving the oxytocin neurones to operate near full power. Finally, oxytocin released in the brain acts on the circuitry for maternal behaviour, sensitised through induction of oxytocin receptors by oestrogen.

Oxytocin is being built up in storage, in the posterior pituitary of the brain of the pregnant woman. During times of stress, we know this about oxytocin: “In rats, the presence of adrenal steroids, released in response to fear and anxiety, increases the ability of oxytocin to bind with its receptors (or be put to use), but mainly in the amygdala." The amygdala will facilitate the state of hyper arousal.

What happens to the built-up oxytocin in a pregnant woman in response to the fear and anxiety associated with someone rejecting her and/or her child? Since we have reasoned that nature would benefit most from a pregnant woman who is more alert to danger than not, what can be known about the state of arousal as it is affected by the pregnant condition? Is the pregnant woman in a hypervigilant state of arousal? The estrogens and other hormones are already affecting her behaviorally:

“..only recently has it become apparent that estrogens exert many actions outside of the reproductive function, including actions on brain areas that are important for learning and memory, emotions and affective state, as well as motor coordination and pain sensitivity.”

The anterior cingulate of the brain, which is that area engaged in social bonding behaviors, will gate or inhibit the actions of the amygdala, which is stimulated in the brain under times of stress, and is facilitating the stress response. It makes sense then, that the pregnant woman would try to calm her aroused state by seeking the society of other human beings. Indeed, this may be Nature’s goal in creating the hyper aroused state to begin with: pregnant human women need assistance during labor and birth. The aroused state is created so the woman will seek that help. Finding no one willing, as is the case in more than two-thirds of all abortions, her stress will increase. She may dissociate from her emotional responses, including and especially the maternal bond, which is closely associated with the threat. In that state, she will acquiesce to the demands of others more easily; and in that state, the maternal bond can be more easily ignored, or denied, at least for as long as it can take to have an abortion.

Now, what happens to the built-up oxytocin when the pregnancy is terminated by abortion? We remember that oxytocin has opiate-like qualities:

After the abortion, I felt nothing but relief, mentally! My body went into grieving mode due to hormone realignment. That lasted a couple of weeks. I understood what it was and did not make it a obsession. It confirmed the opinions of the doctors that Post Partum Psychosis would have been the outcome had I carried to term. When that was done, my relief was TOTAL. Ever since, I have been nothing but relieved.

Sharon’s testimony is notable because she had a history of post-partum depression. It seems our best guess at this point as to the cause of this disorder is the termination of hormones once the pregnant state ends in birth. First, the answer, when we find it, will have to be much more complex than this. The cessation of high hormone levels is the natural consequence of birth; it is abnormal for it to cause illness, so there is a mechanism involved in post-partum depression that we are missing. Secondly, I note this because it is illogical to assume this same mechanism cannot cause depression if the pregnancy is terminated surgically or chemically, by abortion, instead of by natural cessation, or birth. Yet, some experts will still deny that abortion can induce clinical depression. I, at least, am going to try to develop an understanding of obstetric psychology. I don’t see how any discussion of abortion could proceed without it.

Misconceptions

2005-12-20T10:07:00.000-07:00

“For someone who is pro-life, the news of an abortion by a friend or relative brings a mixed bag of emotions. Anger, rage, regret and sorrow are some of these emotions. She did commit a selfish act by aborting her child, however no woman who truly understands what abortion is seeks an abortion.”

~ a Faithful Pro-Life Blogger

In an article telling pro-lifers how to talk to the post-abortive, a young blogger begins with the above paragraph. My comment in response did not make it through her screening process to publication, which disappointed me. I had politely cautioned the blogger against beginning her conversations with the post-abortive with statements such as the one she made above.

I didn’t retain my exact text, but can remember it pretty closely: “While it is true that abortion is an intrinsically selfish act, it is not appropriate to say that the woman who submits to an abortion is always acting selfishly. There may be mitigating factors, such as coercion...Secondly, there are plenty of women who understand exactly what they are doing when they abort. But again, the state of mind of the sinner is the Lord’s domain.”

That’s pretty close. I don’t see anything objectionable about it myself, but it’s been twenty-four hours and I’m not published, so I will assume my commentary has been rejected. It’s a good thing I don’t mind giving unsolicited advice; rejection doesn’t bother me. It’s also a good thing I have my own blog, because my response will be published. I want to protect the blogger’s identity, as this doesn’t merit any undue attention. She meant no harm. The content that followed her introductory paragraph was good, with references to organizations such as Rachel’s Vineyard and the Silent No More Awareness campaign.

This serves as an example, though, of what’s wrong with some of the thinking in the pro-life movement, particularly among those whose hands are squeaky clean and who wear their religion on their sleeves. Let’s start with the title of the article in question – it runs along the lines of, “How to talk to the post-abortive.” Why, thank you. I appreciate your interest in speaking to me. But no, wait. She didn’t publish my comment, so that was not her goal. She only wants to tell others how to do it; I’m not ascribing motives to her, because she presents her article as a template to be handed out. But since I’m taking up valuable internet space with this topic, let me add to the remark I made above, because the spread of this kind of misinformation shouldn’t be encouraged. Step one, Faithful Blogger: if you want to learn to talk to the post-abortive, you’re going to have to come down here to our level. The first thing you do is stop referring to us as if we were a unique type of freak who requires special handling. We are just sinners, after all. Abortion is a particularly heinous kind of sin because the unborn is always an innocent victim; but it isn’t the only heinous crime against the innocent that people commit. And in the final analysis, particularly if one professes the Catholic faith, we don’t get to judge which sinner is the worst kind. So try to think of yourself as one of us, for just a moment: a sinner. St. Paul does this when he acknowledges, “there but for the grace of God, go I.” Come on down here where the sinners live and get to know us, even though you aren’t one of us, and when you do, remember to thank God for your clean hands.

The second step you will want to take in order to effectively communicate with the post-abortive is to stop thinking we are all ignorant of what we are doing. Not only are we apparently unique in the world of sinners, but we are also stupid, because “…no woman who truly understands what abortion is seeks an abortion.” Faithful Blogger wants to believe that we are only aborting because we don’t know better. This kind of thinking is only going to lead her and others who feel the same way into deep disappointment and disenchantment with the world. It exposes her inexperience and ignorance of the often sordid reality of reproductive “choice.” FB, go read some abortion testimony, and some statistics – 43% of today’s abortions are repeat procedures. Ignorance isn’t likely. A lot of us knew what we were doing; unfortunately, that knowledge didn’t suffice to change the outcome. Something else was needed to prevent the abortion. Again, if you are interested in speaking to the post-abortive, listen first – find out why we abort. It will make you more helpful in the long run.

Faithful Blogger is an example of the pro-lifer with no personal abortion experience; clean hands, clean hearts, clean minds. Good for her. I hope she stays that way. On the flip side of the same coin, I finally finished Naomi Wolf’s book, “Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood.” If you don’t know her, and I don’t know much about her myself, Naomi Wolf is a feminist writer who now advocates legal abortions only through the first trimester. She changed her position on abortion after her first pregnancy, which resulted in a live birth. As far as I can tell, she and Faithful Blogger can sit comfortably side by side, as Naomi appears to have clean hands, too. She is a Pro-Abort with No (declared) Experience – a P.A.W.N.E., if you will. The friend who referred me to her writings insists that Naomi has had an abortion, but I can find no confirmation of that anywhere. She is said to have taken the morning after pill once, but that doesn’t count. Every woman who has ever used oral contraceptives has killed a “Maybe-Baby,” or two, or three, or ?. Possibly killing someone who may have existed is about as far as one can get from the kill emotionally; the psychological consequences of this kind of killing are not usually severe. In spite of my efforts, instead of finding any mention of personal abortion experience for Naomi, I find quotations from her along these lines:

“Naomi Wolf suggests a need to face clearly that a death occurs during an abortion, saying that pro-choice rhetoric would be more honest and therefore more effective.”Clinging to a rhetoric about abortion in which there is no life and no death, we entangle our beliefs in a series of self-delusions, fibs and evasions. And we risk becoming precisely what our critics charge us with being: callous, selfish, and casually destructive." She applies this idea to helping abortion staff. "Pro-choicers, too, scapegoat the doctors and clinic workers. By resisting a moral framework in which to view abortion we who are pro-abortion-rights leave the doctors in the frontlines, with blood on their hands, the blood of the repeat abortions -- at least 43 percent of the total; the suburban summer country-club rite-of-passage abortions; the 'I don't know what came over me, it was such good Chardonnay' abortions; as well as the blood of the desperate and the unpreventable and accidental and the medically necessary and the violently conceived abortions. This is blood that the doctors and clinic workers often see clearly, and that they heroically rinse and cause to flow and rinse again. And they take all our sins, the pro-choice as well as the pro-life among us, upon themselves.

"And we who are pro-choice compound their isolation by declaring that that blood is not there."

http://www.fnsa.org/apaw/ch6.html

At least she is honest enough to call abortion what it is; but those who have only been horrified by the sight of their own blood should be careful when discussing the blood spilled by others. In “Our Bodies, Our Souls,” Naomi elaborates further about perpetuating the myth that no one dies during an abortion. The article is posted on the Priests for Life website at http://www.priestsforlife.org/prochoice/ourbodiesoursouls.htm

On their website, Naomi is referred to as an “abortion apologetic.” I take issue with this title. Apolegetics is defined as:

1. The branch of theology that is concerned with defending or proving the truth of Christian doctrines.

2. Formal argumentation in defense of something, such as a position or system.

Naomi Wolf is not an apologetic as I would understand the term. In my limited experience, Catholic apologetics are Catholics. In my opinion, Naomi cannot be an abortion apologetic if she has never had an abortion. In fact, I'm not sure how well she defends the issue at all. In this book, Misconceptions, Naomi devotes a chapter about her third month of pregnancy to “Baby Values,” and questions whether we have the right to take the life of the unborn child. And she waffles, back and forth, about the humanity of the unborn. At one moment during her first sonogram, she sees the tiny hands and feet of her unborn child and, in her own words, “Some voice from the most primitive core of my brain - the voice of the species? - said: You must protect that little hand at all costs; no harm can come to it or its owner. That little hand, that human signature, is more important now than you are. The message was unambivalent,” (Wolf, p. 29). Later, when she sees the child’s eyes in the image, she is struck by its “alien appearance:” “This was a baby in my belly, but it was also a time glider hanging poised in inner space, ensouled already, or to become ensouled at some moment that I would be wholly unaware of...And I could swear that, when it had looked at me, it had conveyed this directly to me: Yes, I will be a human baby eventually, small, helpless, new, and wholly lovable. But not yet,” (Wolf, pp. 30-31).

I finished reading this chapter in complete disbelief that Naomi Wolf was a pro-choice advocate. I'm not sure Naomi knows what it is she advocates. This book is not a difficult read by any stretch of the imagination, but it sat unread at this point for two weeks. I didn’t want to finish the book, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. So in the interim, I did internet research about Naomi, hoping perhaps to find some insight into what makes her so flaky. Is she pro-choice or not? There is mention that she “flipped” on her fellows in the pro-choice movement after this, her first pregnancy, and mention of an article she writes advocating limits on access to legal abortion in the first trimester only. This is a flaky cop-out as well. If abortion is a necessary, right, and healthy medical procedure at 10 weeks of gestation, it is at 13 weeks as well – or it is none of these things.

I dreaded returning to Naomi’s writing, but finally realized the dread I felt was disproportionate to the scope of the project. I had only agreed to look into her writing at the suggestion of a friend, after all. Nothing major hinged on my finishing the book; I could walk away from it if I wanted to. Or I could just take the few hours needed to go on from her third month of pregnancy to the end of the book. One day, I threw the thing across the room, disgusted with it, and left it askew in the corner for days. I vacuumed around it. As it gathered dust, I tried to figure out what my problem really was. If you have post-traumatic stress disorder, this will sound familiar. Apparently, healthy people don’t have to go on an expedition to find out what their emotions are, from where they stem, and why. But I do, and at times, I am very dense.

I sat one morning glaring at the book, noting its drab color scheme, pus-yellow and brown; Naomi smiled at me through a fairly thick layer of cosmetics from the back cover; and as I tried to talk myself into picking it up, I thought, “But, crap, she’s going to take me through every month of her freaking pregnancy,” and it dawned on me, at last. I opened the book, barely noticing the bookmark and its “All things are possible with God” message, and finally understood my reluctance to continue. Naomi and I had left off at the beginning of her fourth month of pregnancy. This is where she and I would diverge. I had been pregnant until my fourth month. I did not want to go there again, and more than anything, I did not want to go beyond.

So I did. I finished it that day. Here’s my book report: if you are a woman who wants to have children, read the book. It will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about being pregnant, bluntly, honestly, and from a pro-woman perspective. There’s marvelous information about the natural birth process and midwifery, and Naomi’s case studies in birth trauma support my contentions on abortion and maternal bonding, found here and here. Naomi “discovered” that the medical community condescends to pregnant women, and in so doing, demonstrates one of the things I don’t like about her. Apparently, social problems don’t become social problems to Naomi until they trouble her own world. Abortion was to be advocated until she became pregnant and recognized the individuality of the child in the womb. And as she searched for a nanny, she lamented that equality between the sexes has not advanced into the area of child care, since she and her friends who were mothers were deemed responsible in the household for all things “Baby,” in spite of having husbands who had been well-trained in the finer points of feminism.

Here she disappoints again. She calls herself a journalist; yet, when she wanted to know what other women experienced in becoming mothers, she asked her friends. When she wanted to know what women of color experienced, she asked her friends’ nannies. She discovered, to her outrage, that the child care providers she and her friends employed were most often leaving their own children unattended or in substandard care in order to go to work every day. To Naomi, this best exemplifies the disrespect we show to mothers in our society; we make no provisions for them in the workplace. She ends her treatise on modern motherhood with “A Mother’s Manifesto,” otherwise known as “A List of Things Naomi Thinks Other People Should Do To Help Mothers.” Here’s one example: “We need on-site day care so that we can see our children while we are at work and on-site nurseries...” Marvelous idea. I support it all the way, along with the spirit of the rest of your manifesto. I just have one question, Naomi – when you were interviewing your friend’s nannies, one of them, a black woman, mentioned that her own youngster was a latchkey kid, left home alone while she worked. Your own nanny’s children were in another country; she was sending money home but unable to see them. Why not suggest to your friends that your nannies could raise their own children alongside yours very easily? You could have provided on-site day care instead of talking about the lack of it. You had the resources in your hands; you saw the problem; and you could have actually done something to make a difference.

And now, I really am finished with Naomi Wolf. I have a litany of complaints, and more than a few compliments. But most of what I would say would probably be tainted with sour grapes. I don’t like P.A.W.N.E.S, Naomi, especially those who go on to discover the joy and sometimes savage beauty of motherhood. I also don’t like people who have never killed who endorse killing as though they are intimately familiar with its characteristics:

“Abortion should be legal; it is sometimes even necessary. Sometimes the mother must be able to decide that the fetus in its full humanity must die. But it is never right or necessary to minimize the value of lives involved or the sacrifice incurred in letting them go. Only if we uphold abortion rights within a matrix of individual conscience, atonement, and responsibility can we both correct the logical and ethical absurdity in our position - and consolidate the support of the center.”

~ Naomi Wolf, http://www.ariga.com/frosties/naomiwolf.shtml

It is most often those who have never experienced combat who endorse it; who describe it in its most glowing terms; and who want to glorify the deeds done therein. The only woman of sound mind who can so blithely discuss wielding the power of life and death over her unborn children is one who has never actually done so.

Conditioned to Kill

2005-11-08T12:00:00.000-07:00

But for the infantry, the problem of persuading soldiers to kill is now a major one…That an infantry company in World War II could wreak havoc with only about one seventh of the soldiers willing to use their weapons is a testimony to the lethal effects of modern firepower, but once armies realized what was actually going on, they at once set about to raise the average.

Soldiers had to be taught, very specifically, to kill. “We are reluctant to admit that essentially war is the business of killing,” Marshall wrote in 1947, but it is readily enough admitted now.

~ Gwynne Dyer, in “War,” as reprinted by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman in “On Killing: The Psychological Consequences of Learning to Kill in War and Society”

We have produced an unusual dilemma. A procedure is rapidly becoming recognized as the procedure of choice in late abortion, but those capable of performing or assisting with the procedure are having strong personal reservations about participating in an operation which they view as destructive and violent…No one who has not performed this procedure can know what it is like or what it means; but having performed it, we are bewildered by the possibilities of interpretation. We have reached a point in this particular technology where there is no possibility of denial of an act of destruction by the operator. It is before one’s eyes. The sensations of dismemberment flow through the forceps like an electric current…The more we seem to solve the problem, the more intractable it becomes.

~ Warren Hern, abortion specialist, as reprinted by Dr. Rachel MacNair in “Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress: The Psychological Consequences of Killing”

As I conducted interviews for this study in a VFW hall in Florida in the summer of 1989, a Vietnam vet named Roger started talking about his experiences over a beer. It was still early in the afternoon, but down the bar an older woman already began to attack him. “You got no right to snivel about your little pish-ant war. World War Two was a real war. Were you even alive then? Huh? I lost a brother in World War Two.”

We tried to ignore her; she was only a local character. But finally Roger had had enough. He looked at her and calmly, coldly, said, “Have you ever had to kill anyone?”

~ Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, “On Killing”

As we’ve been discussing, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman reports on an innate aversion to killing another human being as it has been evidenced throughout the history of warfare. In World War Two, researchers discovered that “…75 to 80 percent of riflemen did not fire their weapons at an exposed enemy, even to save their lives and the lives of their friends,” (Grossman, p. 250). Equating this low firing rate among soldiers to having “a literacy rate of 15 to 20 percent among proofreaders,” (Grossman, p. 251), the military set about correcting the problem. Firing rates improved during the Korean conflict, and by the time we were sending soldiers into Vietnam, the military had achieved a firing rate of 95 percent. They did this by incorporating psychological methodology into training techniques: desensitization, conditioning, and denial defense mechanisms. We see the same techniques used in individuals and in our society to overcome our innate aversion to killing our unborn children.

Desensitization

“The Vietnam era was, of course then at its peak, you know, the kill thing. We’d run PT in the morning, and every time your left foot hit the deck you’d have to chant “kill, kill, kill, kill.” It was drilled into your mind so much that it seemed like when it actually came down to it, it didn’t bother you, you know? Of course the first one always does, but it seems to get easier – not easier, because it still bothers you with every one that, you know, that you actually kill and you know you’ve killed.”

~ USMC sergeant and Vietnam veteran, 1982 (Grossman, p. 251)

“There are weary, grim moments when I think I cannot bear another basin of bloody remains, utter another kind phrase of reassurance…I prepare myself for another basin, another brief and chafing loss. “How can you stand it?” Even the clients ask…I watch a woman’s swollen abdomen sink to softness in a few stuttering moments and my own belly flip-flops with sorrow…It is a sweet brutality we practice here, a stark and loving dispassion.”

~ Sallie Tisdale, abortion clinic nurse (MacNair, p. 73)

“We used medications to try to stop the labor of women in premature labor so that the pregnancy could progress to term. Sometimes, the aborted babies were bigger than the premature ones we took to the nursery. It was at this point that I began to have nightmares…”

~ McArthur Hill, former abortion provider (MacNair, p. 75)

Grossman refers to the process of desensitizing soldiers to the act of killing as “thinking the unthinkable,” (Grossman, p. 251). In addition to reinforcing the idea that the enemy is not human, desensitizing measures included more realistic combat training conditions, such as targets shaped like human beings, some of which were loaded with red-paint-filled milk jugs to make the kill shots more realistic. Killing another human being is drilled into soldiers as target practice, so they will not stop to consider the humanity of their victims, or even consider them human in the first place. Note in the above testimony that the nightmares started for Dr. Hill when his denial was shattered.

Conditioning

Desensitizing is thinking the unthinkable; Grossman calls conditioning “doing” the unthinkable. Conditioning is a term used in psychology to denote learning. According to Grossman, in order to overcome the soldier’s resistance to killing, “every aspect of killing on the battlefield is rehearsed, visualized, and conditioned,” (Grossman, p. 254), so that firing in combat becomes a reflexive action, done without thought. In describing the acute and chronic stress responses, we discussed the amygdala, an area of the brain wherein we process sensory input for emotional content and meaning during times of trauma. It is also that area of the brain where we store certain learned skills: riding a bicycle; playing a musical instrument; and in well-conditioned soldiers, firing upon another human being designated as the “enemy.” We recall that during times of acute trauma, we turn to that knowledge in our brains that is most easily accessible, and we often find that which has been well-rehearsed and stored in the amygdala. It is the entire purpose of fire drills and other rehearsals done by emergency responders. In the attacks of 9/11 on the World Trade Center, many who survived the bombing nearly a decade earlier were saved that day, and saved others, because they had been through it before.

Here is how one military sniper trainer designed his training methods to make practicing the kill as realistic as possible: “I changed the standard firing targets to full-size, anatomically correct figures because no [enemy soldier] runs around with a big white square on his chest with numbers on it. I put clothes on these targets and polyurethane heads. I cut up a cabbage and poured catsup into it and put back together. I said, ‘When you look through that scope, I want you to see a head blowing up,’” (Grossman, p. 255).

The abortion industry does not, so far as I know, use images of infants to train women and girls to abort. The pro-life movement uses these graphic images in an effort to shatter denial and dissuade women from aborting, but runs the risk of desensitizing us to this violence when it does. However, combining reproductive health services to women in the same clinic where one performs abortions can easily be seen as a kind of rehearsal. Get women used to coming to the clinic for health care, and abortion slides right in, almost unnoticed, as just another aspect of same, even though a.) in most cases, there is no abnormal health problem that needs treatment (pregnancy is normal) and b.) there is certainly very little care.

Pro-abortion and pro-choice groups, do, however, use language to disguise the humanity of the aborted child: “pregnancy tissue,” “fetal tissue,” and other similar euphemisms are used to describe the human remains that are chemically expelled or surgically removed. Some women have reported seeing, and abortion clinic workers testify to the practice, particularly in surgical abortions, of making sure the unborn infant is reconstructed. This is done to ensure the child has been entirely removed from the woman’s body. When this fails, we don’t hear the words that describe the true nature of the infection – it is simply referred to as such, and we don’t hear the biological reality that the woman’s uterus is infected with decomposing human remains. That would give us pause; so we don’t think of it; but it is true. This leads us to the defense mechanism of denial, without which no one would abort.

Denial Defense Mechanisms

Denial defense mechanisms are “unconscious methods for dealing with traumatic experiences,” (Grossman, p. 255).

“Basically, the soldier has rehearsed the process so many times that when he does kill in combat he is able to, at one level, deny to himself that he is actually killing another human being,” (Grossman, p. 255). He describes the process of “manufactured contempt,” which is :…a combination of the denial of, and contempt for, the victim’s role in society (desensitization), along with the psychological denial of, and contempt for, the victim’s humanity (developing a denial defense mechanism)…”, (Grossman, p. 256).

“[I]f you really dwell on it, and talk about it all the time, then it gets more personal. It gets more real to you. You just don’t talk about it, try not to think about it…If Dr. Tucker ever caught you discussing something like that – is this right what we’re doing? – he’d fire you. When I was active in the abortion clinics, I don’t know that any of us had any feelings about anything. We didn’t really have a lot of feelings about the women, about the moral issues,”

~ Joy Davis, abortion clinic worker (MacNair, p. 77).

“The one thing that sticks out in my mind the most, that really upset me the most, was that he had done an abortion, he had a fetus wrapped inside of a blue paper. He stuck it inside of a surgical glove and put another glove over it. He was standing in the hall, speaking with myself and two of his assistants. He was tossing the fetus up in the air, and catching it. Like it was a rubber ball. I just looked at him, and it’s like, doctor, please. And he laughed. He says, “No one knows what this is.”

~ Louisiana abortion clinic worker (MacNair, p. 77)

Each and every abortion is in and of itself an act of psychological and maladaptive denial. We are saying, “I am not a mother,” or “I am not a father,” when that is not a biological reality. But denial speaks for itself:

“It took time for it to sink in for me that although I wanted to have kids with Austin, having them at that point would be dooming us all--both the two of us and whatever children came out of it. We weren't stable in any sense of the word, and to have a child would pretty much guarantee that we never would be. I wanted to be a mom, but I wanted to be a better mother than that.

It had been a few weeks since my last change of heart, and Austin had been trying hard to be supportive even though he didn't want us to have kids. When I told him I wanted the abortion, he broke down crying. He was terrified that I'd change my mind again. I called Planned Parenthood the next morning and scheduled an appointment for the following week.

I suppose the details of the actual procedure are pretty much the same for everybody--a lot of "Ow, ow, ow, SERIOUSLY OW," and that's what it was for me. Austin held my hand throughout and looked ready to cry. Afterwards in the recovery room, he held me tight (and ate my crackers) and told me he would make sure I never had to go through anything like that again.

So, what to say about afterwards, other than "I'm not sorry"? I had some rotten mood swings during the next few weeks, but I evened out. I got a job that February, which I still have. Austin and I are still together, and much closer for all that happened--if either of us were at all interested in marriage, we'd probably be engaged by now.

I've encountered a few morons who call me a slut and a baby killer--but they were safely on the other side of a computer connection, where they don't have to look you in the eye to say that kind of thing to you. It used to piss me off, but eventually you get used to it and it just seems laughable and pathetic. Of course, if you don't get upset by being called a baby murderer, then they think you must be REALLY evil ... so I would say that you can't win no matter what you do, but I'm four days away from what was supposed to be my due date. Considering that I am nowhere near giving birth, I would definitely say that I won.”

~ Melissa, http://www.imnotsorry.net/melissaC.htm

I included Melissa’s last paragraph purposefully: in case someone thinks we are not at war against our children with abortion, read Melissa’s last line.

Dissociation, as we discussed, creates an unhealthy schism within the psyche. As I mentioned, abortion is intrinsically an act of denial requiring us to dissociate from parental or nurturing emotions: saying, “I will not be a parent,” when in biological fact, one already is the parent of an unborn child. In mother’s case, her body has already changed by the time she discovers she is pregnant. No one submits to or refers another to abortion without this singular and requisite act of denial.

Denying our emotions, or dissociating from them, can lead to somatic expression of these emotions through chronic pain and illness. All emotions have an adaptive and natural purpose. Guilt is one such emotion – it occurs naturally, so there must be an adaptive purpose to it. It can be a social emotion that helps us conform to what our fellow humans expect of us, but it must also be an individual one, since we are wired to feel guilt when we take a human life – this is the innnate and aversive quality of killing that Grossman identifies. It is not imposed by society, or soldiers, police officers, and abortionists would feel none, since they are sanctioned to kill. Yet we recognize that they do feel guilt, and that this is one complicating factor in PTSD, since it is unrealized guilt that haunts their nightmares.

“I have fetus dreams, we all do here: dreams of abortions one after the other; of buckets of blood splashed on the walls; trees full of crawling fetuses,” (MacNair, p. 76).

Dr. MacNair finds that “negative emotions” as a whole occur more frequently in abortion clinic workers than in other medical fields; and that “…those who have contact with the fetal remains have more negative feelings than those who do not, as would be expected if abortion practice leads to PTSD symptomatology,” (MacNair, p. 79). We would expect this; the fetal face takes on recognizably human characteristics very early in development, and we know that proximity to one’s victim shatters our ability to deny his or her humanity. Scientists have noted that fetal development prioritizes: the lungs, which are needed last, do not fully develop until the third trimester. Of what purpose are facial features in an eight-week old fetus, if not to tell whoever may have the opportunity to view them that what they are seeing is human, and therefore, one of us?

Guilt is a charged emotion: it spurs us to act, usually to confession and atonement. When one denies or represses a naturally-occurring emotion that is urging a response, like anger, fear, or guilt, neuropsychological energy builds up. This energy must dissipate; in post-traumatic stress disorder, it does so in a pathological way known as kindling. The only way to actively dissipate these charged emotions in a controlled manner is to acknowledge and act on them. This requires us to shatter denial, and in the case of abortion, it requires us to admit to atrocity.

Half a World Away

2005-11-03T10:24:00.000-07:00

This could be the saddest dusk
I’ve ever seen.
Turn to a miracle,
High alive.

My mind is racing,
As it always will.
My hands tired,
My heart aches.

I’m half a world away, here.

~ REM, “Half A World Away”

Well, last night I was in a weird mood. Well it wasn't weird it just... I felt like something was crushing my chest (emotionally not physically).

I just, I wanted to hold on to [my boyfriend] for dear life. It didn't matter how close we were, it wasn't close enough. It wasn't tight enough. I fell asleep in his arms. After, I fought for nearly 2 hours to not cry. I did it though. I didn't cry.

I'm becoming stronger. I just… I'm drowning in a sea of unknown emotions.

Nostalgic. That's what I'm feeling. I love [him]. I'm hanging on to him for dear life because I don't want to lose him. I don't want the same thing to happen to us as it did with everyone else.

I just don't know what it is I'm feeling anymore.

~ Anonymous internet journaler, nearly one year after her first abortion

We will continue with our analysis of Lt. Col. David Grossman’s book, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, probably finishing in the next segment in which I hope we will discuss conditioned learning: how it is used in the military to help men and women overcome our innate aversion to killing another member of our own species; and how it is used in society to do the same by abortion. Before we do that, however, we will finally discuss dissociation as it is described in The Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Sourcebook by Glenn R. Schiraldi, Ph.D.

Some housekeeping issues: first, regarding the references I am using, I encourage you to read these books if you find this subject matter interesting. There is so much material that I am unable to cover here, and if I tried, it would be unfair to the authors who worked very hard on their compilations. Please ask for them at your local libraries, or purchase copies at your favorite bookseller. For complete bibliographical information, I’ve included links at the sidebar to aid you, or you can email me at abortionhurts@aol.com.

Secondly, in these chapters in which I am comparing the killing done in combat by soldiers to the killing of aborted children, I want to be clear that I am not comparing women who abort to soldiers doing their duty. We are examining the psychological consequences of killing, and we can find similarities between the two groups because both can and do suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. There can be honor, and even glory, in what a soldier does in war. I only have to think of the liberation of the death camps after World War II to understand that, or of the courage displayed by a group of soldiers described by Lt. Col Grossman who collectively, but without prior planning or discussion, refused to fire directly upon a boat full of civilians in an atrocious act of terrorism. They “conscientiously objected,” as Grossman says, by firing over the top of the watercraft, only realizing they were in accordance with each other’s resistance when no shots could be seen hitting their intended target. Their commander was furious; but the soldiers winked at each other in satisfaction. In Grossman’s research, he found soldiers were particularly eager to discuss the times like these, when they were able to choose not to kill.

In contrast, the soldiers he interviewed were more reluctant to discuss the times they did kill, even when it was justifiable and surrounded with awards and honors. While the psychological consequences of killing can be compared in women who abort to soldiers who kill in combat, since both are sanctioned, there is no honor or glory in aborting an unborn child who is guilty of nothing but existence. This is why we specifically discussed the psychology of atrocity in our last chapter. We can also compare the reluctance of soldiers to discuss specific acts of killing to the documented reluctance of women to disclose information about their abortions: nearly 50% of all women who abort will never tell a single person they have done so, not even their physicians (HT: After Abortion).

Dissociation

“A psychological defense mechanism in which specific, anxiety-provoking thoughts, emotions, or physical sensations are separated from the rest of the psyche.”

Like all psychological tools, dissociation has a proper function in normal life. Daydreaming, for example, is a form of dissociation. Daydreams that do not interfere with our ability to function are not bad; in fact, they can often result in creative ideas and pass the time during boring business meetings. It is when dissociation is used dysfunctionally, as when we try to escape or deny the pain of trauma that it becomes a problem. Post-traumatic stress disorder is generally considered an anxiety disorder; however, it also has dissociative properties.

The definition given above is nice and technical, but what does it mean to us in real life? How do we know if we are dissociating from our own memories and experiences? Dr. Glenn Schiraldi lists the following helpful indications that a person is dissociating, (Schiraldi, p. 24):

Body becomes stiff or still

Miss[es] conversation

Person is slow to respond to others

Derealization (people or world don’t seem real; feel like a stranger in a familiar place; don’t recognize yourself in a mirror; world seems like a dream, veiled, like you’re not really there)

Things seem to move in slow motion or fast forward

Feels like one is watching things from outside his/her body

Emotions become flat, numb; no feelings

Life split before and after (I’m a different person since the trauma)

Not feeling expected pain

Twitching or grimacing

Out of touch with surroundings

Clouding of alertness; foggy feeling…

Drifts off, goes away, spaces out…blanks out, loses track of what’s happening

Unusual, inexplicable behavior…

Downward stare

Attempts to remain grounded in the present (stroking side of chair, tapping, jiggling leg)

Eyes darting anxiously from side to side, or rolling upward

Self-soothing (rocking back and forth)

Eyes blink rapidly or flutter

Things look or sound different; colors are faded or brighter, tunnel vision, “wide-angle view,” sounds are louder or more muffled than expected, things seem far away or unclear/fogged

Far away or dazed look

Tunes out

Not involved in present

Feels like an observer of the present situation, rather than a participant

Inattention

Memory lapses

Fantasies, excessive daydreaming

Overactivity or withdrawal

Being on autopilot…feeling like a robot

Falling asleep

Disoriented

It is interesting to note that these same symptoms are associated with fibromyalgia; the memory and cognitive impairment is known as fibrofog or brain fatigue. It is found in an estimated twenty percent of fibromyalgia patients, in addition to dizziness, clumsiness and dropping things (which indicates distraction), visual changes and eye pain (Wallace, All About Fibromyalgia, p. 62).

You may remember that Dr. Scaer, in The Body Bears the Burden: Trauma, Dissociation, and Disease, compares dissociation in humans to the freeze response found in animals. Dr. Schiraldi does the same:

“Have you ever seen an antelope clamped in a lion’s jaws? It seems to stop struggling as its consciousness shifts. Where does its consciousness go? There seems to be an innate mechanism – called dissociation – that allows mammals to temporarily escape distressing experiences. Thus, we can mentally escape a present distressing experience, as the antelope did, by mentally ‘going away.’ Or, we can temporarily escape a traumatic memory by separating and walling off the memory,” (Schiraldi, p. 14).

The problem created in the brain by dissociation is the lack of integration, or the fracturing of the psyche. “Scientists have learned that under normal conditions various parts of the brain are activated to process memories in an organized way,” (Schiraldi, p. 15). The dissociated brain is an unorganized, disordered, brain. The brain runs on electrical signals; disorder in an electrical system can be expressed by surges of electrical activity, aka kindling.

Schiraldi explains why walling off dissociated memories creates disorder:

1. The walled-off material is highly unstable. “The parts of the brain that would normally file traumatic memories in long-term storage were overwhelmed during the trauma. So traumatic memories remain in the forefront of awareness, easily triggered by reminders of the trauma,” (Schiraldi, p. 16).

2. The wall is highly permeable. A lot of energy is expended trying to maintain the wall, but it is like a leaky dam, (ibid).

3. The dissociated memory is highly emotional and mostly non-verbal, (ibid). We discussed why these memories are difficult to verbalize before. They are stored in the amygdala of the brain. Because they have not been integrated, they cannot form part of our narrative, or declarative memory.

4. Traumatic material is not only walled off from associated adaptive material, but the traumatic memory itself might be fragmented into various aspects, (ibid). Schiraldi gives an excellent example of this in a woman who became uneasy and sick to her stomach while at dinner with friends; she didn’t realize at the time that a man at her table was wearing the same cologne as the man who had raped her, (Schiraldi, p. 17).

Our dissociated memories will trigger in response to environmental cues, usually those which would otherwise seem harmless. When we discuss conditioning, we will see this demonstrated in Pavlov’s dogs, who started associating the sound of a bell with food, which elicited the uncontrolled response of salivation to an otherwise neutral stimulus. The circumstances in our environments during a traumatic period are fractured memories, mostly sensory, with no place to go because they have been separated. Like an endless loop in a bad software program, they run over and over again. This requires brain energy; it distracts us from ordinary thinking, which results in confusion and anxiety, much the same way a looped program will use up the resources of a computer’s hard drive.

This resulting anxiety and the chronically stressed response can lead to debilitating, sometimes disabling illnesses that involve chronic pain, such as fibromyalgia; chronic fatigue syndrome; reflex sympathetic dystrophy, or RSD; and mysofascial pain syndrome. Chronic stress has also been linked to potentially disabling and fatal illnesses: autoimmune disorders such as lupus and multiple sclerosis; heart disease and high cholesterol; some cancers; and diabetes.

Outside of these potential illnesses which result from chronic stress, post-traumatic stress disorder alone can be disabling in the extreme. Grossman describes the nature of psychiatric casualties in war, which creates some of these most extreme reactions because it is on the extreme end of the spectrum in creating trauma. These are some of the neuropsychological symptoms that he reports:

1. Fatigue, which includes “…such somatic symptoms as hypersensitivity to sound, increased sweating, and palpitations,” (Grossman, p. 45).

2. Confusional states, whose “…symptoms include delirium, psychotic dissociation, and manic-depressive mood swings. One often noted response is Ganzer syndrome, in which the soldier will begin to make jokes, act silly, and otherwise try to ward off the horror with humor and the ridiculous,” (ibid).

3. Conversion hysteria, which can occur during the trauma, or post-traumatically, years later. It “…can manifest itself as an inability to know where one is or to function at all,” (Grossman, p. 46), and include amnesia and convulsive attacks. “…during both world wars cases of contractive paralysis of the arm were quite common, and usually the arm used to pull the trigger was the one that became paralyzed…Whatever the physical manifestation, it is always the mind that produces the symptoms, in order to escape or avoid the horror of combat,” (Grossman, p. 47).

4. Anxiety states, “…characterized by feelings of weariness and tenseness that cannot be relieved by sleep or rest, degenerating into an inability to concentrate,” (ibid).

5. Obsessional and compulsive states, including “…tremors, palpitations, stammers, tics and so on…,” (ibid).

6. Character disorders, “…paranoid trends accompanied by irascibility, depression, and anxiety, often taking on the tone of threats to his safety; schizoid trends leading to hypersensitivity and isolation; epileptoid character reactions accompanied by periodic rages; the development of extreme dramatic religiosity; and final degeneration into a psychotic personality,” (Grossman, p. 48).

Can we find these neuropsychological symptoms in women who have aborted their children? In Forbidden Grief: The Unspoken Pain of Abortion, by Dr. Theresa Burke, this woman is described as being “chronically dissociated,” from the trauma of abortion (Burke, p. 131):

“After two abortions, I felt very alone, depressed and confused. I never knew what was wrong with me. I would cry and cry. I would cut myself or burn myself on the oven racks. I would punch and bruise myself. I was out of control, and when anyone would ask me, “What’s wrong?” I honestly answered, “I don’t know.” I felt as if I were going insane. Who cries all the time and hurts themselves without knowing why? I was always feeling numb during the times that I would hurt myself. It was like the pain would help wake me up. I hated myself. Years of counseling did not help; anti-depressants did not help; nothing seemed to help. It was all kept pretty much a secret. Only a select few knew of my extreme depression or my abortions.”

With the exception of the number of abortions, I could have written this testimony myself. I chose a cigarette for burning instead of oven racks, but that was probably just a lack of imagination on my part. At that time in my life, I would not have turned away any tool with which I could inflict self-abuse.

Dr. Burke describes the following physiological symptoms of psychological trauma that women who have had abortions report experiencing: nausea, painful abdominal cramps, upset stomachs, pelvic pain, vaginal numbness, heart palpitations, sweating, or shortness of breath (Burke, pp. 131-132). Often these physical symptoms came in response to environmental triggers that, had they not been associated with the trauma of abortion, would have been normal. One woman was given orange juice in the recovery room after her abortion; she can no longer look at it without feeling nausea. In the same way that Pavlov’s dogs learned to associate the sound of a bell with food, she has associated the smell of orange juice with dissociated traumatic memories. Her nervous system responds to this stressor, and her digestive system rebels in response. The body will remember what the mind wants to forget.

“I began to feel nausea and cramping abdominal pressure whenever I would enter the place where I worked. It was so uncomfortable, I often thought I would faint. Each time I returned to this office, I had the same reaction as I passed through the entrance where there was hung a poster on fetal development,” (Burke, p. 132).

Killing 101 - Part Two - Atrocity

2005-11-02T15:24:00.000-07:00

HOME

I take a walk outside,
I’m surrounded by some kids at play.
I can’t feel their laughter,
So why do I stare?

Twisted thoughts that spin
Round my head (I’m spinnin’).
How quick the sun can drop away.

~ Pearl Jam, “Black”

“Shoot that old woman, Hall,” I yelled, but Hall [the chopper gunner] who had been busy on his own side of the chopper had not seen her before and looked at me as if I had gone crazy, so we passed her without firing and I zigzagged around the paddies, dodging sniper fire, while I filled Hall in.

“She has a 360 degree view over the trees around the villages, Hall,” I yelled. “The machine gunners are watching her and when she sees Hueys coming, she faces them and they concentrate their fire over the spot. That’s why so many are down around here – she’s a g*damned weathervane for them. Shoot her!”

Hall gave me a thumbs up and I turned to make another pass, but Jerry and Paul [in another helicopter] had caught on to her also and had put her down. For some reason, as I again passed our burning Hueys, I could not feel anything but relief at the old woman’s death.

~ D. Bray, “Prowling for POWs”

At the end of last week, I anticipated we would delve into dissociation in more detail in this next article. But I should know better than to try to plot our course, since I am not in charge of this expedition. We go where we are led. So today we will go straight to the psychology of atrocity as Lt. Col. Grossman explains it in his work, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society.

According to Grossman, “in order to kill at close range one must deny the humanity of one’s enemy,” (Grossman, p. 199). Denial, discussed in Killing 101: Part One, is one of several psychological tools used to overcome our innate resistance to killing a member of our own species. Distance, or range to target, is another of these factors. At the furthest end of the spectrum, there is aerial bombing (or abortion referral). According to Grossman, at the other end, the closest and most difficult range at which to kill is sexual range, (Grossman, pp. 134-137). There is an even closer kill, one that also includes sexual overtones, if one is a woman and able to carry another human life within one’s own body.

But women who abort are not soldiers in war, who are not only sanctioned to kill, but whose occupation exists almost solely for that purpose. In most cases, the killing done by soldiers is justifiable. Grossman tells us it is very important to a soldier, personally and psychologically, that his killing be justified: “the basic aim of a nation at war is establishing an image of the enemy in order to distinguish as sharply as possible the act of killing from the act of murder,” (Grossman, p. 193). He defines atrocity in war as the act of killing someone who is a non-combatant. When we abort our children because of conflict in our lives, we are either killing a non-combatant, or we are making enemies of our own offspring. If we are killing a non-combatant, we are committing an atrocity. Whether one believes that abortion takes a sentient or viable human life simply doesn’t matter. We object to violence portrayed in video games and the media, where killing is not real, because we recognize that even killing a human being in psychological concept is damaging. Women conceptualize their children when they learn they are pregnant, or they wouldn’t seek abortions.

This reluctance to kill is high even when we are under direct attack. It is increased manifold when the victim does not seem to be an appropriate target, like non-combatant women and children: “…the higher the resistance bypassed, the higher the trauma that must be overcome in the subsequent rationalization process,” (Grossman, p. 191). As an example, he reports that Vietnamese children were at times armed with hand grenades against U.S. soldiers purposefully, to cause intense psychological damage in those men who would be forced to shoot the children or see their fellow soldiers, and themselves, blown to bits. These occurrences were broadcast by “…beautiful young movie stars [who] led the chant of a nation that echoed through the veteran’s soul: ‘Baby killers… murderers… butchers…,’” (Grossman, p. 288). The baby killer epithet seems to hurt them the most, particularly since the vast majority did not earn it. These same movie stars (not so young anymore, not shining quite so bright) wear the label themselves today and don’t see the irony.

Another of the psychological tools we use to rationalize, or justify the decision to kill is group absolution. To commit an atrocity, which is at the most difficult end of the spectrum of combat killing, if he is psychologically normal, a soldier’s psyche must be shattered. Then the broken pieces must be held together by those in his group who sanctioned the act:

“The process of bonding men by forcing them to commit an atrocity requires a foundation for legitimacy for it to continue for any length of time. The authority of a state … a state religion… a heritage of barbarism and cruelty that diminishes the value of individual human life… are all examples of varying forms of ‘legitimizing’ factors that, singly or combined, can ensure the continuing commission of atrocities,” (Grossman, p. 214).

The absence of this social approval is one factor that Grossman blames for the inordinate number of Vietnam veterans who suffered (and are suffering) from post-traumatic stress disorder – inordinate as it compares to those in other wars. The veterans of prior and subsequent conflicts were not assaulted by the public when they returned home, but were, in most cases, paraded, lauded, and honored. This group absolution did nothing to minimize the horror these veterans experienced in war, since “…killing in combat, by its very nature, causes deep wounds of pain and guilt,” (Grossman, p. 93). But they were supported by societal acceptance and thus better able to resolve their experiences in a way that did not leave them in a continuing state of denial and trauma. “Rejected by the nation that sent them off to war, the veterans [of Vietnam] have been plagued with guilt and resentment which has created an identity crisis unknown to veterans of previous wars,” (Grossman, p. 282).

As this applies to abortion, you might wonder if I’m saying our society should simply approve the act, and all will be well. In the first place, if that were true, there would be no PTSD in veterans of “approved” conflicts, and that is not the case. We have been documenting combat fatigue for centuries. The second answer is even easier: we already did that. Abortion is legal in this nation up to and including the day of birth. I can write here in a public forum that I killed my own child, and I am immune from prosecution. A large segment of our society will tell me I was justified; that it’s perfectly acceptable to deny my child his humanity; and that I had a legal right to have an abortion, nay, a duty not to be an unwed teenage mother. In 1973, our Supreme Court gave us permission to fire at-will, as long as we aim at our unborn children. But we have to remember our innate aversion to killing. Even sanctioned killing wounds us, while killing the innocent with or without justification can break us completely apart. Wounds leave scars. Scar tissue will never have the properties of the healthy tissue it once was; and a shattered psyche will never have the same capabilities, either.

Killing 101

2005-10-28T11:57:00.000-07:00

HOME

Part One

They say that what you mock
Will surely overtake you
And you become a monster,
So the monster will not break you.

But it’s already gone too far.
Who said that if you go in hard
You won’t get hurt?
~ U-2, “Peace on Earth”

“Never underestimate the power to obey.”
~ Sigmund Freud

In his book, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman presents us with “…the specific nature of the act of killing: the intimacy and psychological impact of the act, the stages of the act, the social and psychological implications and repercussions of the act, and the resultant disorders…,” (Grossman, p. xiv). This is a scholarly work of research based on historical evidence gathered from wars across the centuries: from the conflicts of ancient Greece to the first Gulf War. One of the conclusions Grossman reaches based on his extensive research is that human beings have an innate aversion to killing each other.

Of course this doesn’t mean we can’t; we do. It means we have to use some psychological tools in order to overcome an inborn obstacle that prevents us from wanting to take another life, even when our own lives are threatened. As I have been discussing post-abortion trauma so far, I have been making comparisons to trauma that results from environmental threats like tigers in the jungle and motor vehicle accidents. But there was something missing. Something about the fear and trauma that surrounds abortion is quite different from the fear generated by an environmental threat. I found what was missing in Grossman’s book. I found it in the testimony of soldiers who killed not because they wanted to, but because they had to, in spite of the profound and lifelong harm it did to them personally.

So how do we overcome this aversion to killing when killing is the desirable outcome? Lt. Col. Grossman discusses some of the psychological and social factors that come into play. Our military is fully aware of them, and they have designed their training techniques accordingly, because war demands that the individuals on one side successfully kill the individuals on the other side. Later, we will discover the same tactics used in the war against the unborn child.

Denial

“What the soldier knows as a result of war is that ‘the dead remain dead, the maimed are forever maimed, and there is no way to deny one’s responsibility or culpability, for those mistakes are written, forever and as if in fire, in others’ flesh,’” (Grossman, p. 91).

But deny we do, or at least, we try: “The burden of killing is so great that most men try not to admit that they have killed…Even the language of men at war is full of denial of the enormity of what they have done. Most soldiers do not ‘kill,’ instead the enemy was knocked over, wasted, greased, taken out, and mopped up,” (Grossman, p. 92). We do not "kill" unborn children. We terminate pregnancies. We exercise reproductive freedom. We make a choice. We plan parenthood. Soldiers use epithets to describe the enemy; we call the unborn child anything but that, to keep from thinking about his or her humanity.

Physical Distance

“Later I walked over to take another look at the VC I had shot. He was still alive and looking at me with those eyes. The flies were beginning to get all over him. I put a blanket over him and rubbed water from my canteen onto his lips. That hard stare started to leave his eyes. He wanted to talk but was too far gone. I lit a cigarette, took a few puffs, then put it to his lips. He could barely puff. We each had had a few drags and that hard look had left his eyes before he died,” (Grossman, p. 117).

“In my curiosity, I went over to the sink to see what they were looking at. There were all the reassembled parts of my baby: arms, legs, torso and what must have been the head. They were tiny and perfect. In that instant I felt an incredible horror. This was my baby! Torn apart, in bloody pieces. The terror and agony of that moment is etched deeply into my soul,” (Burke, p. 112).

Physical proximity to human death, especially death that we cause, increases the severity of trauma because it shatters denial. The closer the combatant to his victim, according to Grossman, the more reluctant he is to kill his enemy. Grossman describes several instances in which lone soldiers from each side of a conflict have passed each other by in unspoken truce, precisely because both were reluctant to engage in a hand-to-hand battle to the death. Outside of the influences of authority and their peers, individual men acted in accordance with their individual natures.

Obedience

“The second terrorist began to wave his arms frantically up and down, like a featherless black bird attempting to take flight. His eyes kept flitting back and forth between the muzzle of the Sterling and his own weapon, which was leaning against the wall a good ten feet away….”

‘Don’t do it, don’t do it,’ I ordered. But he emitted a loud ‘Yaa…,’ and scrambled for the rifle. I warned him again but he grabbed his weapon, worked the action to place a round in the chamber, and began to swing the muzzle toward me.’

‘KILL HIM, G*DDAMMIT,’ screamed Cpl Edgerton, who had now entered the church behind us, ‘KILL HIM, NOW!’ (Grossman, p. 219).

“The night I told him I was pregnant, he destroyed our apartment. He was screaming at me, telling me I was a whore, slut, pig, you name it. He told me that the kid would be retarded, abnormal, and to get rid of it. NOW!” (Burke, p. 227).

Soldiers must obey orders, and training assures that they will. One reason for the drill sergeant in boot camp to scream into the faces of young recruits is to hardwire them into obeying orders screamed in the heat of combat, without hesitation.

Feminism paints a picture of the strong, independent and liberated woman exercising civil rights over her own body. Perhaps this is why it seems hard to accept that we can so easily submit to the authority of others; that these others are often men; and that this is why we kill our children. So we disguise the language surrounding abortion to give ourselves the illusion of self-determination.

But actual statistics paint a different picture, and this woman is not strong or acting independently. She is victimized: “…research indicates that being pregnant places women at higher risk of being physically attacked….According to one study of battered women, the target of battery during their pregnancies shifted from their faces and breasts to their pregnant abdomens…,” (Burke, pp. 227-228). As noted in this blog before, homicide is the leading cause of death in pregnant women. Threatened with physical violence and/or death by an authority figure in our lives, we easily submit to their commands in a form of self-defense. But aggressive coercion is not at all necessary to elicit perfect obedience to the command to kill.

Grossman reviews the well-documented results of a study done by Dr. Stanley Milgram at Yale University on obedience and aggression: “…in a controlled laboratory environment more than 65 percent of his subjects could be readily manipulated into inflicting a (seemingly) lethal electrical charge on a total stranger,” (Grossman, p. 141). Listen to the response elicited in one subject:

“I observed a mature and initially poised businessman enter the laboratory smiling and confident. Within 20 minutes he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck, who was rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse…At one point he pushed his fist into his forehead and muttered: ‘Oh God, let’s stop it.’ And yet he continued to respond to every word of the experimenter and obeyed to the end,” (Grossman, p. 142).

Parents, boyfriends, husbands, teachers, doctors, nurses, abortion clinic counselors: all of these are examples of authority figures in the life of a pregnant girl or woman. Any one, all, or portion thereof has the power of persuasion to command her to kill her child as easily as Milgram’s experimenters persuaded otherwise civilized people to “kill” complete strangers. They can have the characteristics Grossman describes as necessary for an authority figure to elicit obedience: proximity to the subject; the subject’s respect; an intensity in their demand for the killing behavior; and legitimacy to make such demands (Grossman, pp. 144-145).

Group Absolution and Anonymity

“Among men who are bonded so together so intensely [in combat], there is a powerful process of peer pressure in which the individual cares so deeply about his comrades and what they think about him that he would rather die than let them down,” (Grossman, p. 150).

“In his article, McGee also admits to using teenagers (called 'peer educators') to advance Planned Parenthood's pro-abortion agenda, saying they're more effective in convincing other teens than adults at the abortion business.Peer educators 'are an ideal constituency to engage in our social marketing effort,' McGee declared. 'Activist teens can create a buzz about the campaign by a variety of means--regardless of whether the activities are branded or identified as Planned Parenthood.'” HT: The S.I.C.L.E. Cell

The diffusion of responsibility in a group helps us to overcome our innate resistance to killing. We have all seen mob behavior. The group will do what the individuals who compose it will not do alone. There is also anonymity in the crowd, and at the abortion clinic. In fact, privacy and anonymity are what abortion is all about. But secrecy becomes a shroud for atrocity. As an example, Grossman describes the evolution of the private bedroom in society’s housing and the concurrent increase in child sexual abuse as a crime of opportunity (Grossman, p. xxv).

Emotional Distance

“I had my forty-five in my hand,” he said, “and the point of his bayonet was no further than you are from me when I shot him. After everything had settled down I helped search his body, you know, for intelligence purposes, and I found a photograph.”

Then there was this long pause, and he continued. “It was a picture of his wife, and these two beautiful children. Ever since” – and here tears began to roll down his cheeks, although his voice remained firm and steady – “I’ve been haunted by the thought of these two beautiful children growing up without their father, because I murdered their daddy. I’m not a young man anymore, and soon I’ll have to answer to my Maker for what I have done.” (Grossman, p. 157).

“I remember taking my dog to the veterinarian. I got her when she was a puppy and I was really attached to her…the vet recommended I have her put to sleep because she was suffering so much…I told the vet that I had a hard time allowing something to be killed. As I spoke these words, the memory of my abortion came back like an overpowering nausea…When she was gone, I missed [my dog], but even more I missed my baby,” (Burke, 93).

Grossman reports that victims of kidnapping are most likely to be killed by their captors if they are kept hooded. There is a good reason for this, and it has to do with emotional distance. It seems that the more we identify with our victims, the more psychologically damaging it is to kill them. Hiding the captive’s face allows the kidnappers to keep their distance from the victim emotionally, as a fellow human being. This is also why those condemned to die by execution are often hooded; we understand that it is much harder to kill someone when we must look him in the eye as he dies.

Very often women who have not previously experienced any grief or guilt over the abortion(s) in their pasts will be overwhelmed with these emotions when they become pregnant with a child who will be allowed to live. We find it difficult to create emotional bonds with our “wanted” children without identifying them with the children we have aborted, and this will create “cracks in the veil of denial,” (Grossman, p. 156). We will suffer from grief and remorse when we can no longer keep our emotional distance.

Calling the unborn by any other name than human is used to create distance between us and the unborn. Identifying the pre-born child as “potential” or otherwise inferior to the living enables us to dehumanize him/her, and overcomes what should be a powerfully innate aversion to destroying our own young.

_____________________________________________________________

In Part Two, we will look at the techniques adapted by the military to train soldiers to overcome the innate resistance to killing another human being, even in the face of death. We may find that we women are being trained to abort just as surely as Pavlov's dogs were trained to slobber hungrily at the sound of a bell. We will examine the psychology of atrocity because we have to. We are discussing abortion here, and the victim in this kind of killing is an innocent bystander - collateral damage. The threat of unwanted pregnancy always stems from some outside, and usually human, influence, but it is the most vulnerable life, the target who is most easily overcome, who pays the price for our submission.

Reading Week

2005-10-25T08:24:00.000-07:00

HOME

I need to take a little time for research this week; our next topic, which will appear in the next two weeks, will be dissociation: how it relates to abortion and how it correlates to chronic illnesses, particularly those that involve pain.

To prepare, let’s review a few definitions:

dis·so·ci·a·tion (dĭ-sō'sē-ā'shən, -shē-) n.

The act of dissociating or the condition of having been dissociated.

Chemistry.

1. The process by which the action of a solvent or a change in physical condition, as in pressure or temperature, causes a molecule to split into simpler groups of atoms, single atoms, or ions.

2. The separation of an electrolyte into ions of opposite charge.

Psychiatry. A psychological defense mechanism in which specific, anxiety-provoking thoughts, emotions, or physical sensations are separated from the rest of the psyche.
http://www.answers.com/topic/dissociation

We will focus on dissociation as a psychiatric condition. The psyche is defined as:

psy·che (sī'kē) n.

1. The spirit or soul.

2. Psychiatry. The mind functioning as the center of thought, emotion, and behavior and consciously or unconsciously adjusting or mediating the body's responses to the social and physical environment

http://www.answers.com/psyche

When I speak of the “mind,” or informally, my “thinks”, I am referring to the psyche. When I was growing up, it was considered common knowledge that we don’t use 90% of our brains. Time and advancing medical technology have revealed that it is most accurate to say we don’t know what 90% of our brains are doing at any given point in time. Very little of what our nervous systems do reaches the level where we think. But does that necessarily mean we are completely unaware of this brain/body activity? Are the mind and body separate?

When it comes to our emotions, it’s apparent that they are not. We are already wired to express our emotions physically. Crying is the most easily recognized form of a somatoemotional response – a physical manifestation of a psychological or emotional experience. We feel our emotions as physical sensations (that pain in the gut, for example). Those who suffer from somatoemotional illnesses, like fibromyalgia, usually suffer from chronic pain. In these cases, experts suggest that dissociation has occurred to the point where the body bears all of the emotional response, because the psyche has split from unresolved or unbearable emotions that cause pain.

Here’s my reading list, just to give you a little foreshadowing of what’s to follow in the weeks ahead:

1. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, by Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman. I’ve referred to Grossman’s work before, as it was cited by Drs. Scaer and MacNair. Based on what they wrote, I knew I would be unable to talk about dissociation without reading this study. It is my premise that we are taught to dissociate from our unborn children, and that this is what enables us to kill them with abortion. Lt. Colonel Grossman is a leading authority on the techniques used in the military to make our soldiers more effective killers – here’s a preview from the book jacket:

"The good news is that the vast majority of soldiers are loath to kill in battle. Unfortunately, modern armies, using Pavlovian and operant conditioning, have developed sophisticated ways of overcoming this instinctive aversion. The psychological cost for soldiers, as witnessed by the increase in post-traumatic stress, is devastating. The psychological cost for the rest of us is even more so: contemporary civilian society, particularly the media, replicates the army’s conditioning techniques and, according to Grossman’s controversial thesis, is responsible for our rising rate of murder, especially among the young."

2. The Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Sourcebook, by Glenn R. Schiraldi, Ph.D. I don’t usually like self-help books, but I’m hoping this one may be an exception. In the acknowledgements section, Dr. Schiraldi pays homage to the work of Dr. Bessell van der Kolk, whose work I have referenced before. Dr. van der Kolk wrote a paper that is published online, well worth reading, called “The Body Keeps the Score: Memory and the evolving psychobiology of post traumatic stress.” http://www.trauma-pages.com/vanderk4.htm

3. Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood, by Naomi Wolf. A friend recommended I read Naomi Wolf’s writings. She is supposed to be avidly pro-abortion, and some of her essays were to be found published on the internet. I did locate a web page linking to some of this work, but all of the links were dead. I also saw an intriguing statement that said Ms. Wolf had changed her position on abortion. I have never heard of her before, and I don’t make a habit of reading pro-abortion arguments – consequently, I have no preconceived notions or ideas about her that will color my perceptions. If you have any opinions about Ms. Wolf, or links to more of her writing, I would be interested in hearing about them. Her reported change in attitude about abortion was interesting enough for me to purchase her latest book, to see what she has to say now that she is a mother. Here’s what the book jacket tells us to expect:

“With uncompromising honesty she describes how hormones eroded her sense of independence, ultrasounds tested her commitment to abortion rights, and the keepers of the OB/GYN establishment lacked compassion.”

I understand it is not considered polite to accuse someone of being in denial about her (or his) abortion pain and/or trauma. However, I have never suffered from acute manners. If someone publishes her thoughts in the public domain where I may run across them, she can expect me to find and point out any of her inconsistencies – “Pardon me, Madam, but your denial is showing.” When I finish this work, it will be book report time. I do hope Ms. Wolf is more skilled at hiding her inner conflicts than Jane Fonda was. I prefer a challenge.

3. Peace of Soul, by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. I personally do not believe we can find healing in body and mind without healing of the soul (and modern psychology is starting to lean in that direction as well). Archbishop Sheen addresses the issue from a psychological and theological perspective. Here are some reviews from the cover:

“Peace of Soul [shows] that inner conflicts can be resolved only through their redemption by God.”

“[M]any readers will find this to be the book they have been waiting for…it could…be classed as required reading for all psychiatrists and as recommended reading for all persons who are searching for peace of soul.”

“[Sheen] begins his book where the readers of self-improvement volumes seem to feel most at home: the realm of psychology…The psychiatrist’s patient may indeed gain peace of mind, but the Christian gets something far better – peace of soul.”

4. Lift Up Your Heart: A Guide to Spiritual Peace, by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. Along the same lines as the above-mentioned work:

“With clarity, logic, and unshakable faith, Sheen provides guidance in solving the problems caused by the tensions and stresses of living in a troubled modern world. This treasured classic contains simple, practical advice on identifying and overcoming conflicts associated with empty pleasure, character weakness, self-discipline, false beliefs, and the fear of ‘letting go.’ Above all, the book offers enduring words of wisdom on grace, prayer and meditation, sanctifying the present moment, and making up for the past.”

In the meantime, while I am doing all of this reading, here is a poem left by a kind soul.

NOTHING TO FORGIVE (adapted for abortion survivors)

A woman stands in judgment today,
Still attempting to atone,
She sheds a tear in memory,
And feels so all alone.

Too many years of silence,
Have ripped this girl apart,
As the death of her unborn child,
Lies heavy on her heart.

She sits alone with sorrow
Questioning the baby's sex and name,
Consumed by her emotions,
Of sorrow, guilt and shame.

Then she travels back in time,
To where it all began,
Back to the abortion clinic,
Where they finalized the plan.

Self doubt and fear plagued the way,
To which she'd heed no warning,
Crying out for absolution,
Yet condemned to a life of mourning.

In that instant when she gave up on,
All the values she held true
"I'm sorry my blessed baby,
There'll never be another you."

With helplessness and horror,
For this life who grew inside,
She still recalls the instant,
When that precious child died.

Staring death in the face,
Knowing she too would die that day,
She tried to deny the agony,
"Don't worry, it's okay."

Shock and horror were the result,
Of taking that precious life
That day she took a tiny heart,
And cut it out with a knife.

Years went by in anguish,
And the girl was never free.
She stood alone against the world,
On the verge of insanity.

Trying her best to hide the pain,
And the tears she never cried.
With too much guilt to bear,
She only thought of suicide.

Wanting to see her baby in heaven,
But knowing it was a sin,
And if she ever followed through,
They wouldn't let her in.

The Lord finally cried out to her,
"It's not your fault my child.
I do not think you're wicked,"
Then he gently smiled.

God showed her all the reasons,
That she was meant to live,
"Now go in peace my daughter,
There's nothing to forgive."

But she closed her ears,
And she closed her mind,
As she carried the guilt,
For leaving her baby behind.

And the woman never told a soul,
Until this very day,
About her aborted baby,
And how it passed away.

Then she brings herself to face the pain,
With all the sorrow that she would feel,
The wounded soul hoped to find,
A place for her to heal.

As she called out to her angel,
She fell upon her knees,
In an anguished voice she whispered,
"Can you forgive me please?"

Then the spirit of the unborn baby,
Reached out to her at last,
"The time has come dear woman,
To let go of the past.

"There was a reason to this rhyme,
There's no debt to repay,
I did have a purpose in this life,
And we'll meet again someday.

"Lay to rest your heavy heart,
And don't be afraid to live,
Now go in peace my mommy,
There's nothing to forgive."

Chris Woolnough
June 6, 2005

Mad Season

2005-10-14T13:31:00.000-07:00

Well, I need you now
Do you think you can cope?
You’ve figured me out.
That I’m lost and I’m hopeless.
I’m bleeding and broken,
Though I’ve never spoken.

I come undone
In this mad season.

~ Matchbox Twenty, “Mad Season”

Anniversary Trauma in Abortion-Induced Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Recently, I was asked how I know that the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with which I struggle was induced by my abortion. After all, I was also in a serious motor vehicle accident as a child, during the winter I turned twelve, and it is a factor. But we’ve already learned that it is not at all unusual for those who suffer from PTSD to have multiple traumas in their histories. As I understand it, we attribute the disorder to a single traumatic event by identifying when the symptoms of the disorder appear; finding the “last straw.” Consistent with the conditions as defined previously, I developed my first symptoms of PTSD a few months after my abortion. I had not suffered any ill effects stemming from previous traumas, psychological or physical up until then.

There are many other reasons why I am able to identify my abortion as the source of my PTSD/PAS. Memory loss surrounding the event is one. For example, I cannot remember the exact date of my abortion; only that I had finished the school year, and had not yet started my full-time summer job, so it was in late May or early June of 1979. I should remember the date, because my mother’s birthday falls in late May, and there must have been some kind of sarcastic remark from her about “What a gift.”

Just reading my narrative of my abortion shows plenty of personal testimony to feeling traumatized – you go ahead and read it; I can’t stand to look at it, and that’s a sign in itself. And further evidence that my abortion was personally traumatizing can be found in my medical history and journals from a specific time every year, increasing in intensity as the years have rolled along: evidence that I am suffering from anniversary trauma surrounding my abortion. From mid-May until about mid-June of every year, I enter into Mad Season.

During a typical Mad Season, I get sick – physically, emotionally, cognitively, and psychologically sick. And I do odd things – one year on May 13th, I put down a full pack of cigarettes and just said, “I’m done with that,” for the next eighteen months. I have been a smoker since – well, since I was in the womb, essentially, thanks, Mom. That year, I lost my mind for about a month, from anniversary trauma complicated by nicotine withdrawal. Everyone around me learned just how mad, and how angry, I was, although no one could have known the cause then. Near the end of June, I “awoke,” looked around, and wondered who that insane woman was. I lost my job later that year; when the time came for lay-offs, I was an easy pick. No one wants to be around an angry and confused person.

In 2003, Mad Season came along just as I was on the Doctor-Go-Round in neurology, trying to find out what was wrong with me. I was taking an anti-seizure medication called Topamax. I would love to tell you how this drug works, but even its manufacturer doesn’t know that. However, of the four mechanisms mentioned by which it might work, all are related in some way to the neurophysiology of the stress response. I stopped this medication because of its side effects. At the time, I thought all of my experiences were due to the drug, even though my neurologist denied this. I started keeping a detailed record of how I felt as I withdrew from the medication, because I was experiencing serious problems with my memory and concentration. Below are some excerpts from my journal from the time, describing what I called “episodes.” I now recognize the symptoms of panic attack, which was probably brought on by the drug because it made my heart race. [Interesting side note: The heart is also known to some neurologists as the “mini-brain.” It sends more signals to the brain than it receives. I think a racing heart can trigger the brain’s fight/flight/freeze response, and in my case, my internal pacemaker is not working correctly.] With the sole exception of the eye pain, which I later confirmed is a side effect of the medication, every other sensation described below, as I now know, is a physical symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, occurring at the same time of year when I aborted my first child.

[edits are bracketed]

Monday June 2nd [2003]

More pain. Jts. [translated, “joints”] (hip); foot cramps; back muscles.

Episode: [Triggered by] repetitive high pitched sound. It hurt. I felt the muscle in my head directly over my ear move – “hitch up.” Then I became frenzied. The base of my spine [was] burning (there was urinary urgency). My thoughts were racing – I can’t remember them now, but my emotions were intense. I walked – no, paced, from room to room, but I didn’t know why. My heart was pounding and skipping. My mouth was bone dry. My muscles were twitching (like a panic attack? Pain?) My speech was impaired. This time I “recognized” it, I think – I don’t recall, really. I came to the bedroom and lay flat. Within 5 minutes [my husband] came in and I was able to tell him. I was still having speech problems [stuttering and stammering, looking for words]. After 15 minutes or more, I felt normal. Got up to finish vacuuming. Recorded at 2:50pm.

Current – ribs hurts[sic], “dental” pain is back; back is mucho bad; feet very bad (tight arches); I’m due for 50mg Topamax tonight and I think I’m done. Tailbone burns like fire. Mood is improving and the fog of confusion is lifting. I am starting to feel more like myself. I do not know where I have been. Topamax reduced a lot of symptoms but the price was too high. Right eye is still very sore, sharp and dry feeling.

4:30pm. Both eyes hurt. I get a headache when pressure’s wrong on my seat – it’s a lot like the [spinal] tap headache. Feet really hurt. Teeth, too.

June 3, 2003

Felt feverish, temp 99.5. Some blackout rising too quickly – went to full 1mg Cardura last nite blood pressure should be low, no big deal. Get up more slowly.

June 4, 2003

Mood and personality much improved. Getting a lot of tremble in hands.

Episode: At the computer. Sat down to complete a short email form and compose a two paragraph note. Ron [my husband] was talking as I was trying to proof and re-edit. The trembling in right hand increased and I could no longer see cohesively (no gestalt?). I couldn’t comprehend what I was reading. I could see the individual words but only one at a time. I could not see colors on the monitor but sharp white “eye noise.” My head chimes. I could not comprehend what Ron was saying although I could hear his voice.

Trembling.
Dry mouth.
Pain at base of spine/lower back
Hostility – spoke sharp-voiced. I was in a _____. There’s no word.

He pulled me away from pc, I layed down and it slowly subsided.

June 5, 2003
Episode as it happens: woke 5:50 severe headache {& crying - bad drm writing @7:37 am I had a nightmare I woke crying with a headache as if I had an episode while sleeping. Yes the dream evoked intense anger and tension. My calves keep flexing as do my ankles}
Wrote lengthy email
- can’t stand still strange symptoms
Tears and tremor

11am wrote email lost time, 45 min. This one’s bad. Always dry mouth. Lower back pain. Xtreme urinary urgency; tears in waves; chest, heart, pressure in throat? Dry mouth even when not stipulated; laying flat to get relief? Headache.

1pm Hang in there.

In The Body Bears the Burden, (see sidebar link) Dr. Scaer tells us that anniversary trauma is a “rarely reported but well-documented example of trauma reenactment,” (Scaer, p. 92). He gives us this explanation:

“One needs to remember that all animals, the human species included, possess innate neurophysiological mechanisms sensitive to the passage of time based on seasonal light variations and even the phases of the moon…Once again, endorphin-based reward systems associated with this cyclical arousal could well provide further impetus to the repetitive reenactment on the anniversary of the trauma,” (Scaer, p. 93).

As anniversary trauma regards abortion, Dr. Theresa Burke, in Forbidden Grief (see link at sidebar), writes that “researchers have found that women are more likely to experience depression, suicidal ideation, nightmares, difficulty concentrating, abdominal pain, cramping, headaches, and increased relationship conflicts around the anniversary of the abortion or on the anticipated due date of the aborted child than at other times,” (Burke, p. 97).

In other news:

I recently added a link at the sidebar to “Life Matters,” an excellent pro-life television program with the potential to reach 30 million viewers. I was privileged to tape two episodes a couple of weeks ago at their Life Studios facility here in the Valley of the Sun. In one episode, I give my testimony, and speak to the program’s host, Sally Sisk, about my attempts at suicide because of my abortion. In this segment, I was honored by and grateful for the presence of Georgette Forney, co-foundress of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign. In the second episode, Sally and I discuss the physical consequences of long-term post-traumatic stress induced by abortion: serious, potentially disabling and deadly chronic illness and pain. Sally has been working in the pro-life movement long enough to have discerned for herself the connection between abortion and chronic illness. It is our hope that this program will be helpful and informative. I am finding more and more women who are suffering from chronic illness and who are also post-abortive. If you are one of us who hurts, I would like to hear from you, too: email me at abortionhurts@aol.com. Confidentiality is guaranteed, and no, you don’t have to be religious or even regretful; abortion hurts, either way.

I will post the airtimes in a few weeks, when the schedule is announced.

Stuck In A Moment

2005-09-28T10:10:00.000-07:00

I was unconscious, half asleep
The water is warm until you discover how deep.
I wasn’t jumping; for me it was a fall.
It’s a long way down to nothing at all.

~ “Stuck In A Moment,” by U-2

Abortion and Trauma Reenactment

According to the Elliott Institute, women with a prior abortion experience are four times more likely to choose to abort when pregnant again than are those who have never aborted. Approximately 45% of all abortions are now repeat abortions – nearly one in two young girls and women who come out the back door of the abortion clinic will be going back in the front door one or more times. In Forbidden Grief: The Unspoken Pain of Abortion (see link at sidebar), Dr. Theresa Burke describes the psychological and social reasons why women so often find themselves seeking abortion after abortion. In some cases, it is self-punishment and abuse stemming from the self-hatred the first abortion caused. Also, many women become pregnant again soon after aborting. So those factors that led to the first abortion are still present in their lives, such as poverty and a lack of social support to aid in choosing birth.

There is yet another reason proposed for repeated abortions: the trauma reenactment cycle associated with post-traumatic stress disorder, which Dr. Burke describes as “the adrenaline fix.” We’ve all heard about adrenaline junkies, thrill-seekers who engage in dangerous activities for the “high.” This “high” is a natural part of the fight/flight/freeze response, and is produced by endorphins such as oxytocin and vasopressin. Oxytocin has opiate-like qualities, and has a calming psychological effect. When it acts in certain areas of the brain, it “rewards” that brain activity. Because it is like an opiate, the reward is powerful.

We’ve discussed oxytocin before, in the segment regarding abortion and maternal bonding. Oxytocin is a neuropeptide, a hormone unique to mammals. It is made in the brain, and is distributed differentially in regions of the nervous system, but particularly in the hypothalamus and in those areas of the brain that regulate the autonomic nervous system. It has been associated with birth, lactation, sexual behavior, pregnancy, and social bonds, like the maternal bond. Because it is uniquely mammalian, it is thought to be of particular help in overcoming the pain and anxiety surrounding birth and the post-partum period. Oxytocin is produced in higher levels during pregnancy. Perhaps this is the glow of a happy mother-to-be?

Oxytocin is released when we meet the tiger on the jungle path, and it is “taken up,” or used by those areas of the brain that come into play when we are faced with a life-threatening situation, such as the amygdala, which we’ve discussed before as that area of the brain responsible for processing the emotional responses associated with sensory experiences during times of acute stress. It is also released in response to pain because it has endorphinergic, or pain-killing, properties.

During labor and birth, oxytocin would normally be taken up and used by the anterior cingulate of the brain, that area in which we form social bonds, like the maternal bond, and where we determine our sense of self, or identity. Under other circumstances involving pain and anxiety, like meeting a tiger in the jungle, the amygdala would be using the oxytocin, or getting rewarded for learning from the fear and anxiety surrounding the events that are causing us pain, so we will learn permanently and with an opiate-like reward to avoid those situations again. But it is contra-indicated for a species to be afraid to reproduce – it will not survive that way. So in the normal birth process, the anterior cingulate, a “higher” brain region, takes up the oxytocin instead. This disables the amygdala in a way, which lessens the traumatic impact of birth. And the anterior cingulate is rewarded with an opiate-like high to stimulate the mother to bond with her child. Further, mother’s oxytocin sends a chemical signal to the unborn infant’s nervous system, which then produces its own oxytocin and mirrors the effect in the infant’s brain. Thus, the infant bonds with his mother and “forgets” the trauma of birth. A similar pattern is seen in paternal behavior, but the research into the chemical aspects of social bonding is slim.

But we’ve already seen that the anterior cingulate does not activate properly in people who have post-traumatic stress disorder. In The Body Bears the Burden: Trauma, Dissociation, and Disease, Dr. Robert Scaer describes how this may be why those who suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome experience symptoms such as isolation and social anxiety, since the anterior cingulate is the area responsible for social behaviors and our sense of self (Scaer, p. 110). It also puts the brakes on the amygdala, in some cases perhaps by taking up its oxytocin. Without the anterior cingulate’s gating function, the amygdala is rewarded with an opiate-like substance for its activities – evaluating sensory input for emotional meaning; facilitating the state of arousal (fight/flight/freeze response); and fear conditioning (learning). Dr. Scaer describes it this way:

“Endorphin-based reward systems have evolved as a means of facilitating behavior that is specific to survival, not as a means of perpetuating reenactment. If the neurochemical changes of traumatic stress have resulted from dissociation and a truncated freeze response, however, the result may be endorphinergic reward for reenactment rather than survival,” (Scaer, p. 95).

An author once wrote, “Destiny struggles to assert the pattern that was meant to be.” In the case of the traumatized aborted woman, perhaps it is her body that is struggling to assert the pattern that was meant to be. When we end a woman’s pregnancy, we terminate the need for the anterior cingulate to use this oxytocin for maternal bonding, and the newly-developing sense of self as "Mother." When we end a woman’s pregnancy with purposeful violence, traumatizing her, that oxytocin supply will be taken up by the amygdala in her brain, and she will learn to associate the pregnant condition with fear. And in a struggle driven by deeply rewarding, psychologically calming oxytocin, she will unconsciously struggle to assert the pattern that was meant to be by becoming pregnant again, and by aborting that pregnancy, too. She may also engage in other risk-taking behaviors out of the same need for the oxytocin fix, such as self-mutilation; starvation (anorexia); promiscuity (note that oxytocin is also related to sexual behavior); or she may seek to replace it with other substances, like drugs and alcohol.

Dr. Scaer warns us against judging these people too harshly for their behavior. At this point, it has become something against which an individual cannot struggle alone. In his words, “…the phenomenon of trauma reenactment is rooted in unconscious biochemical systems of the brain, and is probably a neurophysiologically deep-seated conditioned response,” (Scaer, p. 87). But what can be done to break the cycle? It would seem that here is where the success of group therapy in treating post-traumatic stress disorder comes in to play. When we bring our traumatic memories to life with others who share the experience, we bond with them. When we make social bonds, the anterior cingulate of the brain is exercised, and the functions of the amygdala are gated. Oxytocin and its cousins are picked up by the anterior cingulate instead of the amygdala, and we are deeply rewarded for social bonding behavior instead of the traumatic stress response.

Actor Christopher Reeve had regained a small amount of movement in one finger as a result of his intensive physical therapy. As I heard it described, his therapy involved working his limbs as if they could feel in an effort to stimulate his nervous system to rebuild damaged pathways. That little bit of movement was said to be proof that it is possible to do this. As it applies to therapy in patients with post-traumatic stress disorder, then, perhaps healing can be found in exercising those areas of the brain that need to supplant the stress response. As we bond with others who have experienced the same kind of trauma, we can rebuild the adaptive neurological response.

When Acute Trauma Becomes Chronic PTSD

2005-08-23T10:21:00.000-07:00

Symptoms of PTSD – Part Two

We’ve been discussing the physiological and psychological symptoms of acute stress and chronic post-traumatic stress disorder, particularly as they relate to abortion-induced PTSD. The symptoms of autonomic nervous system arousal arise normally to assist us when we are faced with a life-threatening situation. In meeting the tiger last time, I took the response to its most extreme level, and tried to describe the effects of “freezing.” Sometimes people do “faint” in moments of extreme stress, but not often. Dr. Scaer postulates that the human neuropsychological equivalent to the freeze response noted in the animal kingdom is dissociation (Scaer, p. 109).

Psychological dissociation is defined as “a psychological defense mechanism in which specific, anxiety-provoking thoughts, emotions, or physical sensations are separated from the rest of the psyche.” It is characterized by depersonalization, derealization, and psychogenic amnesia, (http://answers.com/topic/dissociation). As a survival mechanism, it probably enables our greater intellectual and problem-solving abilities to be used in our defense to a threat while subduing or separating our thought processes from the emotional responses which may hinder them (even while the emotional responses are necessarily kick-starting the autonomic nervous system response to prepare the body for fight or flight). When I met the fictional tiger on the jungle path, the last thing I needed to do at that moment was cry about my misfortune. Crying would come later. For the moment, dissociating myself from my emotional response was a good coping mechanism.

Having survived the tiger experience, I could return to my village. There, I would form my narrative of the event, using the sensory and emotional memories I had retained. I would probably meet with other villagers who had survived tiger attacks, in what we would call a support group. In so doing, I would be exercising that part of my brain which was traumatized, and I could dissipate the unused autonomic nervous energy with intellectual resolution and social bonding. I would undo the dissociative mechanism by recalling the event and its emotions in a safe setting, with others who would be able to validate my emotional responses by comparing them to their own. Exposure to the memories and emotions of my traumatic experience would, over time, help me to recover by reconnecting my psyche to my emotional responses and sensory perceptions.

But in reality my brush with the tiger was quite different. I had known ahead of time that there were tigers in the jungle and that it was dangerous for me to be walking the path, but I was sixteen years old. That area of my brain which would be able to assess risk-taking behavior had not fully developed. And I wasn’t walking alone. In the jungle, cornered and with no escape, my tiger offered me a deal: “Give me your unborn child, and I’ll let you go back to your walk down the path as if nothing had ever happened. I will even show you the way out. Otherwise, you and your baby will wander lost through this jungle for the rest of your lives. There are other tigers out there who will devour both of you anyway, and lions, and bears, too.”

The tiger wasn’t alone, either. Standing around him in a circle were all of the people in my life upon whom I relied for love, a home, food, and my daily needs. I turned to them to protect me from the tiger, but they were in agreement with him. They pointed out to me that I was the one who had entered the jungle in the first place. As my baby’s father said, “I didn’t want a child right now. That’s why you came to see the tiger, isn’t it? I won’t walk the rest of the way in the jungle with you if you choose to go to another village, have the child, and leave it. I couldn’t live with the thought that my child was walking around out there in another village somewhere. Let the tiger have the child, and we can forget about the whole thing.” I turned to my mother then, believing she, at least, would understand why I didn’t want to give my baby to the tiger. But she said, “Fine. You want to have the baby and give it up for adoption. But I know you, and you won’t go through with that in the end. I won’t lead you out of the jungle, either, so good luck with it on your own.” Then the tiger turned to my family doctor, who told me that many women escaped the tiger this way – it was perfectly acceptable, medically-sanctioned, and everything would be fine.

Alone and threatened with the withdrawal of the supports I needed to live, I acquiesced. I gave the tiger permission to reach into the most private depths of my being and my body with a giant claw. He tore my baby from my womb, and then he tore him to pieces in front of me. Then he kept part of his end of the deal. He let me go back in to the jungle, to continue my walk as if nothing had ever happened. But he couldn’t lead me back to the path, because he had lied, and everyone else left me once the tiger had done what they all wanted him to do. There was no longer a way out of the jungle, because I had sacrificed my child for my own security.

Somehow I made my way back to my village, and instead of finding other tiger survivors to bond with who could share my experience, shame made me hide. I knew there were other women who had sacrificed their children to the tiger who weren’t talking about it, either, for the same reasons. Everyone knew we existed, but very few women would speak of it openly as a personal experience. I wondered why someone didn’t kill that damned tiger, and then I learned that some people felt the lost children were a necessary sacrifice, an unavoidable consequence of women walking alone in the jungle. Many women were deliberately using the tiger to get rid of unwanted and inconvenient children before they were born. But even among those who thought the tiger had a purpose, there was still the idea that child sacrifice was very wrong, and it should only happen on rare occasions. There were a few women who wore t-shirts advertising their relationship to the tiger who wanted the rest to think of infant sacrifice as a good thing for women to do – “Go, find the tiger.” They were the strangest, embracing the beast who brought death and destruction, and calling it “freedom.”

Still others carried pictures of infants who had been torn to pieces by the tiger and protested at the entrance of the jungle against those who were complicit in feeding him on unborn children. There were a few, too few, who offered to escort women through the jungle to keep them and their unborn children safe (but there were more who offered to take women directly to the tiger by the shortest route). I avoided them along with anything else that would remind me of my walk in the jungle, and I avoided the jungle itself. I felt strongly that I should have found another way to escape the tiger. I would never tell anyone what I had done, and I hoped the whole experience would just fade away. I pretended to be fine (even to myself), and I remained dissociated – my sense of self grew more distant from my emotions until I became unable to express them properly at all. Eventually, I developed an almost purely somatic response to my emotional distress, so great was the chasm between my psyche and my experience. In an effort to escape, I would eventually repress most of my tiger memories, until they were no longer accessible to my conscious mind. But my body would suffer the consequences of undissipated emotional nervous energy, because repressed memories are not forgotten. They, and the emotions they produce, live on in my non-declarative memory. Like kindling, they ignite quickly and with intense heat, trying to get the fire going so the trauma will be burned away completely. Unable to sustain a controlled burn, unresolved, the acute trauma grew into the flash fires of chronic post-traumatic stress disorder.

The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (1994), known as DSM-IV, lists the following symptoms of PTSD for psychiatric diagnosis.

“The traumatic event is persistently reexperienced in one (or more) of the following ways:

1. recurrent and intrusive distressing recollections of the event, including images, thoughts, or perceptions.
2. recurrent distressing dreams of the event.
3. acting or feeling as if the traumatic event were recurring (includes a sense of reliving the experience, illusions, hallucinations, and dissociative flashback episodes, including those that occur on awakening or when intoxicated)
4. intense psychological distress at exposure to internal or external cues that symbolize or resemble an aspect of the traumatic event.
5. physiological reactivity on exposure to internal or external cues that symbolize or resemble an aspect of the traumatic event.” [The emphasis added here is mine]

The DSM-IV continues:

“Persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma and numbing of general responsiveness (not present before the trauma), as indicated by three (or more) of the following:

1. efforts to avoid thoughts, feelings, or conversation associated with the trauma [50% of all women who have abortions will never disclose it]
2. efforts to avoid activities, places, or people that arouse recollections of the trauma.
3. inability to recall an important aspect of the trauma.
4. markedly diminished interest or participation in significant activities.
5. feeling of detachment or estrangement from others.
6. restricted range of affect (e.g., unable to have loving feelings)
7. sense of a foreshortened future (e.g., does not expect to have a career, marriage, children, or a normal life span)

“Persistent symptoms of increased arousal (not present before trauma), as indicated by two (or more) of the following:

1. difficulty staying or falling asleep
2. irritability or outbursts of anger
3. difficulty concentrating
4. hypervigilance
5. exaggerated startle response”

The duration of the symptoms must be for longer than one month. It is referred to as an “acute” response if the duration is less than three months. It is “chronic” if these symptoms endure for more than three months. And it can be referred to as “delayed onset” PTSD if the symptoms do not arise until at least six months after the stressor (all of the above text of the DSM-IV reprinted from MacNair, pp. 4-5).

Am I suggesting that if I had only had someone to talk to, I would have been able to resolve the trauma of sacrificing my child to the tiger? If only it were that simple, but it is not. There is an element to our complicity in killing another human being that complicates our recovery from perpetration-induced traumatic stress. Our evidence for that comes from research into the psychological consequences of sanctioned killing, mostly the kind done by soldiers during wartime. Lt. Col. David Grossman, in his book, On Killing, suggests that “…military training artificially creates depersonalization in soldiers, suppressing empathy and making it easier to kill other human beings,” (http://answers.com/topic/dissociation). Dr. Rachel MacNair also describes Grossman’s work in her book, Perpetration Induced Traumatic Stress: The Psychological Consequences of Killing. She tells us how Grossman “..goes over evidence that the human being has a high resistance to killing….Even under situations of self-preservation, the resistance to killing is strong.” She describes the research that suggests only about 15% - 20% of soldiers prior to the Vietnam conflict ever fired their weapons in combat, and those who did often deliberately aimed high so as not to kill anyone. Based on these findings, the military tried to correct this “problem” by making war training more realistic and teaching soldiers how to depersonalize their human victims. They were successful. In the Vietnam war, 90-95% of the combatants shot their weapons, but there was a high price: “…the same training that ensured greater efficiency in the short term also contributed to greater psychological costs in the long run,” (MacNair, p.3).

Our military showed how we can effectively desensitize people to an innate aversion to killing other human beings. However, in doing so, they also demonstrate the consequences of violating this natural law. We may be able to kill easily. We can walk into the abortion clinic/jungle over and over again, terminating our unborn children as easily as we sit down for coffee. But we come out of the jungle damaged because we were not designed to survive on the blood of the next generation. While Darwin’s theory of evolution is just that, a theory, there are many pieces of it that are observable and measurable in the natural world. One piece is the necessity of reproduction for survival of the species. In the animal kingdom, the primary goal of both males and females is to reproduce and to provide for the next generation, because they must. The species will only survive if there are young to carry on.

Human beings are not like other mammals. Human females have no equivalent to periods of “heat” or estrus, as animals do. We can and do engage in reproductive behavior at will, regardless of fertility, while other mammals go through seasons during which they are compelled to engage in this behavior because it is only at this time that they are able to produce young. In this we see that human beings have a free will. But having the free will to choose does not mean we have the ability to do things that are contrary to our nature and survive them unscathed, and that includes sacrificing our children to the tiger in order to save our own sorry butts.

Dear Anonymous

2005-08-22T08:10:00.000-07:00

In response to this post, "More on Graphic Images," which is a continuation of "Is the Picture Worth a Thousand Words?" I received this anonymous comment, and made the reply that follows. I wanted to bring this discussion to the forefront, because there are lives at stake. I encourage discussion, but will not tolerate any attack on my reader.

Anonymous writes:

"I'm a post abortive woman, I had an abortion at 19 and I'm 24 now and I have viewed several sites containing graphic images lately. The fetus in the coffin, the scattered arms and legs, as well as the ole' babies in the trash can. I'm not effected. I'm pregnant now and will have an abortion in two weeks. You have made in error in judgement if you really think these images will have a significant impact. Peta has been showing grisly images of slaugter and cruelty for years. Yet I've seen people who winced viewing video of screaming cattle vomiting blood after having it's throat cut, being skinned alive, and their meat being dragged through feces on it's way to McDonalds go out the next day and slobber all over their Big Mac. If someone really wants that Big Mac or feels they need that abortion, they will still get it."

I replied as follows:

"Dear Anon,

I don't disagree with you at all about the gory pictures. We can become and are desensitized to violent images and violent acts. I hope you will visit to read again, because I will be posting about dissociation this week.

Dissociation is how we separate ourselves from the emotions that are naturally, biologically, and rightly engendered at seeing violence done to fellow members of our species. But it is a very, very poor coping mechanism that leaves us damaged.

You are also correct in that these pictures and words will only work on those who are open to the effect. People will always kill other people because we can't legislate or wish away aberrant and maladaptive behavior.

I saw pictures of aborted fetuses before I had my abortion. And then I saw my real aborted baby, in little baby pieces. It was 1979, and young people were more immature and less exposed to violence, then. You have grown up in a different world, one made more violent by the people in my generation and that of my parents. I am very sorry for that.

I love a good steak, but seeing a cow in the field doesn't make me hungry, and neither would watching it be slaughtered. I'm glad that's someone else's job, though, because people have to eat.

But psychologically that has nothing to do with the death of human infants in the wombs of human women, or pictures of dead human beings. Our brains don't respond the same way, because a dead cow is not intrinsically threatening to our own lives.

I made no judgment that these pictures have a significant impact. I have been told by others that they do. I will never use them or link directly to them. I believe hurting the one to save the ninety-nine is wrong, because as Christians, we are taught in Scripture that the Lord leaves the ninety-nine in order to save the one.

In fact, I personally believe (and my conviction is growing) that if Jesus Christ Himself was standing at the door to an abortion clinic, the LAST thing he would do is shove a picture of a brutally killed infant in my face to keep me from going in [read the post to find out why it would not work and why it is an act of violence against me and others who have the same PTSD triggers]. He would talk to me about positive things instead, like the value of each and every human life.

I have a link at the sidebar to 4-D images of the child in the womb, alive. I don't know how far along you are, but I can tell you researchers say he or she has enough of a neurological system by eight weeks to feel the pain of being aborted. Slaughtered cows are put out of their pain before they are killed. Infants in the womb have no such protection.

You have the legal right to choose to abort your child. That doesn't mean you have to choose it, or that you have to do so in ignorance of the damaging effect it might have on you now, and in the future when you want to keep your children.

A fetal infant is not a Big Mac or a cow. You have new life in you, life that is a part of your own genetic make-up. You and your child are communicating on an autonomic level via hormones. He feels safe. He is exercising his reflexes. He is growing, maturing, and loving the sound of your voice. Your own body and the subconscious part of your brain have welcomed him and made a place where he can grow. So even if you don't want to go on with your pregnancy, you are already his or her mother. It can't be undone, just terminated, and "it" is your child.

Please consider all of the information available to you now that may not have been available to you five years ago. I encourage you to look for scientific explanations, to see what women are learning when they want to carry their pregnancies to term, because those aren't lies or shady truths aimed at making you feel better about your choice to abort. The program, "In the Womb," keeps rerunning on the National Geographic Channel. It is not a political statement. It is a documentary based on physical, measurable, objective evidence of how very much alive the child is and has been from Day One.

My prayers are with you regardless of your choice. Thank you for stopping by and for commenting."

The Lady and the Tiger

2005-08-20T09:20:00.000-07:00

When we left off last time, I said I would attempt to explain the why and how behind the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder that I listed in the form of questions. By the way, my answer to each of the questions is, “Yes,” but not deliberately so, as if I chose to list only those things that bother me. It’s a fairly comprehensive list, if short on detail. I just happen to have experience with much of the full range of symptoms. This might be a good way to segue into a disclaimer of sorts: I also seek answers, and I don’t want to be taken as an expert in anything but my own experiences. I write here what I am learning from others, and those references are listed at the sidebar.

Hopefully, I have been gifted with some understanding, which would be due to the fact that I suffer from this, PTSD induced by abortion. I have a B.A. in psychology, and that helps me with the terminology, but it doesn’t qualify me to dispense medical or therapeutic advice, even to my dog. So I encourage every one who suffers to ask the same questions I ask. Please - run these ideas by your doctors or therapists, if you have them. Then come back and tell me where they say I have it wrong, so we can all benefit from greater understanding. (But if he or she won’t tell you why it’s wrong, I’ll give you some direct advice – get another doctor. Don’t waste time on medical professionals who will not give you enough respect and courtesy to at least try to understand.)

Dr. Scaer gives us specifics about the acute stress response, listing all of the hormones that are released, and the neuronal receptors to which they bond and where. It’s quite technical, and I find it difficult to slog through the acronyms and medical terms. So I thought instead to demonstrate how these chronic symptoms arise as normal responses during the acute traumatic experience by going back into the jungle to meet the tiger. As I do, I will describe some of the things my mind and body are experiencing, in every day words. When we understand how the autonomic nervous system response to trauma works normally, it’s easier to recognize how the symptoms of chronic post-traumatic stress disorder arise from its dysfunction. So, here we go.

I’m walking along a narrow path, surrounded by jungle growth, when I see a tiger sunning in a patch of light on the path ahead of me. I recognize him by visual cues – his distinctive coloring and feline appearance say, “tiger,” because I’ve seen pictures, and Wild Kingdom. He resembles my housecat, only he’s much, much bigger. He’s certainly big enough to devour me, and has the teeth to show it, too. I see those as he growls at me. The hair on the back of my neck stands up at the sound, and my mind and body trigger red alert. The tiger is a threat to my existence. Immediately, my body gets ready for what I must do to save myself, doing things that are regulated and controlled by the autonomic nervous system. There’s no time to waste conscious thought on preparing my body to fight or flee in response to this threat. So the autonomic nervous system starts flooding my body with chemical signals that affect each and every system, because each and every system will be involved until the threat has passed. No energy will be wasted on bodily functions that do not contribute to my immediate need for survival.

In the cardiovascular system, my respiration changes. I begin to inhale more than I exhale. This oxygenates my blood more quickly. My heart accordingly starts to beat more rapidly, increasing blood flow. Blood cells in my limbs dilate so the oxygen-rich blood can feed the muscles quickly and efficiently, as the blood cells feeding the non-essential internal organs like the stomach constrict. All digestive activity is turned off, because this is no time to be thinking about what I had for lunch. I can finish digesting that after I get away. I’m also not feeling hunger or satiation, signals regulated by the autonomic nervous system, because feeding isn’t important right now. Saliva is part of the digestive process, so my mouth immediately goes dry. No energy wasted there, either. The muscles in my limbs, neck, back, and waist will tense in preparation for hard use. Even my immune system is on hold for the time being, not working at all against that cold virus I picked up the day before.

Constantly seeking escape from the threat, my eyes are darting to and fro, and my thoughts race as I take in every aspect of my environment. The vestibular system in my brain is on “all systems go,” compensating for my rapid eye movement, and ready for sudden changes in posture. I need to know where I am in relation to my environment. My ears are finely tuned to the slightest sound the tiger may make if he starts to move toward me. My nose is recording his smell, which is also a measure of his proximity. The warm blood rushing into my limbs and a gush of perspiration will cool my body more efficiently during exertion (as blood rushes to the surface of the skin, it release its heat into the air).

Not only am I not digesting lunch, I have also stopped higher brain functions that have nothing to do with my survival. I’m not writing poetry, solving trigonometry problems, or composing music, although there is a funny tune that runs through my head as that part of my brain fades into sleep mode. I’m not contemplating Plato, and how the planets orbit around the sun. I’m not wasting any brain energy recording a narrative of the events as they happen, either, but the sensory input and the emotional responses they engender will be hard-coded in my brain so I can access them again, when I need to later on, if I survive this time.

Sensory input has been processed, and I have determined there are no handy trees to climb or weapons at hand. He is too big, too obviously dangerous and better armed for me to fight bare-handed, so my only option is to flee. As soon as the choice is made, the body reacts. I turn to the side and dart off into the jungle, running at top speed. Adrenaline gives me more strength than I would normally have. My heart and lungs are still working furiously to feed the muscles with oxygenated blood. Endorphins flood through my body killing the pain caused by the scratches of branches, and the pain in my ankle when I take a misstep into a hole. I’ve taken the tiger by surprise – he was lazy and sleepy in the afternoon heat, and fortunately for me, not particularly hungry. My ears are still highly tuned for any sound of pursuit. My eyes are constantly scanning the scene as I zigzag through the heavy greenery. I haven’t chosen a destination, because that would have required some heavy thought, a process that was shut down so it would not slow down the life-saving choices I needed to make. All of my decisions as to which direction to run are being made based on information I have stored previously – I don’t have time to read a map and learn the geography now.

So it’s no surprise when my arms automatically fly out in front of me to stop my slamming headlong into a thicket of bushes climbing a steep cliff wall that blocks my path. I turn, too late, to discover that I’ve run straight into a natural enclosure of jungle growth and boulders that lie at the foot of the cliff. My only way out is to backtrack, but the tiger has not been outrun. He blocks my exit, and I am trapped.

As I stand in the jungle facing the tiger, which while not hungry, has been quite intrigued by my resemblance to prey in flight, my eyes stop darting around looking for escape or a weapon I can use against strength, teeth, and claws. There is nothing – no way over the boulders or up the cliff. No tree limbs to use as a club. I have no recourse but to accept the threat, and my eyes lock on the tiger and approaching death.

At this point the autonomic nervous system may take complete command. There is one more option available to me, but in order for it to work, my conscious thoughts have to be turned off. I have to run silent. Playing dead, or freezing, is my last chance to escape death in the tiger’s jaws.

I lose conscious thought, and crumble to the ground as my muscles relax, losing tone to resemble lifelessness. My senses, previously so acutely attuned, are muffled so I will no longer respond to threatening cues. More endorphins are released, so I will not reflexively move in response to pain. And the reflexes themselves are inhibited for the same reason, to keep me from moving and showing signs of life. The game only works if the tiger believes I am dead, so there must be no sign – even the swallowing reflex is inhibited.

The blood vessels are stimulated to do the reverse of what they have done – they will constrict in the limbs, restricting movement and creating a cold, dead appearance to the tiger’s senses. My respirations slow, and my heart rate falls, so blood pools in the internal organs. This may help save my life if I am injured while I am “out” by keeping me from bleeding to death before I revive. The muscles and reflexes in the urinary and digestive systems also relax, and their contents are released. This happens when creatures die, so it’s an attempt to make the tiger believe through his sensory perceptions that his prey is already dead (and therefore less desirable to eat).

As I crumble to a heap on the ground, the tiger charges in. He reaches out with a massive paw and bats me like toy. His claws dig deep into the flesh of my upper back, but I make no response. I am not consciously aware any longer, and there are endorphins easing the inflamed pain warnings so I don’t even unconsciously twitch. Thankfully, the tiger really isn’t hungry, and isn’t quite sure I was ever edible in the first place. After a few more swipes, he buys into the act, loses interest, and turns to make his way back into the jungle to finish his nap.

Some time later, I stir. Some sensory perception must have remained in order for my body to know when the danger has passed, or freezing wouldn’t be a very useful survival tool. My consciousness snaps back on, and I sit up, immediately as alert as I am aware, and I remember the tiger. I can’t recall much else, except the blurring of green as the jungle rushed by me and the fear. All systems come back on full alert again, muscles constricting, blood richly oxygenating and heart pounding. My eyes dart, my ears perk, my nostrils flare, and I use all of my senses to determine consciously whether the danger has truly passed. As soon as I have assured myself that it has, I start to feel the pain in my shoulder wound where the tiger has clawed me. My ankle hurts now, too, and I notice it for the first time. The endorphins are retreating, and the pain is allowed to give me the signal to get to safety in order to tend my wounds. Somehow, although I will never remember the details, I stagger out of the jungle.

If I was a mouse, or a gazelle, this period of unconsciousness would have been immediately followed by the dissipation of unused energy, called “the freeze discharge:”

“…the animal will arouse and begin to tremble. This may be as imperceptible as a shudder, or as dramatic as a grand mal seizure. In some cases, analyzed by slow motion video, the trembling will resemble the last act of the animal before freezing – the act of running. The animal’s behavior at times seems to resemble an unconscious attempt to complete the act of survival, as if the last protective motor or muscular activity is locked in unconscious procedural memory and needs to be released, or completed, perhaps as a means of ‘discharging’ retained autonomic energy. At the same time, the animal may perspire. This motor and autonomic response may persist for several minutes, and is usually terminated by a series of deep, sighing breaths. The animal at this point will usually arouse fully, regain its feet, often stagger a bit, shake itself, and then run off, apparently none the worse for its life-threatening experience. Long-term observations of such animals do not seem to show any harmful effects on behavior, health, or other measures of survival. It would appear from these observations that animals in the wild possibly possess an instinctual means of dissipating autonomic activity stored and accumulated in the freeze response,” (Scaer, p.18).

But I am a human being, endowed by my Creator with an intellect and free will. I will work out my traumatic experience and dissipate that nervous energy cognitively and socially, with other humans also gifted with intellect. I will have access to the sensory and emotional memories of the event to help me resolve the trauma and discharge the built-up nervous energy by decision, resolution, action, acceptance, and supportive social bonding and interaction with other humans, particularly those who have also escaped the tiger.

In the next segment, we will continue the tiger saga. We will discuss what happens when this trauma is not resolved, and what the consequences are when acute traumatic stress becomes chronic post-traumatic stress disorder.

Symptoms of PTSD, Part One

2005-08-18T08:58:00.000-07:00

Case History – Part One

In “The Body Bears the Burden: Trauma, Dissociation, and Disease,” Dr. Robert Scaer begins with the case history of Beth. Beth was involved in a low-speed motor vehicle accident (5 to 10mph) prior to developing the symptoms that brought her to Dr. Scaer. There was no damage to either car, and the other driver was uninjured.

“Beth, on the other hand, continued to suffer from terrible neck and shoulder pain, numbness of her right arm, disabling headaches, and temporomandibular joint syndrome. Six months of chiropractic treatment and massage therapy brought her only temporary relief from pain, and a dental splint only slightly helped her morning headaches. Recently she developed severe pain in her right hip and buttock, with the pain radiating down the back of her leg. X-rays and MRIs failed to show any cause for her spinal or leg pain.

Since the accident, Beth had also experienced worsening problems of distraction and an inability to concentrate. Her memory was terrible, and she would constantly go somewhere and forget what she had intended to do. She had recently started to drive again, and would travel to some familiar place in town, and on arriving, realize she could not remember how she got there. She would stumble over words, say the wrong word for what she meant, and then feel stupid. She even had developed a stutter whenever she was stressed. She constantly made errors in her checkbook.

Worst of all, since the accident, she had become panicky when traveling in a car, especially as a passenger. Her heart would pound for no reason. She had become edgy and irritable, and jumped at every loud sound. Thoughts and images of the accident kept popping into her mind, producing distraction and anxiety. Although she was able to fall asleep without drugs, she kept waking fully aroused, sometimes with a racing heart, sometimes with dreams of the accident or of being threatened with no means of escape. During the day, she was exhausted by every physical and mental effort, and had dropped out of her master’s program in clinical social work. Her extreme sensitivity to almost any stimulus had resulted in her isolation from almost all of her prior social activities.

She admitted that at times she was worried that she might have a brain tumor. She experienced dizziness when she moved her head too quickly, kept losing her balance and bumping into things, and noticed that her vision blurred whenever she moved her focus from one object to another. Reading caused blurring of vision and a headache,” (Scaer, pp. xvii-xviii).

When Dr. Scaer questioned her about her past traumatic life experiences, he discovered that from the age of six to twelve, her brother, who was seven years older, would come into her room after bedtime at least twice a week, overpower and rape her. Beth entered counseling in college, and thought she had put it all behind her. Her motor vehicle accident was the event that precipitated her symptoms, but it was not what initially caused her nervous system dysfunction, the unresolved flight/fight/freeze response.

Do any of Beth’s problems sound familiar?

What about these?

Do you have frequent urinary tract infections? Painful urination or intercourse? Loss of bladder control or sphincter muscle tension?

Do you have unexplained pelvic pain?

Are you often fatigued or exhausted by comparatively minor activities that others seem to do with greater ease?

Have you designed your workspace, if you are able, so that no one can “sneak up behind you?” Are you easily startled by the “sudden” appearance of another person?

Do loud sounds “hurt,” or make you feel irritable, edgy, or angry?

Do you suffer more than others from the symptoms of premenstrual syndrome?

Do you get frequent headaches?

Do you have digestive problems – alternating constipation and diarrhea – frequent heartburn? Difficulty swallowing? Do you experience frequent dry-mouth?

Do you have problems with your memory (ever forget your own phone number)? Do you stutter, stammer, and search for the right words, especially in stressful situations (job interviews, doctor appointments)? Have you ever experienced, “word spaghetti,” when an archaic or little-used word pops out of your mouth instead of the word you intended to say? Do you often lose your train of thought in mid-sentence?

Does your heart race, or feel as if it’s going to jump out of your chest at times (ka-THUMP)?

Do you have sharp, shooting pain in your limbs that seems to have no source? Does the pain radiate? Do your arms and legs go numb or tingle?

Do you have tender spots that hurt under pressure? Is it hard to find a comfortable position? Do you feel sore and achy when you haven’t changed position for some time? Have you ever experienced “referred pain” – pressure on one part of your back, for example, may feel like pain radiating from your chest?

Does your jaw ache?

Do you have pain in your teeth that is hard to localize, and your dentist can’t find any problems?

Does the surface of your skin go numb in odd, seemingly random places, such as a patch on your upper arm, or do you feel as if you are wearing gloves on your naked hands, or stockings on your bare feet?

Do your hands, especially the palms, redden? Have you ever noticed a red, lattice-work appearance under the skin, sometimes called a “strep rash?”

Do you have any tremors? Muscle spasms or “fluttering?”

Do your tendons hurt for no apparent reason? Do you have joint pain, but no sign of osteoarthritis or injury?

Do you suffer from back aches with no sign of spinal injury?

Are your muscles tired as though you’ve been working out?

Do you have burning sensations in your limbs? Sciatica, or pain that radiates from the buttock down the back of your leg?

Do you have sharp, shooting pain in your chest wall, especially on either side of the sternum?

Do you feel faint when you stand up?

Do you have difficulty breathing (especially exhalation) or symptoms of asthma but normal blood oxygen levels when tested?

Do you feel dizzy (vertigo), as if the world is moving around you while you stand still, or do you perceive that your body is moving as if on a merry-go-round?

Are you clumsy or accident-prone?

Do you miss a lot of work due to flu-like symptoms?

How well do you sleep? Do your dreams often involve falling? Dying? Being pursued? Do they wake you? Are you even able to remember your dreams?

Do any of these problems intensify during times of increased stress? Have you ever looked for a pattern of illness that occurs at about the same time every year, as in, “I get sick every spring – it must be allergies?”

Do you have difficulty telling others (or identifying for yourself) how you feel emotionally?

Do you have an eating disorder – anorexia or bulimia – or obesity?

Do you have a history of psychological or physical trauma, such as sexual abuse, abortion, motor vehicle accidents, surgery, serious illness, slip and fall accidents, physical abuse, assault, or have you been a witness to any traumatic events?

Have you been tested for, diagnosed with and/or treated for, or troubled by any of the following conditions:

Alzheimer’s Disease?
Anxiety disorders?
Alcoholism or other substance abuse?
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?
Depression?
Diabetes or hypoglycemia?
Insomnia?
Anorexia Nervosa and/or Bulimia?
Hyperparathyroidism and hypothyroidism?
Seizure disorders?
Sleep apnea?
Systemic Lupus Erythematosus?
Migraine?
Multiple Sclerosis?
Meningitis?

These are a few of the conditions listed by the University of Maryland as having similar symptoms as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which gives us an idea of the systemic (fully-involved) range of physical symptoms that accompany this physioneurosis. It also helps explain why PTSD and many of the illnesses mentioned above are difficult to diagnose.

Dr. Scaer dedicates his book to a professional colleague and friend who taught him that “…the diagnostic truth lies more in the uninterrupted story told in its entirety by the patient than in a dozen diagnostic tests.”

In the next segments I will be discussing more symptoms, pick a few, and then go into an explanation of why and how PTSD causes them. Commentary here would be really helpful - there are so many to choose, that I would like to hear what others are most interested in discussing. After that, we will look at therapy for the disorder. I will warn you that the prognosis is not the greatest - and no, I am not going to sell you a book or a video, either, so read in peace. When I have covered everything I need to cover, I will condense this in a booklet format, and make it available to view, download, and print in .pdf format - free of charge. There isn't much that ticks me off more than buying a book that proposes to help me and finding an advertisement in each chapter for more junk I have to buy before they let me in on their secrets. I've linked to several of my sources at the sidebar. None of these professionals purports to sell you a cure, but they do help us understand what's going on - and that in itself is therapeutic.

When abortion hurts, it hurts permanently. As a medical solution to the temporary condition of unwanted pregnancy, we will discover it's like amputating the leg to relieve an ingrown toenail.

Lightning Crashes

2005-08-12T15:49:00.000-07:00

lightning crashes
a new mother cries
this moment she’s been waiting for
the angel opens her eyes
pale, blue-colored iris presents the circle
and puts the glory out to hide, hide.

~ “Lightning Crashes,” Live

Most of us can picture the scene, at least from movies and television if we haven’t actually been there: Mom, newly-delivered, red-faced, sweaty and exhausted, but smiling, cradles her newborn child. The infant’s eyes stare, fixed, back into hers, pupils dilated wide. In normal childbirth, this is what we can expect to witness. These moments of post-natal bonding are brought to us courtesy of various hormones released by the mother, in response to labor, and by the newborn, in response to the signals from his mother’s body.

But in the post-Roe world, Mom has a problem. There’s about a forty-percent chance she has had one or more pregnancies before this one that she chose to end with abortion because the pregnancy and/or the outcome were undesirable at that point in time. This may be all the recall of past stressors that she needs during labor to inhibit the adequate production of oxytocin and the other hormones she needs to protect her from the pain and trauma of childbirth. [Author's Note, 9/27/2005: further research has led me to conclude that the amount of oxytocin may be less significant than where it is utilized in the brain. In rats, the presence of adrenal steroids, released in response to fear and anxiety, increases the ability of oxytocin to bind with its receptors (or be put to use), but mainly in the amygdala. To facilitiate bonding behavior, the endorphinergic, opiate-like rewards of oxytocin must be used by the anterior cingulate, which we have already seen does not activate properly in those with PTSD.]

These are also the biological mechanisms acting on her brain by which she is encouraged to bond with her child. Stress and anxiety inhibit the production of these hormones, which can make childbirth a traumatic event. Environmental triggers will stimulate the sensory memory portion of Mom’s brain, and she may experience all of the anxiety and stress that surrounded the difficult moment(s) in time when pregnancy did not result in birth. And for about one in four post-abortive Moms, these cues are triggers for post-traumatic stress syndrome, and Mom’s stress response to childbirth will be elevated. Her labor may be prolonged because these hormones also facilitate birth in other ways. Prolonged and difficult labor can lead to the use of forceps and other complications that result in birth trauma.

So Mom’s problem isn’t hers alone, and for another very good reason: it is her production of these hormones that stimulates the infant to produce his own endorphins. They protect him from the traumatic pain of birth. They also dilate the infant’s pupils, encourage him to fix his gaze, and stimulate the bonding center in his brain, as well. His fixed stare is thought to attract just the kind of activity we see – long, loving, and bonding looks between mother and child. The lack of a maternal bond has been shown to lead to maladaptive behaviors later in life, such as an increase in criminal behavior, substance abuse, and violence.

But something else happens to the child who doesn’t have the protection of endorphins against the pain of childbirth: Strike one – at birth. Recently, the Veteran’s Administration announced they were going to “audit” the disability claims of some veterans who are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. They claim to be doing this in response to the increasing numbers of cases that they are seeing. The VA suspects the condition is being over-diagnosed. I don’t think that’s necessarily accurate. The number of cases has been rising in the last three decades. This can be attributed to the current conflicts, and to a growing awareness of the disorder, but here’s another factor we aren’t considering. We started growing these young men and women in the post-Roe, post-traumatic-stress disorder world.

There are more cases of post-traumatic stress disorder being reported because there are more cases of PTSD to report, especially among our soldiers. These 30-and-unders are the legacy of the Roe decision. Minorities and the poor are over-represented in both our military and our abortion populations. So there’s a good chance our brave soldier’s Mom aborted one or more of his older siblings before they were allowed to reach the outside air alive. Did she produce enough endorphins during labor to prompt his own body’s response to protect him from birth trauma? We don’t know. But we know our traumatic experiences weaken us, may summate, and cause some degree of PTSD. It isn’t unreasonable to at least suspect that our current generation of young soldiers may be more susceptible to the disorder precisely because abortion was legally and widely available to their mothers.

Yup, It's All In My Head

2005-08-04T12:17:00.000-07:00

“Where do we go for help?” was the question posed by two readers who also suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder induced in part by abortion. I say in part, because I recently read in commentary at After Abortion a very good argument against even having a subset disorder known as post-abortion stress disorder (PAS, or PASS). I concurred, so I will no longer use these acronyms. There was no single event in my life that caused PTSD; there were many. Several occurred in childhood and adolescence, when I was most vulnerable to trauma, including my abortion. My symptoms began then, and continued. As in every life, the years brought more strikes, and with each successive strike, my symptoms would worsen with weaker shocks required each time. I believe I have some understanding of kindling theory because I live it.

I admitted I had no answer for the questioners, but promised to discuss the problems. I originally wanted to do so by scolding the medical community for its inadequacies, because I was on the Doctor-Go-Round for many years. I was one of their hard-to-diagnose cases. According to the various general practitioners and specialists I have seen over the years, I could have any number of things: fibromyalgia with an unrelated peripheral neuropathy of unknown origin; multiple sclerosis; lupus; a congenital connective tissue disorder; and, most often, “I don’t know, but something’s not right.” I really wanted to verbally rip to shreds every physician and therapist I have ever seen over the last two decades who missed the PTSD link, dismissed my complaints, misdirected my therapy, over-medicated me, misdiagnosed and underdiagnosed me, and ultimately left me to find my own way in the dark. It would be more graceful, though, and perhaps much more helpful to others, if I explain why I was such a lousy patient. Since I did nothing to help any of these professionals come to the correct conclusions in the first place, it doesn’t seem fair to lay the blame squarely on the medical community – but they are not innocent.

I was always afraid my problems were being dismissed as just in my head. I was right on both counts. My problems were being dismissed and/or misdiagnosed, and they are all in my head. But that didn’t mean they weren’t real. Step one is not to make the mistake in thinking that those who suffer from mental disorders are imagining their physical symptoms, and that the mind and body are separate entities to be treated in different ways. Anti-depressants might be a good example to use in this regard.

In clinically depressed patients, researchers discovered the link between the amount of free-floating serotonin, a neurotransmitter, and the psychological symptoms of depression. With the administration of SSRI’s, serotonin-reuptake-inhibitors that we know by such brand names as Paxil and Prozac, the symptoms of clinical depression may abate. But it is not logical, nor is it proper scientific method, to conclude that it is this chemical imbalance that causes depression. Depression may cause the chemical imbalance in the first place, and what we are doing is observing and treating a physiological sign of a mental disorder. There isn’t a thought that passes through our brains that isn’t accompanied by an electrical signal between neurons. It is very likely that future researchers will find, not a physical cause for mental illness (and bad behavior - ! – coming soon, “The Wages of Sin”), but that mental illness is displayed by measurable physiological dysfunction of the human nervous system, which produces real, not imagined, systemic physical sensations and problems as part of the stress response, and also in response to kindled signals: chronic pain, fever/flushing, digestive disturbances, difficulty swallowing, dry mouth, sensitivity to temperature, vertigo, sensitivity to sound (this is also a dysfunction of the vestibular system, like vertigo), urinary difficulties, inhibition of reflexes, cardiac arrhythmia and postural hypotension, tremor, muscle spasms, paraesthesias (numbness), and more.

I didn’t understand the complexities of the problem for a very long time, and blamed the medical community in general for failing. But I was part of the problem. I have not had a good relationship with any of the physicians I have ever seen, male or female. I have doctor-hopped dreadfully, not seeking medication, which I was either too freely given or flatly (and with prejudice/suspicion) denied, when I had no intent to ever ask; instead, I was seeking an explanation for systemic neurological dysfunction that was measurable, and therefore, real – not merely psychological, as I considered it then. I have been an enigma to at least four neurologists; a rheumatologist (who thinks he knows what it is, but he didn’t have the whole picture); two pulmonologists; an ear-nose-throat-don’t-make-me-spell-it-ologist; a urologist; several cardiologists who didn’t help by looking at me and my test results with alarming alarm; and too many family practitioners to count. Doctor-hopping is not a good idea. But I dreaded every appointment, and disliked almost every one of the physicians I saw even as I plodded on in search of an answer. I argued with them (which was often necessary in order to get permission to stop medications that were making me feel worse). I would not hesitate to butt heads and rudely debate their opinions about things which they knew better than I. Is this due to my own arrogance? Yes, in a strange way. I don’t trust the opinions of others, but not because I love my own so very much. There was one time when the advice I received was quite wrong, and I lost the argument about the choice made on my behalf, for my own good. The decision to abort my child when I was sixteen had been aided by our family physician, someone I trusted. I have no confidence in the ability of others, particularly medical professionals, to make right decisions for me because that trust was once so deeply violated. No, I was not able to handle having an abortion, and I am angry that no one in the position to do so was able to see it. These were adults and professionals. If they didn’t know what was best, who could?

But the problem runs deeper than that, to areas beyond my control. It is also hyper-vigilance, anxiety, and all of the symptoms of PTSD that became an obstacle to proper treatment. I could not find help from medical doctors because every occasion to visit one was triggering a post-traumatic stress response, and no one could see that, either, especially me. Now, here’s a problem to overcome. When I go into a doctor’s office, hospital, emergency room, clinic – it doesn’t matter what kind of medical facility it is – there are always environmental cues that are triggering the emotions of fear, anxiety, horror, guilt, and shame that are associated with my abortion experience. I’m going to close my eyes and try to recall some details from my abortion, and while I do, I will record what my senses remember, those I am able to verbalize, and I won’t over-edit my recollections:

White – everything was white. The blankets, white cotton, woven in a pattern of small squares. The nurse’s white uniform (I prefer people who wear brightly colored and patterned scrubs). The walls were white. The abortionist was all in white, and his hair was white. He was old to me, but I was young then.

Red – the only color I see is red, because everything else is black or gray. I sat up before she took the cart away, and I see how black. No, it can’t be a dissecting tray, I don’t care what it looks like. Long, coiled tubes that should be transparent, clotted with red. Glass jars that should have been used for sun tea, and were not. The nurse’s face was white in contrast, just then, when I sat up too soon. My feet were still in the stirrups. [Ladies, for a moment, assume the stirrup position – what are your legs doing? Our toes are pointed at the ceiling, and the calf muscles from the back of the knee to the back of the ankle are stretched taut. This is a posture that I fight with even when I am “at rest.” And isn’t it an odd coincidence, that I have nerve conduction studies showing dysfunction in the nerves that feed these specific muscles? It brings to mind Dr. Scaer’s description of posturing, when an animal recovering from the freeze response assumes the last physical position and/or activity it was performing just prior to the loss of conscious control. The gazelle, waking up on its side in the grass after the not-so-hungry-after-all lion has left it alone, flails its legs as if running. My toes pull to the ceiling, as if I am in gynecological stirrups, frozen in that moment in time when I reached the utmost state of helplessness and horror, too.]

Examining tables – they are so hard, my rear-end gets cold. The vinyl is also cold. Needle pricks and the niggling discomfort of the IV.

Sounds – the humming of machines and voices, office noises. Phones ringing. The creak of the vinyl of the examining table. Vacuuming with a gurgling sound, like the appliance dentists stick in our mouths to suck out debris and fluid when they are working. No, I don’t like dentist appointments, either. All of the sounds seem to be filtered through ear muffs.

Smells. They are the hardest. [They are known to evoke the strongest emotions, because the sense of smell is processed differently than the input from our other senses. It is a more direct route to the emotional connection made by the amygdala.] Disinfectant. Blood. Cotton.

When I am sitting in an examination room today, for whatever reason, I am fighting the post-traumatic stress response to these and other triggers, because the last straw needed to feed the kindled flames of my post-traumatic stress disorder was delivered by medical professionals in a clinical setting. So much for finding help from physicians. Could I be a better patient now? Possibly, since I understand why I am so emotionally wrought in a doctor’s office. Also, I now know why I never felt as much pain under examination as I do at home – the stress response releases endorphins, natural pain killers that result in the physician’s inability to elicit to its fullest extent the worst of the myofascial and neuropathic pain that I feel.

But what about getting help from a mental health professional? I mentioned my abortion and my anger about it in a group therapy session once many years ago, and the information landed in the room with an audible thud before the group leader changed the subject and moved on. This was an anger-management group to treat my cutting behavior, which did me absolutely no good since it disregarded the source of my anger. The APA refuses to acknowledge the traumatic effects of abortion. What chance do I have of finding a sympathetic ear? I am also not likely to be comfortable with a male therapist because of the gender of my abortionist and the physician who advised abortion. But a female therapist may be an abortion victim herself. If she feels fine, can she validate my own, not-so-fine, feelings? I have great doubts.

So this limits my options. I had thought to seek psychological help from the pro-life community, where many different groups are offering post-abortion counseling. Many of these are based on the group-therapy model that has had good results in PTSD treatment, and which has the victims offering help to each other. Unfortunately, I have trust issues, and the two programs I looked into each let me down in one way or another – in one case, it was the counselor who bailed, as unreliable in her post-abortive state as am I; in the other, it was me – I didn’t feel I could place trust there for some reason I haven’t been able to identify. I have used this as a convenient reason not to pursue professional counseling at this time, and yes, it is clear to me that my efforts in writing about the disorder are certainly an attempt to treat myself for the condition. I don’t recommend it, but it’s all I have at the moment.

Fifty-percent of women who have had one or more abortions will never admit it. It’s not going to be easy for any of us to receive help from the medical community in this regard if we don’t start complaining, loudly. Why should they “believe in” what they have not seen? I don’t go to doctors any more, though, so they aren’t likely to hear from me unless they read this blogspot. I decided nearly three years ago that I was getting off the Doctor-Go-Round, and I did. I have no desire to see any more white blankets, or to experience the smell of disinfectant, or continue filling my system with medications that more often than not make the problem worse. This is not a reasonable and long-term solution, I know. As I said, I have no answers, just problems. There are treatments that are specific for post-traumatic stress disorder, and I will go into those in a future segment. For the moment, I need to recover from the stress of remembering, and the best answer I have found to that is prayer.

One, Two, Three Strikes - You're Out!

2005-07-31T10:17:00.000-07:00

A very kind reader left me the text of a letter written by Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, which included the following statement (scroll to the comment section under my recent article about abortion and maternal bonding to read the entire text – well worth it).

“As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people.”

I had to stop and think: who are the specific people I want to reach? As I write these things, I tend to imagine the reader to whom I’m speaking, and I imagine the arguments this reader would make against what I propose. Lately, this voice has been asking me, “So what? So what if I (or my patient) might develop post-traumatic stress disorder? It is a necessary price for me/my patient to pay for relief from an unwanted/difficult pregnancy. It is only a chance, anyway.”

So what, indeed? So kindling, that’s what. Kindling.

If you’ve been reading these articles, you will remember Dr. Scaer and his work, “The Body Bears the Burden.” Dr. Scaer is a neurologist and psychiatrist whose research into PTSD as autonomic nervous system dysfunction arose from treating thousands of patients for “whiplash syndrome.” This is a somato-emotional disorder not unlike fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, RSD, etc., all of which likely stem from chronic stress (PTSD is a severe form of chronic stress). Other well-known stress-related illnesses are diabetes, heart disease, diseases of the immune system (such as lupus), and even some cancers.

He puzzled as to why so many of his patients had developed permanent injuries to the brain and spine even after low-speed motor vehicle accidents. A reasonable doctor (such a rarity), he decided against the irrational belief that his patients were involved in a mass conspiracy against the insurance and medical communities, and determined that since we could so easily identify a pattern in these syndromes, there must be something the medical community is missing. He is right on target, and he is supported in this by NIMH, who has encouraged medical practitioners to look for histories of trauma and emotional loss in their patients to determine if their chronic conditions stem from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Dr. Scaer started taking psychological profiles of his whiplash syndrome patients and found a commonality: multiple traumas, including the one that brought them to his office for treatment. Most of his patients with whiplash syndrome, fibromyalgia, and their kin had experienced some form of childhood abuse. So Dr. Scaer postulates that post-traumatic stress disorder stems from undissipated nervous energy created under life-threatening situations in which we “freeze.” Freezing is an automatic response to a threat when we are helpless to flee or to fight. Children are too weak and too small to do either effectively, so it is likely that freezing is the best survival technique. Mimicking death, and refusing to fight, children under attack in primitive cultures are more likely to survive (if attacked by other people, they may be taken hostage instead of being killed; if attacked by animals, perhaps playing possum will make the predator unwilling to kill and eat the prey). So children who suffer trauma are particularly susceptible to developing post-traumatic stress disorder. For the very same biological reasons, women are more susceptible than men are.

Research into just how prevalent childhood abuse is varies. The most destructive form of childhood abuse is sexual abuse, and Dr. Scaer records that “…the baseline incidence of childhood sexual abuse in women has been estimated at anywhere from 12 to 64 percent of the general female population in various studies. The average probably falls somewhere around 30%,” (page 75). Considering how under-reported childhood sexual abuse is, 30% may yet be too low. One-third of us will hear “Strike One!” in childhood, when we are most helpless. We will not all develop PTSD – at least, not yet. It is the “not yet” that brings us back to kindling, and the reason why we should not go out of our way to inflict damage on ourselves by submitting to abortions, and why the medical community should wake up and stop recommending it.

“The physiological model of kindling was developed in rats by applying a repetitive electrical stimulus to an area of the brain with specific frequency and intensity. Although each stimulus was insufficient to trigger a convulsion, if the stimuli were applied with a critical frequency, they would summate and trigger a seizure. In addition, if kindled seizures were induced in newborn rats with many repetitions, the rats would exhibit the tendency for spontaneous seizures that thereafter would be self-perpetuating, and would occur without any stimulus. In other words, these rats developed a relatively permanent change in the excitability of neuronal networks within the kindled part of their brain. The brain region most susceptible to kindling is the amygdala,” (Scaer, page 44).

The amygdala, as we’ve already discussed, is that center of the brain responsible for memory as it pertains to arousal (times of stress or trauma are states of arousal). It is where sensory input (smells, tastes, sounds, and other environmental cues that we perceive with our senses) is assessed for emotional content and meaning. It is where we learn most effectively, through fear conditioning – remembering to climb a tree when we see the tiger, as I related in previous examples.

Strike one: as many as thirty percent of women have suffered traumatic childhood sexual abuse. This leads to early and often promiscuous sexual behavior, as women learn young to relate to the world as sexual beings. They use their sexuality to gain love, affection, and favor. They fail to understand and define themselves apart from their sexuality. As Jane Fonda says, they “shine,” and become prey for sexual predators and others with ill intent who recognize their weakness. She even noted the prevalence of childhood sexual abuse among the girls who attended a camp for troubled teens that she established at one time in her career. Jane, like all of us, isn’t all bad. She is, like me, dissociated from her own emotions.

It is difficult, at best, to reestablish the connection when conscious memory is repressed, but emotional memory stemming from the uncontrollable action of the amygdala in our brains runs wild. We are left holding a bag of emotions that stem from some thought we have pushed away. Often then, because we refuse to look at painful past events, we will search our present lives for a reason for these negative emotions like fear and anger. How many times have you heard someone say, “It only bothers me when I think about it?” as they tell you they are fine, really – just fine. It takes a lot of energy to push those thoughts away, and unresolved, the emotions linger. These who protest being “just fine” are usually not fine at all from the outside looking in. Our anger is visible in our body language, facial expressions, and in how easily we seem to over-react emotionally. We aren’t really over-reacting, though. We just can’t tell you what we are angry about, because the emotions come from an area of the brain that does not include declarative memory. We become so skilled at pushing away the thoughts, there are many times we aren’t consciously aware that they were there to trigger the emotional response. But they arise with every stimulus to our senses that is assessed by the amygdala, which never forgets.

But I have digressed, and we are still at bat here. Strike two? Take your abused girl into young womanhood, and with her easy sexuality, she is likely to get pregnant before the time is “right.” Victims of sexual abuse have learned that our bodies are not our own, and that our own feelings have no validity or power. We become one of the estimated eighty percent of women who abort who would have chosen birth if help and support were provided, because we need that support more than others. We cannot stand alone in a world so dangerous because we have been crippled in our ability to think for ourselves. We were mastered as children, and learned helplessness very early. We submit to abortions in order to fulfill the needs of others.

Have you ever heard the saying, “one man’s choice can become another man’s duty?” I do not recall who said it, but I will give credit to EWTN, because that’s where I first heard it. It was explained in the context of euthanasia. I will explain it in terms of abortion, so let’s change the gender: “one woman’s choice can become another woman’s duty.” An unwanted pregnancy is a burden on the mother, the father of the child, their families, society – take your pick. “You’re too young to have a baby.” “You need to finish your education.” “We can’t afford another child right now.” “I won’t support you financially if you have a baby I don’t want.” "You already have more children than you can afford, so you are a burden on the state." “I won’t raise your child for you.” “It is your pregnancy that is making you sick, so if you want to be well, you must terminate your pregnancy (and my liability as your doctor, thanks).”

If abortion is legal and readily available, then abortion becomes the recommended solution to the problem. “Women do it every day. So can you.” Just as someone who is terminally ill may feel compelled to select suicide as an option instead of holding on to dear life in hope of survival, the woman who is pregnant with an unwanted child succumbs to the temptation to terminate the pregnancy even against her own desires and wishes. Her choice has become a duty, to protect others from the consequences of her condition.

If so far we have managed to come through sexual abuse and abortion with no symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, good for us. Let’s don’t get happy, though, because this fire still smolders because of kindling. Strike three? Take your pick there. We live in a dangerous world, where our bodies are hurled through space at higher speeds than at any time in history. Coming to a violent stop, even at speeds as low as ten miles per hour, as Dr. Scaer found, can be the last straw that sets post-traumatic stress disorder ablaze. One look at our auto insurance rates should tell us how likely we are to be involved in even a minor traffic accident, and that is just one example of trauma that many of us will experience as part of normal life. Most of those who suffer from full-blown symptoms of PTSD have more than one traumatic event in their histories. It is the cumulative effect of undissipated nervous system energy that summates. Each successive trauma makes us more likely to develop PTSD, and there are so many events that can be defined as traumatic.

Trauma as I have used it here has nothing to do with guilt, regret, relief, happiness, or any other emotion we feel about the traumatic event after the fact. Trauma as it is used here is the equivalent of driving our skulls against a brick wall, psychically and/or physically. If an avid skydiver survives a skydiving accident, she may suffer from PTSD as a result, even though the trauma occurred while she was doing something she enjoys, and may yet enjoy again. What she cannot help or forget is the trauma that resulted from her brush with death, and the helplessness she probably experienced at seeing the ground rushing toward her in the moments before the back-up parachute unfurled.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) defines trauma as a person having “…experienced, witnessed, [or been] confronted with an event or events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others….the person’s responses involved intense fear, helplessness, or horror.” Some examples include, but are not limited to, military combat, violent personal assault, kidnapping, terrorist attack, natural or man-made disasters, motor vehicle accidents, life threatening illness, and surgery.

Dr. Scaer elaborates:

“Actually viewing these types of traumatic events or seeing a dead body may be traumatic. Learning about these types of events occurring to a family member or close personal friend also may be defined as trauma. When the trauma is inflicted by another person, is especially intense, or the traumatized person is extremely close to the trauma, the severity of traumatization may be especially profound.

Being kidnapped, mugged, raped, involved in warfare, or in a severe MVA are life-threatening experiences, and therefore potentially traumatic. Photographs of survivors of tornadoes, floods, or other natural disasters clearly reflect the shock, grief, and suffering associated with shocking and life-threatening natural events. Witnessing a graphically violent event could be perceived as shocking and traumatizing, especially if the event had personal meaning or involved another human being…. Even learning secondhand about a severe traumatic event involving a loved one generally is a source of shock to a person,” (pages 1-2).

The last straw could be anything. There are already so many variables beyond our control, and so many dangers to avoid. When we walk into the abortion clinic, we may as well ask the doctor to use his vile instruments to suck out some of our brains as well as our babies. Or give us a clean and quiet room, a loaded .44, and time to blow our brains completely out. There is no difference. When we seek out abortion, we are seeking out that which will harm us, permanently. We may experience problems immediately, as I did, or like so many women as Dr. Theresa Burke says in her book, “Forbidden Grief,” our post-abortion traumatic stress syndrome may show up (or intensify, since the symptoms range from mild to disabling) at a later time, after another significant and usually traumatic event in our lives: another pregnancy and childbirth (as explained in the maternal bonding segment); the death of a loved one; divorce; or yet another abortion.

There are people who want the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade based on new and still-developing medical evidence that abortion is more harmful to women than unwanted pregnancy. In addition, I also want to go to the source: if there were no doctors providing or recommending abortions out of real concern for womens’ health, we could put a dent in this problem. But only when the financial liability for abortion’s harm exceeds the potential liability caused by a difficult pregnancy will physicians stop using it as a medical necessity to protect themselves against litigation. And to go to the true source, I hope and pray that women will refuse to put this gun to their heads, as well, but that won’t happen until we demand better health care and honesty from the medical community about the true nature of this bullet to the brain.

Yet Another Role for Jane Fonda

2005-07-26T12:11:00.000-07:00

I took a break recently to do a little thinking and a little reading, so now it’s book report time! Today’s subject: “My Life, So Far,” by Jane Fonda.

Before I go into my opinions and my review of the new role Jane is playing, I should say that prior to reading her autobiography, I knew little about her. I was a bit too young to understand the war in Vietnam as it happened, or the protest movement in which she became so deeply enmeshed. And I was certainly too young to see the Barbarella-Jane when she first came out. I’ve seen bits and pieces of it on cable TV, and it is most likely what turned me off from most Jane Fonda films, so I haven’t seen much of her work.

I saw and liked both “Agnes of God,” and “On Golden Pond,” mainly because of the strength of the casts in these films. I’ll give Jane her props, though, for these roles. Her performances were very good in my opinion.

Another reason Jane has rarely crossed my mind is that I have little to no interest in what celebrities have to say off-screen. Sure, they have as much right to free expression as I do. However, they are paid to pretend to be what they are not, so why do they think they are believable in the first place? Frankly, if I need information about Ritalin, I won’t ask Tom Cruise or Kelly Preston. I will ask someone who was formally educated. Just because a celebrity can play a doctor on TV doesn’t mean he or she could have handled medical school. I’ll stick with the professionals, thanks, even though too many of them lack credibility these days.

Some actors are so good they can even fool themselves, and after reading her account of her life, I would guess Jane rightfully earned her Oscars and could have received some for her performances in real life (which she admits freely, in so many words). But in this, what she calls her Third Act, I don’t think she’s giving us quite the Oscar-caliber performance of which she reminds us often she is capable. Acting is so much more difficult in print.

You might ask, if I’m so above the Hollywood opinion, why did I throw good money down on a celebrity autobiography? I’ll tell you. I had seen Jane making the rounds on the talk show circuit, and something about her demeanor caught my attention, and then I stopped to listen. What I heard intrigued me. I’ve been on a spiritual journey myself in the last few years, and I am no longer who I once was. I am interested in how other people experience change in their lives, and she seemed to be someone who at least felt changed. She said in her interviews that she had converted to Christianity, and then my interest peaked further when she said she was working with adolescents on reproductive issues in her now-home state of Georgia. I had no idea where Jane stood on abortion before or after her conversion. I didn’t check out the foundation she established until I had finished the last page of her book, and I didn’t read anyone else’s opinions, either. I wanted an open mind, and I wanted to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth.

On camera, Jane plays the gracefully-aging, well-adjusting, saved, maturing, wisdom-seeking woman one would hope to be by her age of sixty-seven. As I said, though, acting doesn’t translate well to the page. She comes so very close to the truth, and I think has some keen insights into the behavior of women who have been sexually abused (as she believes she may have been, and as her mother was). Like me, Jane has some lost memories.

I thought perhaps I would find abortion in Jane’s life. Statistically speaking, I had a good chance of it, and I wondered if that’s what I had “recognized” in her when I watched her TV interviews. She discloses that her mother was the kind of woman other women could go to when they were pregnant and needed help, clearly meaning her mother knew the right doctors for the job. And in researching her role for her third act, it appears Jane is using her mother as a role model. Jane Fonda, peace activist, environmentalist, feminist and now self-proclaimed born-again Christian is in the abortion business. Check out www.gcapp.org, the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention to find links to Planned Parenthood and their like.

Jane also makes it clear in her book that she shares her mother’s scorn for people who have more children than they can afford to raise. Her mother’s insecurities stemmed from time spent in poverty, and are therefore understandable. To hear these ideas from a woman like Jane Fonda, who never knew hunger or want of the basic necessities of life makes me ill. She looks down from her great height of material plenty and derides the poor, whose joys stem not from material goods, which they lack, but from each other. She would deny them the fulfillment of children because they are financially deficient, and perhaps take up too many of her resources, I suppose. She doesn’t really explain it well, or provide alternative solutions to killing off the humans who would like to inhabit this planet. We forget that we are a natural part of this world, not an infestation.

If I sound as if Jane failed to impress or inspire me with her introspective, it’s because she did. Miserably. While her writing style is readable, her material often drags. Instead of introspection there are too many times when it’s purely narcissism. Her account of working with Katherine Hepburn is a great example of Jane projecting, mirroring herself in others. In Jane’s version, Ms. Hepburn’s obvious jabs at Jane’s ego are turned around and become a self-esteem issue for Ms. Hepburn.

Jane ranges wildly from keen insight into the “shine” of sexuality exuded by women who were sexually abused as children to events that are obviously still shrouded in mystery for her. She reports that her second marriage began to slide downhill rapidly after her then-husband viewed a screening of “Coming Home,” which contains a sexually explicit scene. From what Jane describes of his response, I hear a man who isn’t sure who he’s sleeping with at home. She acts well, and apparently often. Jane is still unaware herself that she is playing a role, so perhaps she simply needs more time to think about it. She does consider herself a work in progress, which is good advice for everyone, me especially.

I wanted to entitle this review, “Jane, you ignorant ----,” but I guess it isn’t polite (old-time SNL fans like myself can fill in the blank easily enough). But Jane, one cannot be a pro-abortion Christian. There is no such thing. Abortion is simply not allowed under Christian precepts, in any denomination that relies on the New Testament Scriptures. I wonder if Jane is a “John 3:16 Christian,” and if so, it is sad. There is a wealth of information in the Scriptures, including the Gospel of women: The Gospel According to St. Luke. Jane conveniently forgets how Luke describes the meeting between Mary, the Mother of our Lord Jesus Christ, and her cousin, Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist. Both women were pregnant. The second-trimester child in Elizabeth’s womb recognized the first-trimester Jesus, and leapt with recognition. The ancient word used for the unborn infants is the same word they used for born babies. The children in these wombs are filled with the Holy Spirit, but Jane, the self-described Christian, would have condoned the abortion of these. Jane, there’s no Christianity without Christ, and He was once an unborn child filled with the grace of God from the moment of His conception.

Another reason Jane’s book disappoints is that even though I slogged and dragged myself through the quagmire of her political views about war here, and war there (hear she’s hitting the “war” path again), and her great love for and knowledge about the plight of veterans, I got no where. She speaks about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as if she has studied it, and I would have expected her to know something about it, as deeply as she says she involves herself in Veterans Affairs. Jane says that our military trained our soldiers to dissociate from killing, to make them more efficient killers, and that this set them up to develop PTSD more readily. She’s heard right. There are studies that indicate this is the key reason why there seem to be so many more PTSD victims as a result of more recent military actions.

But in the present world, Jane, you ignorant…..she is teaching adolescents girls to dissociate themselves from their unborn children, to make them into more efficient killers and setting them up to develop PTSD. She wants a Good Brownie Badge for this, too. She understands that the male-dominated society required women to change themselves to suit the male workplace, instead of the workplace being changed to accommodate the special needs of women. But she fails to catch on that abortion holds women in slavery to men. A recent op-ed by John Lankeit in my Diocesan paper (The Catholic Sun, July 21, 2005) said it best:

“…in a world without contraception, pregnancy-proof sexual intercourse is not a given. In such a world, a man has to consider carefully how his actions will affect not only himself, but the woman. Here’s a real person - a real woman - with feelings and needs, dreams for success and love, and the potential to bring human life into the world. He has to stop and think, ‘If I got her pregnant, is she the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with – and vice versa?’ Suddenly, she is more than just a potential ‘fling without consequences’ as she is unfortunately reduced to in a contraceptive culture. Frankly, I can’t think of a single technological advance that is more abusive to women than artificial contraceptives. Women have been duped by a promise of sexual freedom. But in place of liberation there’s been a huge increase in divorce, in domestic abuse, and in single mothers raising children.” And abortion, I will add. All women are reduced to Barbarellas, and another good sign that Jane’s not nailing this performance is that she thinks Barbarella, as a film, was making a relevant social statement in support of women. And she says she’s actually seen it.

“Jane, you…” Oh, never mind. I’m not sure Jane will ever grasp it, but she comes so close that I have hope. How close? Eight pages, most of them photos (for a woman who dislikes her own image, she sure shares a lot of photos with her readers). On page 183, she writes that she never considered abortion an option to “back out” of a difficult pregnancy, but she was glad she had the choice offered to her. On page 191, she has this to say about the same pregnancy: “I am carrying life – what does this mean for me?” Life that she was glad she had the choice to end early on. I wonder, bruised and complaining as she is about her deeply troubled parents and unhappy childhood, if she ever gave any consideration to the effect these words will have on her son? He lives only by his mother’s choice, and she is glad of the power.

To top off her hypocrisy and my well of disenchantment, Jane tries very hard to make the reader bleed for the children who are and were killed by combat, something about which we should all grieve. And she sees what perpetrating horrors does to the perpetrator, as she laments, “What are we doing to our young men?” after recalling an incident in which a brutally broken soldier tried to confess having killed an infant in Vietnam. Jane, what are you doing to our young women (and men) down in there Georgia? Millions of us cannot even admit to the infanticide we’ve committed, as blocked and sputtering as the young soldier who tried to reach out to you.

I let Jane’s book gather dust with the last two chapters unread for at least a week, dreading even the small effort needed to finish it. After her charming accounts about population control (Hollywood-style eugenics), and the obnoxious image of Ted Turner (who she reveals was described as a male chauvinist pig) speaking in support of pitting women against their children, I was sick of the sound of her voice. I feel very sorry for Jane Fonda. She lost her mother young; was probably sexually abused in childhood; had an emotionally absent father; engaged in demeaning sexual activity and lost her identity for every man to whom she was committed – and as she gets closer to the day when she will meet the One who is the way, the truth, and the life, she is still mired in denial of that truth.

She is assuming a role that I think is based in part on what she sees as her mother’s good qualities. She is attempting to reconcile with her deceased mother, something with which I deeply empathize. She associates feminism with contraception and access to abortion, an all-too-common mistake. She claims to tackle every new project by attaining an inexhaustible supply of knowledge about the subject at hand, so she can “make it better.” I understand that, too. But she has neglected a wealth of data and personal testimony warning about the harm abortion causes, including depression, suicide, substance abuse, and PTSD. She likes statistics, but she seems ignorant of the 100,000 women who will be in post-abortion healing this year, and since 50% of us won’t admit we’ve ever had an abortion, these are the tip of the iceberg.

But with Jane, the hardest thing for me to understand is how ill prepared she is for this, her final role, as she calls it, especially after being forced to read in detail how well she prepared for just about every other role she has played. How does she manage to ignore the fact that her mother’s philosophies about sexuality and abortion never led her to where Jane says she wants to go? Jane’s tortured mother slit her own throat in despair, leaving her children vulnerable and alone. Don’t raise the curtain on your third act just yet, Jane. You have a lot more work to do.

Abortion and Maternal Bonding

2005-07-07T11:58:00.000-07:00

In the last two segments, I have been describing the effects of trauma on the autonomic nervous system that lead to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I have also discussed at length why abortion is always and intrinsically traumatic, well demonstrated by traumatized abortion clinic workers whose dreams are haunted:

“In my nightmares, I would deliver a healthy newborn baby. And I would take that healthy newborn baby, and I would hold it up. And I would face a jury of faceless people and ask them to tell me what to do with this baby. They were to go thumbs up or thumbs down, and if they made a thumbs down indication, then I was to drop the baby into a bucket of water which was present. I never did reach the point of dropping the baby into the bucket, because I'd always wake up at that point.”

~ Former abortion doctor, McArthur Hill

"She drew me aside and talked in a decidedly agitated manner of the increasingly frequent nightmares her husband [an abortion provider] had been having. He had confessed to her that the dreams were filled with blood and children, and that he had latterly become obsessed with the notion that some terrible justice would soon be inflicted upon his own children in payment for what he was doing."

~ Bernard Nathanson, Abortion Clinic Pioneer

I promised earlier to discuss the effect of abortion on maternal bonding in this third segment of a series on abortion and trauma. It may seem unrelated at first, but for one very technical and to me, puzzling line in The Body Bears the Burden, by Dr. Robert Scaer, referring to the neurological dysfunction of post-traumatic stress disorder: “The anterior cingulate serves an inhibitory gating function on fear conditioning by the amygdala, and also plays a role in generation of maternal behavior and social bonding,” (Scaer, p. 65, emphasis mine). I’m not a neurologist, or any other –ologist for that matter, so I have had to research and puzzle this out. I will do my best to describe my understanding of it.

The amygdala is a region of the brain that processes sensory input from the body: smell, taste, vision, hearing, and vestibular sensation (the position of the body as it relates to the environment). With this input, “…the amygdala evaluates the emotional meaning of the incoming information, and integrates the memory image of the event with the emotional experience,” (Scaer, p. 36). The sights, sounds, smells, and other sensory input we receive during times of trauma can become highly-charged cues for the emotions that accompany a life-threatening situation, such as fear or anger. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk has published a paper on the internet at http://www.trauma-pages.com/vanderk4.htm, entitled “The Body Keeps the Score.” In his example of this physiological phenomenon, which is psychologically expressed as conditioned learning, “a rape victim may respond to conditioned stimuli, such as the approach by an unknown man, as if she were about to be raped again, and experience panic.” He goes on to say that “there are persistent and profound alterations in stress hormones secretion and memory processing in people with PTSD.” One of these hormones is oxytocin, which will be discussed again.

I briefly mentioned in the first segment on PTSD the fact that there is memory in our “primal” brain. We have two basic kinds of memory – declarative, or explicit, and non-declarative. Declarative memory comes from the higher brain functions, is conscious, intentional, and the type of memory we use to acquire information and formal education. It develops after an event complete with all of our perceptions, relevant past events, emotions, and well-developed impressions. It is the story we would tell to others. Non-declarative memory, on the other hand, also called implicit memory, cannot be expressed in words, but it is hard-coded. The body remembers what the mind cannot express. Dr. Scaer describes declarative memory as “knowing that,” and non-declarative memory as “knowing how,” because it is responsible for storing acquired skills, conditioned responses, and emotional associations. “All of the motor skills that we learn and never forget, such as musical, artistic, and athletic talents are stored in procedural memory,” a part of non-declarative memory. “Procedural memories are readily acquired without intention, and retained forever without awareness, especially if they are linked to a coincident emotional event. They are acquired and stored without the necessary involvement of conscious memory centers serving declarative memory,” (Scaer, p. 37, emphasis mine). The body does not need the conscious mind in order to remember.

The amygdala processes the emotions surrounding trauma and builds those memories. It also facilitates the state of arousal required of us in a life-threatening situation. The anterior cingulate, which Dr. Scaer describes as exerting a “braking action” on the activation of the amygdala “therefore provid[ing] a gating mechanism on the development of fear conditioning in traumatic stress,” (p. 110), is a region of the brain associated with “higher level input.” It is also where we develop social behaviors like the maternal bond and a sense of self.

In PTSD patients, PET scans show the failure of the anterior cingulate to activate. Since the anterior cingulate acts to inhibit the amygdala, we can conclude that its malfunction results in the PTSD patient being more likely to reach a heightened state of fear and arousal, and we see this confirmed in the research. Dr. van der Kolk cites the work of Grinker and Spiegel who “…noted the similarity between many of these symptoms [of autonomic nervous system arousal] and those of diseases of the extrapyramidal motor system…Contemporary research on the biology of PTSD…confirms that there are persistent and profound alterations in stress hormones secretion and memory processing in people with PTSD.” One of these hormones is, again, oxytocin.

According to Andrea Robertson, in her article entitled “The Pain of Labour: A Feminist Issue,” at http://www.acegraphics.com.au/articles/painlabour.html, “oxytocin is the central hormone in all aspects of reproductive behaviour. In each area of reproduction (sexual intercourse, labour and birth, lactation) it works in the same way and is affected by the same inhibiting factors.” Ms. Robertson explains all of oxytocin’s actions in her article, and they include the initiation of care-taking behaviors in both men and women, and an increase in maternal nurturing behaviors.

Oxytocin is a stress hormone, also released in response to the pain of labor, acting accordingly in the anterior cingulate of the brain to facilitate maternal bonding. The research tells us that chronic and persistent stress inhibits the release of stress-responsive neurohormones like oxytocin. Those who suffer from PTSD are suffering from chronic and persistent stress, and they do not secrete the proper levels of stress hormones. As stated above, there are PET scans that show the anterior cingulate fails to act in those with PTSD, visibly demonstrating insufficient levels of oxytocin, the hormone required to activate the region of the brain responsible for maternal bonding. [Author's Note, 9/27/2005: Further research has led me to conclude that it is not the amount of oxytocin that is significant, but rather where in the brain it is utilized. In rats, the presence of adrenal steroids released in response to fear and anxiety makes oxytocin bind to its receptors (go to work) more readily, but mainly in the amygdala. If the anterior cingulate is not utilizing the oxytocin due to PTSD, the amygdala apparently is. Oxytocin is an endorphin, which has the same qualities in the brain as do opiates. We have all heard of "adrenalin junkies," but what they may actually be addicted to is not adrenalin, but the oxytocin and other neuropeptides that are released simultaneously. This opiod action on the amygdala also explains the roots of trauma reenactment, which can then be seen as unconscious self-rewarding behavior that is as difficult to control as opiate addiction.]

But what exactly is the relationship between maternal bonding and stress hormones? Pain. Pain is normally a warning sign. Something is wrong. Chronic pain like that manifested in fibromyalgia and its cousins is a malfunction of this normal neurological response, and we feel pain in the absence of painful stimuli. There is a time, though, when acute pain is normal, and not a warning that something is wrong. When a pregnant woman goes into labor, pain, a natural part of childbirth, tells her that something important is imminent.

Ms. Robertson says “the primary need for pain in labour centres around the need for a woman to know that the birth has started so she can retire to a safe place…[which is] crucial to the well being of both mother and baby, since both are immobilised and vulnerable during the event and immediately afterwards.” But pain is usually a warning sign, and it is unpleasant. We would not reproduce more than once if pain was all there was. The memory of it would cause normal women to shy away from repeating the experience, except for one thing: the unpleasant emotions surrounding pain are processed by the amygdala as described above. But in normal labor, the anterior cingulate is inhibiting the action of the amygdala, because it is being stimulated and activated by oxytocin. Oxytocin is released in response to the pain of labour. It stimulates contractions, reduces the risk of hemorrhage after birth, and increases maternal nurturing behaviors. No oxytocin in the anterior cingulate – no blocking the fearful memories being formed in the amygdala of our brains without our will or conscious thought – no bonding with the child, a warm experience that protects both mother and infant from the trauma of birth.

How does any of this relate to abortion? According to Dr. Philip Ney, a clinical professor at the University of British Columbia, http://www.priestsforlife.org/media/interviewney.htm, “…statistically speaking women who have had abortions are less likely to bond to their children.”
In 2002 the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry reported that “the children of women who have had abortions have less supportive home environments and more behavioral problems than the children of women without a history of abortion. This finding supports the view that abortion may negatively affect bonding with subsequent children, disturb mothering skills, and otherwise impact a woman’s psychological stability.” The Elliott Institute reports further that “abortion is linked with increased violent behavior, alcohol and drug abuse, replacement pregnancies, depression, and poor maternal bonding with later children. These factors are closely associated with child abuse and would appear to confirm a link between unresolved post-abortion trauma and subsequent child abuse.” Traumatized women cannot produce enough oxytocin during labor to develop a proper maternal bond, and the results range along the same continuum as do post-traumatic stress symptoms themselves. Some women seem to treat their children as little adults, responsible for fulfilling their adult emotional needs (“Why don’t they understand me?”). This has been called “emotional incest,” and is a sign that something went wrong with the maternal bond that would otherwise stimulate the woman to take the nurturing role. It’s not as obvious as physical abuse, but quite psychologically damaging to the child. The other end of the extreme is child abuse and neglect.

Even if we didn’t now understand the physiology behind the degradation of maternal bonding between aborted mothers and their children, we could see this with common sense. As she prepares for, thinks about, and dreams of the wanted and convenient child, the aborted mother reaches into the box for loving, maternal emotions and finds instead fear, anxiety, panic, anger, and all of the negative sensations surrounding the aborted child. Thanks to the trauma of unwanted pregnancy, and the trauma of abortion, these memories have been thoughtfully stored by the amygdala without her conscious will or awareness, associated to all things “Baby.”

PTSD, Abortion, and Chronic Pain

2005-06-07T15:04:00.000-07:00

As established in the last segment, abortion is intrinsically traumatic, although not all will be traumatized by it. But some women will develop a form of post-traumatic stress disorder known as post-abortion stress syndrome, or PAS. The existence of PAS is in dispute in the medical community, for what I can only imagine are ideological reasons that have nothing to do with health or care. As discussed previously, even abortion clinic workers are traumatized by what they are doing, and many of them claim to be doing it for benevolent reasons. It is clear then that the perceived benefit of abortion is no defense against being traumatized by it. Many women do not express regret over their abortions because they believe the abortions helped them, and sometimes they even believe the abortions helped the unborn child. We’ve already seen, though, that guilt and regret are absolutely unnecessary in the development of post-traumatic stress disorder. The perpetrator can indeed be traumatized by her own actions because the traumatic response occurs in the brain at a fundamental level that does not consider the belief systems she may have constructed that justify these actions. When she develops post-traumatic stress disorder, she is responding to the perceived threat against her own life that is inherent in the destruction of the life held so intimately in her own body.

But while guilt is not a factor in the development of PAS, a feeling of helplessness is, according to Dr. Robert C. Scaer, MD, author of The Body Bears the Burden: Trauma Dissociation and Disease (The Haworth Medical Press, 2001). In his words, PTSD “is produced by threat, shock, or injury that occurs in a state of helplessness,” (Scaer, p.xxi). In the animal kingdom, we see three different responses in situations which threaten the survival of the animal: the fight/flight/freeze response. Most of us are familiar with the fight or flight response. The freeze response is less commonly understood, according to Dr. Scaer. When the animal is helpless, unable to flee or defend itself against a threat, nature provides a third mechanism by which it might possibly survive: the animal freezes in an instinctual and unconscious reflex into a state of immobility, created and sustained by the parasympathetic nervous system, a division of the autonomic nervous system.

Sometimes the predator, faced with prey that is suddenly and entirely immobile as if dead, gives up and the animal survives – “playing possum.” Additionally, in the freeze response, the brain releases endorphins, which we all know as the body’s natural pain killers. Dr. Scaer remarks, “Whether this analgesia has survival value, or is a gift from a greater Being to prevent a painful death is open to debate,” (Scaer, p. 16). Another reason for the animal to be dissociated from the pain might be to keep it from its natural desire to tend to its wounds before it has completely reached safety, just as endorphins work in the flight or fight response to keep the animal from feeling pain that would impede either action.

Following the freeze response, there is a “discharge” of this autonomic nervous energy, which has been stored while the animal mimicked death. Animals in the wild and in the laboratory have been observed to tremble and perspire when they arouse from the freeze response, and oddly enough, the first movement they make is often a postural representation of what they were doing at the exact moment the freeze response was invoked – their legs will work as though running, for example, if they froze while being pursued, even while they are still lying on the ground. This is indicative of a period of unconsciousness or amnesia.

Dr. Scaer postulates that the freeze response exists in humans, but not usually to the extent it is seen in the animal kingdom. He describes it as the psychological equivalent of dissociation, in which specific, anxiety-provoking thoughts, emotions, or physical sensations are separated from the rest of the psyche: “…people [suffering trauma]…will frequently relate that they felt as if they were ‘in shock.’ This is often related as a sense of detachment, numbness, and even confusion. Time often seems to stand still. Some patients report that they feel as if they are detached and removed from their body, occasionally reporting the events of the trauma as if they were seeing them as a third person…many of the posttraumatic symptoms that occur often for years after the unresolved trauma are characteristic of dissociation, or recurrence of the symptoms of freezing,” (Scaer, p. 19).

Humans also don’t seem to have a period of discharge of autonomic nervous system energy after trauma, either, which leads Dr. Scaer to speculate that “the self-perpetuated circuitry involved in kindling is remarkably compatible with absence of discharge…” (Scaer, p. 20). “Kindling” results from the build-up of nervous energy that is not dissipated. Dr. Scaer believes that without the dissipation of this autonomic nervous system energy, “the ‘survival brain’ may continue to perceive that the threat continues to exist, and is unable to relegate it to memory as a past experience,” (Scaer, p. 21). In other words, post-traumatic stress disorder is physiologically expressed by autonomic nervous system dysfunction.

Kindling refers to the spontaneous combustion of materials reaching a certain critical temperature. In neurological terms, kindling refers to the process by which electrical impulses can add up and trigger spontaneous responses. The PTSD nervous system smolders with undischarged energy that bursts into full flame, and the resulting neuropsychological symptoms include flashbacks, intrusive memories, cue-related memories, nightmares, anxiety, panic attacks, phobias of events and places reminiscent of the trauma, memory and situation-induced arousal, mood changes, irritability, stimulus sensitivity (to light and sound, for example), exaggerated startle response, and insomnia. Furthermore, because the autonomic nervous system is involved, there are “often dramatic physical symptoms, including bowel disorders, myofasical pain, and cognitive impairment….We therefore seem to be dealing with a syndrome affecting all aspects of a person’s being, including body, mind, and spirit,” (Scaer, p. xxi).

This leads Dr. Scaer (and others) to the conclusion that “many of those chronic diseases that seem to be the most common,” and the most difficult to treat, “may well have their roots in the insidious systemic effects of traumatization,” (Scaer, p.21). He continues, “in fact, I believe that the most common complaint in current medical practice, that of persistent and unexplained chronic pain, has its roots in the persistent changes in brain circuitry associated with unresolved traumatization, and the continued tendency for dissociation to occur in the face of stress or threat,” (ibid). He describes the disorders resulting from post-traumatic stress disorder as psychophysiological, and they include fibroymalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, reflex sympathetic dystrophy, and somatization disorders that drive people to doctor after doctor, seeking a diagnosis for that which apparently cannot be explained. Dr. Scaer is very sympathetic to these patients, adding that they suffer the burden of being retraumatized and devalued by a medical community that will deny the physical validity of their very real pain (Scaer, p. 81).

The physical complaints associated with post-traumatic stress disorder include headaches, gastrointestinal complaints, immune system problems, dizziness, chest pain and other pains throughout the body. NIMH explains that “Often, doctors treat the symptoms without being aware that they stem from PTSD. NIMH, through its education program, is encouraging primary care providers to ask patients about experiences with violence, recent losses, and traumatic events, especially if symptoms keep recurring.”

One of the most mysterious of the psychophysiological disorders is fibromyalgia. More than 90% of those diagnosed with fibro are women of reproductive age. Researchers have already noted that large numbers of those women diagnosed with fibromyalgia have some kind of trauma in their histories – most often, it is childhood physical and/or sexual abuse. The physical symptoms of fibromyalgia include: headaches, fatigue, pain, vertigo (dizziness), chest pain, irritable bowel syndrome, low-grade fever and flu-like feelings. It seems likely that Dr. Scaer and the National Institutes of Mental Health are correct in speculating that fibromyalgia and its cousins may actually be undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder, undiagnosed in my opinion because physicians and researchers aren’t able to identify a source of trauma – but then, they aren’t looking for abortion in our medical histories. For the most part, it seems the medical community is standing around scratching its collective head while women get sicker and sicker with illnesses they can’t quite diagnose or understand.

As we can see from Dr. Scaer’s model of the freeze response, helplessness is a primary factor in determining whether a traumatic event will be traumatizing. According to the Elliott Institute’s report, Forced Abortion in America, eight in ten women who had abortions report they would have chosen to give birth instead if they had received support and encouragement from friends and family. The woman who aborts her child because she feels she has to, because she is financially, socially, or otherwise isolated and without help submits to a procedure that results in violent death, and is primed to develop post-traumatic stress disorder as a result.

Not all women who have abortions will develop PAS, as I’ve mentioned before, but that shouldn’t ease our minds. Most people who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder have multiple traumas in their histories which did not at that time trigger symptoms of PTSD, but which weakened them against future traumas, making them more susceptible to develop the disorder each time. Also, the symptoms of PTSD appear on a continuum – some will suffer less than others. Again, each successive traumatic event will be more difficult to handle, and, because of the kindling effect in the nervous system, it actually takes less severe trauma to incur the most severe results as time and stress march on. Occasionally, I have to take a second look at the title of my blogspot – abortion hurts. We have been practicing unrestricted abortion on demand in this nation for thirty years without regard to the consequences, and without medical research that determines whether or not this is really as benign a procedure as we are promised it will be. It's pretty clear to me, though, that the evidence is already in. Not only is abortion not benign, it is malignant, and it is making us sick.

Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress

2005-06-03T12:56:00.000-07:00

It was several months ago, and the question posted at the After Abortion blogspot was intriguing: “If Terri Schiavo dies, will Michael Schiavo suffer from post traumatic stress like women who have abortions do?” T he questioner was in earnest, and it got me thinking – not whether Michael Schiavo would suffer from PTSD – but whether or not our own involvement in creating trauma has any significant effect, especially on women who abort.

As it turned out, we weren’t the only ones wondering if and how we can cause our own PTSD. Rachel M. MacNair explores the issue in her book, Perpetration Induced Traumatic Stress: The Psychological Consequences of Killing, published in 2002 by Praeger Publishers. MacNair describes PITS as a subset of post-traumatic stress disorder. She provides detailed results of scientific studies of those who participate in sanctioned killing in addition to rich, anecdotal evidence from historical accounts of those who have killed, sanctioned and otherwise.

The evidence that post-traumatic stress disorder can and does result even when one is the perpetrator of the violence is clear. MacNair describes it in detail as it results in combat veterans, executioners, law enforcement officers, Nazi war criminals, and abortion clinic workers. She avoids any extensive discussion of PTSD as it applies to women who procure abortions, saying only:

“Some scholars have proposed that women who undergo abortion have a variant of PTSD, which they call Post Abortion Syndrome. Controversy rages over whether this exists or not. Some studies show that it does, others show that it appears not to, and there seems to be a high correlation between the bias of the researcher and the results. Opponents of the concept of postabortion problems believe that proponents are trying to undermine the actual benefits of abortion. Proponents, on the other hand, believe that people who are making a profit or have an ideological commitment are trying to ignore the negative. Over 300 studies with varying outcomes have been done on this matter, and it is subject to intense debate,” (MacNair, p. 71).

Regardless of the controversy and bias of researchers, there is enough evidence in the existing research to conclude that abortion can and certainly does cause post-traumatic stress syndrome. MacNair says it best herself, introducing the chapter on PTSD among abortion practitioners: “Defenders of abortion believe that it is a form of medicine. Opponents believe it to be killing. If abortion is the taking of a human life, then the psychological consequences of PITS could be expected among those who perform abortions. If we find no such aftermath, the case is strengthened that abortion is not violence at all.” I have to add that if we find evidence of PITS among abortion clinic workers, we are unreasonably blind to think the woman who aborts is somehow shielded from the same trauma.

So do abortion practitioners show signs they suffer from Perpetration Induced Traumatic Stress, or PTSD? MacNair says there has been little research, but there is plenty of anecdotal evidence, and all of it says they do. She finds only two studies that were not done by researchers who work in the abortion field and which looked at large numbers of people, both performed by abortion proponents, and notes, “in contrast to the studies of postaborted women, they both note the high prevalence of symptoms that fit under Posttraumatic Stress Disorder,” (MacNair, p. 72).

According to MacNair, the National Abortion Federation has addressed the issue of trauma among abortion clinic workers already, but it is a well-kept secret. Warren Hern, an abortion specialist, in a paper given to the Association of Planned Parenthood Physicians said the following: “Some part of our cultural and perhaps even biological heritage recoils at a destructive operation on a form that is similar to our own, even while we may know that the act has a positive effect for a living person.” In other words, it doesn’t matter if we think the unborn child is a person or not. It doesn’t matter whether we believe it is aware or sentient.

The physical and psychological resemblance of the unborn to that which is instantly recognizable as human is enough for us to recoil at its destruction. Our brains recognize it as human death, at psycho-neurological levels that are not affected by the higher cognitive functions where we develop the belief systems that justify killing. MacNair says “it is not normal for medical staff to regard surgery as trauma,” yet clinic workers report a common and widespread symptom of trauma: dreams and intrusive thoughts about the aborted fetuses. The American Medical News reported from the National Abortion Federation Workshop, “they wonder if the fetus feels pain. They talk about the soul and where it goes. And about their dreams, in which aborted fetuses stare at them with ancient eyes and perfectly shaped hands and feet asking, ‘Why? Why did you do this to me?’” (MacNair, p. 75). Clearly, abortion is intrinsically and always psychologically traumatic because it involves at least the idea, if not the physical evidence, of the destruction of human life.

The destruction of human life is traumatic. Quite simply, it has to be. Human beings must have an aversion to killing each other more often than not, or we wouldn’t be able to live together. Additionally, the killing of another human being is designed to invoke in us the automatic and autonomic nervous system response we know best as “fight or flight.” This response also includes a third option “freezing,” as described by Dr. Robert C. Scaer, in The Body Bears the Burden: Trauma, Dissociation, and Disease published by the Haworth Medical Press in 2001. Freezing is our “deer-caught-in-the-headlights” look, and it is this response that Dr. Scaer says causes post-traumatic stress disorder. This is a simple survival response because what killed another human might also kill us, and it is processed in what some call the most primitive part of the brain, an area we cannot consciously control. This is also why and where we recognize and differentiate human versus non-human. A dead tree in the forest is not usually a sign of imminent danger, unless it’s on fire, perhaps, but a dead human can certainly be. Our brains recognize the features of human faces even as infants.

I don’t like the word, “primitive” as it applies to brain function because it implies that our brains were once less than what they are, and I simply don’t believe that. It is more likely to me that what works in simpler animals for survival works equally as well for human survival, and a good designer doesn’t keep reinventing the wheel. It also implies that the automatic regions of our brain are somehow inferior, and therefore, we terminate the lives of people whose only brain function is the most basic. It’s an absurdly out-dated idea. There is memory in the brainstem, and emotional responses – things we use all the time, that are a part of who we are as individuals. Death, human and violent, affects us directly and immediately, because we need that kind of response in order to survive.

My premise is that abortion is traumatic because it is always perceived as involving death, and consequently, it will always stimulate the autonomic nervous system response to danger. To begin, here is my very primitive description of how the autonomic nervous system works. It is not primitive – it is foundational. Perhaps it is the equivalent of the operating system of the body, and higher levels where thought and declarative memory (memories we can put into words) exist are like applications. Some of us have stronger applications than others, but we all have the basic operating system. The autonomic nervous system runs the things we can’t possibly take the time to think about doing. I t regulates things like digestion, heart rate, breathing, reproductive cycles, and reflexes. Imagine if we had to think about beating our hearts 90 times a minute. There wouldn’t be any time to do anything else, but if our hearts don’t beat, we die. That’s another feature of the autonomic nervous system – it takes care of the things that keep us alive so we don’t have to think about those, either, and in order to do that, it has a memory of its own.

Why is it a matter of survival for the autonomic part of our “thinking” system to take over in a life-threatening emergency? Because what matters most when our lives are in danger is how quickly we react, and how effectively we react. Our responses have to be fast because most threats appear suddenly. They also have to be learned permanently the first time, because we may not get another chance to learn how to avoid the danger. Imagine you are in the jungle, and a large orange animal with black stripes jumps out at you from the bushes. You’ve never seen an animal like it before. How do you know if it is a threat? If at that point in time you had to mentally compare the animal to every other animal you have ever seen or read about, detail by detail, you would be killed and eaten before you’d eliminated “aardvark.” Certain features are going to stand out, features that can be evaluated and compared to current knowledge quickly, in an easily accessed part of the brain where memory/recognition of important things like this is stored. The sight of fangs, the sound of a growl, the smell particular to meat-eating animals, perhaps a human finger caught in those giant teeth – this input from all of our senses is received and processed in our brains autonomically, so we can climb the nearest tree quickly without taking precious, life-saving time to think about whether it’s necessary.

Our responses to danger have to be learned permanently, too. If the tiger goes away after we’ve climbed the tree, then we learn that it is an effective way to avoid being killed by one. So after the first tiger grows bored and leaves us alone, when we continue down the path and run across the next tiger, not only do we instantly recognize him based on less information than we needed to the first time, but we also remember to head for the nearest tree, and fast. It’s called “conditioned” learning, and it’s the same thing that made Pavlov’s dogs slobber at the sound of the bell even when there was no food to eat, because he had taught them to associate the food with the sound.

In the tiger situation, fear is an appropriate emotional response, and it results in the autonomic fight/flight/freeze response that we commonly think of sending adrenaline coursing through our veins. Our bodies get ready for what we have to do – if we are to flee, or fight, adrenaline increases our strength. If we are unable to do either, then we resort to freezing, like animals caught in a trap. It is the autonomic nervous system directing our physiological responses the whole time – releasing endorphins, for example, to help us ignore the pain if the tiger claws our legs on the way up the tree. Here then is the relationship between post-traumatic stress disorder and autonomic nervous system dysfunction as described by Dr. Scaer, who postulates that the autonomic nervous system is malfunctioning in those whose initial alarms fail to subside after the threat has passed (in other words, in those who develop PTSD).

How does the autonomic nervous system response to danger apply to women who submit to abortions? It’s been established that the thought or sight of human death causes us to fear for our own lives, putting us in a state of autonomic nervous system arousal. Can the thought or the sight of human death make us fear for our own lives even when we cause the death of the other human being? In other words, does anticipating the traumatic event have any effect on whether the event is traumatic? No, it doesn’t. Dr. Scaer is a neurologist and psychiatrist who works with people who have been traumatized in motor vehicle accidents. In his experience and in the research, he finds there is absolutely no significant difference between the traumatic response of those who saw the accident coming, and those who didn’t. Consequently, even if we can expect to see someone die because we are causing it, it doesn’t matter. The death itself is recognized as a threat autonomically, so anticipating it on a higher level in our brains doesn’t do anything to block the automatic response. Yes, killers can be traumatized by their own actions, and women who abort can be traumatized by their abortions, too.

MacNair looks at the conclusions of Dr. Lisak, a counselor of deathrow murderers, who established from his case studies that, “…the act of murder can indeed traumatize the murderer…They were the creators of these scenes of horror, but they were by definition also witnesses to them. The images seared them no less than those images would sear any witness,” (MacNair, p. 62). Guilt is also an unnecessary component in trauma, although it can certainly be a complicating factor in recovery. And there is certainly reason to believe that symptoms of PTSD can underlie future violent activity, particularly since outbursts of rage are a common symptom.

This journaler suffered from PTSD:

“Toward the end of the first two years, which had passed monotonously and without any special incident, I was overcome by a most peculiar state of mind. I became very irritable, nervous, and excited. I felt a disinclination to work…although I had hitherto thoroughly enjoyed…work. I could no longer eat and I brought up every mouthful that I forced myself to swallow. I could not read any more and became completely unable to concentrate. I paced up and down…like a wild animal. I lay awake all night, although I had up to then always fallen at once into a deep and almost dreamless sleep. I had to get out of bed and walk round…, and was unable to lie still. Then I would sink exhausted on to the bed and fall asleep, only to wake again after a short time bathed in sweat from my own nightmares. In those confused dreams I was always being pursued and killed, or falling over a precipice. The hours of darkness became a torment. Night after night I heard the clocks strike the hour. As morning approached, my dread increased. I feared the light of day and the people I should have to see once more. I felt incapable of seeing them again. I tried with all my strength to pull myself together, but without success. I wanted to pray, but my prayers dissolved into distressed stammering. I had forgotten how to pray, and had lost the way to God. In my misery I believed that God had no wish to help me, since I had forsaken Him.”

Rudolf Hoess, the infamous commander of Auschwitz who oversaw the gassing of approximately two million people from July 1941 to the end of 1943 wrote the above journal entry in 1924, while in prison for a savage murder he committed with his own hands. He was one of a group of Nazis who were administered a Rorschach inkblot test while imprisoned after the Second World War. His responses to that test, as well as his jail cell complaints from 1924, were consistent with someone who suffers from PTSD. MacNair concludes that, in Hoess’ case, “what caused what and when has been lost in the mists of time, but Hoess’ case illustrates the possibility that knowledge of PITS serves not only as a way of dealing with those who suffer from it, but perhaps also as an important tool in prevention efforts,” (MacNair, p. 54).

Hoess and other Nazis, who personally oversaw the death of millions, had PTSD symptoms. Law enforcement officers who kill on the job, because they have to, suffer from it to the extent that many police departments have mandatory counseling for every officer involved in a shooting, particularly a fatal incident. And abortion clinic workers suffer from trauma because of their proximity to perceived human death. Yet somehow we are expected to believe that women who undergo abortions are exempt from the trauma of death when it comes to bumping off their unborn children. How could this even be possible? Well, it isn’t. It is in fact arguable that her proximity to the unborn child, including the chemical communication that exists between her body and her child’s, which begins at conception when the fertilized egg sends chemical signals to the mother’s body to prepare it for implantation and pregnancy, makes it even more likely that the mother will identify abortion with the death of another human being, one close to her.

Violent death is inherently traumatic. Abortion is perceived as an act of violence resulting in death even by those who believe they are doing it for benevolent reasons. This is because the human response to death is perceived at an autonomic level in our brains that does not consider the philosophical idea, but only that visceral, gut response that moves us to avoid those things that can hurt us. It is reasonable to conclude that abortion is intrinsically traumatic. Not every witness to a traumatic event develops PTSD, but those who do can become very ill indeed, because unlike the abortion practitioner, the woman who submits to an abortion has an added complication: the “helplessness” factor. No longer able to fight, certainly unable to flee, she faces this life-threatening situation by freezing. In the next segment, I will describe how this freezing response to the trauma of abortion is responsible for psychophysiological illness, based on the research of Dr. Scaer. Later, we will examine the consequences when maternity is associated with trauma, and the possible physiological brain mechanism that makes an inability to bond with our children a potentially unavoidable consequence of abortion.

AARP Finds the Silver Lining in Abortion

2005-05-16T09:13:00.000-07:00

In the May 2005 (Vol. 46, No. 5) issue of the AARP bulletin, the following “blurb” appears on page 4:

“Nifty Fifty. South Korea’s policy on family planning has caused the birthrate to plummet so dramatically in the last decade that the country is now the most rapidly aging place in the developed world. This will severely strain the retirement system, but there will be a silver lining of sorts for South Koreans in their early 50s: By mid-century, they’ll be considered young.”

Isn’t that a lovely thought? Of course, “family planning” is a euphemism for abortion as well as contraception. But according to AARP, I can sleep easier tonight knowing that the 4,000 abortions to be performed in the U.S. today will thin the herd of young people so I can feel younger in comparison, even as I age. Have we finally found the fountain of youth?

My actual response was a little different, though, emailed to AARP at bulletin@aarp.org:

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Your suggestion that those who are aging can find a silver lining in South Korea's "family planning" success is disturbing (May 2005, page 4).

South Korea's family planning policy includes legalized abortion (with a particular and irresponsible emphasis on the abortion of females, as is common in China). As of 1996, South Korea's abortion rate was one in four pregnancies. In the United States, we abort nearly one in three pregnancies. While you acknowledge the strain this "population control" is putting on the retirement system in South Korea, where is the same statement about our own troubled Social Security system? Having been designed so the younger generation supports the retired community, it is only obvious that killing one in four taxpayers before they are born will eventually lead to insolvency.

Instead of noting this similarity, however, you encourage older people to be pleased to be young in comparison to the rest of the population, a selfish, me-oriented philosophy that is part and parcel of what is wrong with this nation today.

Sincerely,

Mrs. Julie Shockley

Perhaps it is only after we of the Roe v. Wade generations have finally lain down and died that our nation will be free of this parasitic attitude. May God bless the young and hurry along the changing of the guard.

Awakening on Mother's Day

2005-05-10T09:18:00.000-07:00

“My partner and I regret that we had to make the decision that we made, but we will never regret that decision. It's a subtle difference, but it's as important and undeniable as life itself.”

Strange statement, I think. The difference is too subtle for my poor addled brain to understand. Awakening returned to her abortion blogspot briefly about a month ago. What prompted her return? She had her abortion, and as she describes, she’s perfectly comfortable with her decision. She visited with friends who have a new baby, though, and for some reason that drove her back to her abortion blogspot. It brought to mind her own abortion and her own child. Why would seeing a newborn baby bring Awakening back to re-affirm her choice? If we are to believe what we are told, there should be no connection between the living, newborn child and the aborted “tissue.”

But bring her back it did. She saw the perfect little family: Mom, Dad, and Baby. And so she thought about motherhood and her abortion. I thought about Awakening on Mother’s Day, even in the middle of my own little pity party, which I throw for myself every year at about this time. Having been rendered childless by choice for having made the ultimate Choice, I don’t have any pleasant distractions. There are no flowers, no cards, no letters, no children who feel obligated to call me even though I am a pain in the ass, so I don’t really enjoy Mother’s Day. This year, I thought of young Awakening, and wondered how she felt when she awoke on Sunday morning. Did she imagine how things might have been? She would still be pregnant if she had made a different choice. Does she understand what I have been grappling with for two and half decades? Dear Awakening, did you get a card for Mother’s Day? Because you are a mother, poor soul. I am a mother, too, as much as it truly sickens me to think of it. I am a lousy mother. But when the Celebrant asked all of the mothers to stand for their blessing at Sunday’s Mass, did I? No. I could not. For the life of me, I could not stand with the other mothers. I am a mother, but I don’t deserve the title and the blessings that come with it on the second Sunday each May. I didn't let my children live.

I recently read Jennifer O’Neill’s post-abortion healing book, You’re Not Alone – Healing Through God’s Grace After Abortion. She includes an I.D. Checklist, asking the reader to determine how he or she experienced abortion. Select one of the following: mother, father, grandparent, sibling, family member, etc. I read the list twice without finding anything to check for me. “Where am I? There must be a typo,” I wondered. Seriously – I was confused. I read the list a third time. It took me another complete reading, and then the light went on: “Hey, idiot. You were the mother. Mother. M-O-T-H-E-R.” Well, duh.

I have been thinking a lot about Awakening since I discovered her return a few weeks ago. I thought she had long since abandoned her abortion blog and the need for it, but I was wrong. Awakening is facing triggers now that make her think of her pregnancy and the conditions under which she and her partner decided to end their child’s life. Now she is facing other mothers with no child of her own in her arms. She would talk to them about her pregnancy if she could, I bet. Perhaps she would like to discuss morning sickness. Cravings. Quickening (btw, Miss O’Neill, in a book aimed at post-abortive women, you might want to reconsider using words like “quickening” that are pregnant with alternative meanings, if you get my drift). Or prenatal care. But none of those things apply to her anymore.

Answer me this: If we make a choice with which we are satisfied, and about which we have no doubts, how many times do we need to revisit the decision and reaffirm it?

Another subtle difference that I noticed, but Awakening doesn’t, is that her recent post doesn’t include any reference to the Great Love she shares with her partner. Her pre-abortion blogs were filled with doey-eyed descriptions of her soul-mate and their undying Love. Her latest? Well, he’s not a soul-mate in this one. He’s just her partner now. A partner in crime, perhaps? We will see, and unfortunately, so shall Awakening. On average, according to Miss O’Neill’s book, it takes sixty-two months for a woman to experience post-abortion regret. Awakening is still in the dream-state, I think. Go on, girl. Keep telling yourself that it was the right thing to do under the circumstances. Don’t forget, if you hadn’t had your abortion, you wouldn’t be where you are today – that’s a good rationalization, too. It will help to think that for a little while, at any rate – or at least you will believe it helps you.

Eventually, though, morning comes, and brings the truth to light. Maybe it's Mother’s Day morning that dawns, and we will awaken alone, in the knowledge that the opportunity to be beloved to another person in that role, on that day, has been terminated, and we are unloved because of our own choices. Eventually, it may seem as if the entire world revolves around motherhood, which becomes an exclusive club to which we don’t belong. Many women get pregnant again very soon after an abortion. Is it possible we are desperately trying to regain the identity that was sucked out of us? Well, duh.

I could write reams about aborted motherhood. Some day I probably will. In the meantime, Happy Mother’s Day to those who have earned that honor and title.

eBay? Yes, way!

2005-05-07T10:59:00.000-07:00

The headline in my diocesan newspaper, The Catholic Sun, startled me: “No way, eBay.” I read on with trepidation, and became quite angry.

Some of my readers may be aware that I used eBay to become Silent No More. I auctioned my first guitar, and we donated the proceeds to Virtue Media, who create pro-life television commercials, including one for the Silent No More Awareness Campaign. More importantly, we used the eBay marketplace to raise awareness about the harm abortion causes in some women’s lives by publishing my testimony in the ad. It was a positive experience, without a doubt. I received no hate mail whatsoever, which surprised me, and I received several e-mails that were encouraging and kind. I still hold the eBay community in general in high esteem for this reason.

I was prepared to withdraw our association with eBay after reading the article (which appeared in the May 5th issue of The Catholic Sun). Two different individuals have attempted to auction the Blessed Sacrament on eBay. One claimed the host had been consecrated by Pope John Paul II. For those who are not Catholic or unaware, it might help to explain that in the Catholic faith, the consecrated host is the body of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is to be treated with the utmost reverence. Extraordinary Ministers of the Eucharist in each parish are taught to make sure the host offered to the Communicant is placed in his or her mouth immediately. It is not to be taken away from Mass. To sell the body of the Lord is sacrilege.

The Sun reports that "several dioceses have contacted the company and hundreds, if not thousands, of concerned Catholics have placed phone calls and sent e-mails. Also nearly 34,000 people have signed an online petition urging eBay to change its policy." I logged on to sign the petition this morning, at www.boycottebay.org , and learned that eBay had issued a statement – here is an excerpt:

“We understand that the listing of the Eucharist was highly upsetting to Catholic members of the eBay community and Catholics globally. Once this completed sale was brought to our attention, we consulted with a number of our users, including members of the Catholic Church, concerning what course we should take in the future should a similar listing appear on our site. We also consulted with members of other religions about items that might also be highly sacred and inappropriate for sale. As a result of this dialogue, we have concluded that sales of the Eucharist, and similar highly sacred items, are not appropriate on eBay. We have, therefore, broadened our policies and will remove those types of listings should they appear on the site in the future.”

Visit the boycott website to read eBay’s entire statement and to learn how you can thank them for their swift and respectful response.

Shades of Gray

2005-04-20T10:40:00.000-07:00

It’s been a long hiatus, busy moving our household across town while the world changed. Terri Schiavo’s judicial homicide by starvation is a fait accomplis for the culture of death. Our beloved Pope John Paul II was released from his earthly burdens, and the newly-elected Defender of the Deposit of Faith is the orthodox and competent former-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.

Prior to the announcement of his election yesterday, I wrote three words on a notepad: “Shades of Gray.” Moral relativism was going to be the first subject I tackled on my return, one of many that have been bouncing through my head with nowhere to land. Pope Benedict's election was Providential in that regard, but I was actually prompted by an earlier criticism from a pro-choicer who thought I was unable to see in shades of gray. My first response to the accusation was childish and not worth recording except in an email whine to Ashli at The S.I.C.L.E. Cell (an excellent blogspot that deserves as many plugs as I can fit in): “the world has shades of gray - oh, my, did I, the baby-killer, not know that?”

Childish, yes I am, but I am also often amazed at the childishness of the pro-choicers who spout patent arguments off the cuff without any thought at all, apparently. I am post-abortive – is that a secret somewhere anymore? I have a pretty good idea of how to look at the world through the screen of gray shades, thanks. Been there, done that, and tired of saying it to people who don't pay attention. Please, change your arguments or think them through when you are talking to a woman who exercised the choice you fight so hard to protect.

The problem is that there are absolutes in the world, legitimate shades of black and white that every one is capable of seeing, but which not everyone can accept, and one of those black shades is the color of death. And that’s what abortion is about – it’s about death, and death is inarguably absolute.

It’s not about women’s health, or we would regulate the abortionists and the abortuaries – but we don’t. It isn’t about poverty or financial responsibility, or thirty years of legalized abortion would have reduced the number of children who live in poverty in this nation. It hasn’t. It isn’t about letting women decide whether they want to be pregnant or not – they already can without legal abortion. Abortion is not contraception, because it occurs after conception. It is murder used as contraception, and this black truth bears repeating as often as it takes, until we no longer deny that it exists.

The simple fact, in plain black and white, is that abortion is about killing the child and the responsibilities that come with him or her. It is this truth that causes problems for women who procure abortions. Unlike other cases of abuse or trauma in which the victim is purely a victim, the post-abortive woman has to point to herself as one of the instigators. Not only was she a victim, she was a victimizer. She wasn’t just abused by abortion; she abused her own child with it, and he is absolutely dead because of it. This scar penetrates the psyche in a different way because it carries the black weight of guilt. In helping the post-abortive woman who seeks recovery understand the consequences of abortion in her life, we cannot deny the impact of grave sin on her soul. In doing so, we short-change her because apparently we don't think she can grasp right from wrong. We don’t give her the opportunity to repent and heal if we don’t help her stop denying that it is the knowledge that the abortion was wrong, that she sinned against life – a life she helped create - which is tearing her apart inside.

Mark Crutcher of Life Dynamics would prefer the pro-life movement say that women “submit” to abortions, rather than saying they “have” them. Yes, women submit to abortions. They are coerced, present company included, and they give in to the pressure of others. But he misses a point that is salient to recovery programs and to turning the tide against making the poor choice. All post-abortive women are victims of abortion, yes, but many of us don’t just submit – we choose. We elect. We opt. We procure. We engage.

In doing so, we accept the lies and cheap rationalizations, the gray area that frees us to make the choice to kill our unborn children. We have to identify with the argument, no matter how briefly or transparently, that abortion is okay, or we aren’t going to be able to go through with it. I accepted this lie: “it will be as if it had never happened.” Yeah, right. Unfortunately, the catch phrase is as black as truth can be. I didn’t not become a mother by choosing abortion. Just like they say, I became the mother of a dead child. The abortionist could not undo conception. He had to kill the child to make me un-pregnant. There was no other way, no gray area in which I could think of myself as having been a “little bit pregnant,” or think of the child as not quite alive, yet, so the abortionist is simply removing some inanimate tissue (but if the baby is not alive, essentially dead already, why does he have to be torn to pieces? Most doctors remove a tumor intact if they can...but no, I can't bear thinking of that, because it is all black, there, and I get lost in the darkness). Does anyone remember when being a little bit pregnant was a joke, and few would argue with it because of the absurdity of it all?

In our current “dictatorship of moral relativism,” it is entirely possible to convince ourselves that obvious fallacies such as this can be true. “If it’s true for me, then it’s Truth, whether it conflicts with what you think is true or not. If what you think is true is different, well then that’s Truth for you, and your Truth equals my Truth.” It hurts just to write such unreasonable reasoning. Thinking in this manner creates complete anarchy in the psyche. If there are no absolutes, then I cannot find my way. There are no landmarks to guide us on this gray plain, so it is no wonder we act as if we are lost.

Truth is immutable – it is unchanging by its very nature. Truth comes in one shade, and isn't gray. Otherwise, it is not truth. It is opinion. Opinions come in all the shades of gray that range between black and white, and we all know the old saw about opinions: everyone has some of them, along with other equally unattractive features.

They're Not Sorry - What Now?

2005-04-08T10:25:00.000-07:00

Some commentary is being tossed about at After Abortion reviewing the stories posted at I’m Not Sorry, testimonies of post-abortive women who claim they have no regrets, women whose stories remind me of my mother (see "Is There Something Missing in Me?. In the comments, rightly or wrongly (and I admit I am sensitive), I heard a tone that had kept me a stranger to the pro-life movement for decades. I heard people judging the reasons why the women who weren’t sorry had their abortions. The reasons came up short, of course. They are all flimsy excuses for killing: careers, financial resources, immaturity, lack of support from the baby’s father, etc. Many of these women don’t sound dire and desperate enough to have resorted to the ultimate solution: killing the expected problem-child. But why are we even looking for good reasons in the first place? There are no good reasons for an abortion. It is an inherently selfish and self-serving act because it eliminates a human being who would otherwise require our attention and care. It’s fruitless to search for good reasons, and even more pointless to state the obvious – their reasons aren’t good enough. But I hear the women being judged for their poor choices anyway, and my defenses go up. I think we can concede the point – it was a poor choice. Now what do we do with their flimsy reasons, particularly those of us who are pro-life Christians?

Well, let’s don’t judge the sinners. Remember “hate the sin, love the sinner?” From our perspective, other people’s lives look darned easy. But we are not called to pass judgment on the lives of others. We can judge their actions as being good or bad – the distinction is important. We cannot judge the person or the inner workings of a person’s mind (reasons). Only God can discern the righteousness of the soul. But apparently we still have to teach Christians how to treat post-abortive women. We have to remind church-going Christian people that the woman standing next to them might be post-abortive, and they should not treat her unkindly. Why? Shouldn’t we also remind our church-going Christians that the person standing next to them could be a liar, or a thief, or an adulterer, or a fornicator? Shouldn’t they already be aware that such a person might have been staring back at them in their mirrors that morning? “There but for the grace of God, go I.” No one is exempt from sin, but all sinners can be forgiven – even the baby killers such as I – if we repent. The woman who is not sorry is not a lower creature. She lacks enlightenment, all too often because the pain of facing our own ugliness is too great for her. Are we all standing so strongly on such high moral ground that we can look down on her weakness and berate her for it?

Better yet, let’s listen to what these women think were dire and sufficient reasons for abortion, and come up with solutions based on them. I see quite a few who were in abusive relationships. Pro-life people need to be vocal about protecting women from domestic violence, particularly since homicide is now the leading cause of death among pregnant women. So many of them were young when they made the choice. We need to support our crisis pregnancy centers. We need to support married couples, to keep families together and fathers in the household. Young girls who find love at home don’t seek it elsewhere. These aren’t all the answers, of course, but every abortion story is a roadmap that can tell us what these women needed in order to a) avoid pregnancy in the first place, or b) choose birth (often a lack of access to legal abortion would have sufficed). And each story tells us what these women now need in order to live with the truth of the choices they made, giving us directions to help them see that truth.

Lastly, as we listen to what is at times cold-blooded testimony of infanticide, words that can even make a pro-choicer wince, we have to remember there’s a human mouth on a human face speaking those words. We can’t see that face, but I have seen at least one of them. My mother held back the bitterest tears as she said she was not sorry. I think the most compassionate response is to listen as if the speaker is a woman who desires to justify her decision to have an abortion because she is unable to live with her choice if it was unjust. I hear in many of the stories a woman who suffers more than other post-abortive women, but in such silence that she cannot even hear it herself. I hear many of them say they are sorry about something – sorry for getting pregnant; sorry the father was such a bastard; sorry she didn’t have the resources or the time to have a child at that moment; she is often sorry, but to admit she is sorry for the abortion itself, she has to admit to the sin, and such a sin it is: to kill one’s own helpless and innocent child.

The post-abortive woman (sorry or not), like all sinners, needs our compassion and, if we are true Christians, our prayers. If she seems obstinately unrepentant, it is entirely possible, and perhaps likely, that she is in a cold, dark void, crying out for someone to please help her deny the truth, tell her it was all right, and that she’s not really a bad person after all. The pro-choice movement stands ready with arms wide open to embrace her. The pro-life movement has not been there for women like me in the past, and still some seem to resist help from the post-abortive ("Be Gentle with the Wounded Soul"). It’s time for that to change. If you work in the pro-life movement and your hands are clean, God bless you. Now let's help those whose hands are not clean. Let's try to bring them gently out of the void and the darkness with compassion and love. They are not our enemies, no matter how loudly they insist “No, I wasn’t wrong, and I’m not sorry!” They are our sisters, and if they are not as enlightened as they should be, we have to reach out to them – out, not down. If we start picking apart a woman’s reasons for choosing abortion, we automatically put her in a defensive position from which she will be unable to hear us. If we lead her to the true nature of the act of abortion instead, helping her see that her child was a human being entitled to his life, his own life to make worth living, then she will also be brought to the truth that there were no valid reasons to justify the taking of that life.

Retain Them? I Think Not

2005-03-26T08:37:00.000-07:00

In forthcoming elections, my response to each and every ballot question to retain a sitting judge will be NO.

Here’s my opinion:

A court order can be in violation of the law. It is not a law unto itself.

Laws are made by legislators and the executive branch. Judges are not constitutionally empowered to make law. They are to interpret circumstances as they fit under the prescribed laws, not as they fit into other court decisions which are NOT laws.

A court decision is just that and no more. Precedent is not law, and new laws can be made by our elected legislators that supersede precedents, because laws can be changed.

Judges are not empowered to order the death of innocent citizens in a non-criminal matter, particularly when the burden of proof is anything less than reasonable doubt.

The judicial branch of government has no right to impede a criminal investigation ordered by the executive branch.

We have reached the point where we are ruled by the judicial system, rendering the legislative and executive branches impotent.

I don’t have the time or the resources to figure out if the judges who will be appearing on my future ballots agree with my opinions or not. They surely won’t tell me, so I suppose I would have to wade through their decisions looking for clues about how they think. It sounds as if it would take a lifetime, and I could never be certain I interpreted their thoughts correctly.

So I’m afraid I’m going to have to vote to throw out the good with the bad. That is a shame. And I don’t have a say-so about every judicial seat, which is also too bad. But we are unable to root out any corruption if a court order can stop a criminal investigation before it has even begun. The only way I can see for me to mitigate the damage of at least some corrupt judges is to recycle them right off the bench in every election, and the consequences be damned.

To My Elected Representatives, In Re Terri Schiavo

2005-03-23T09:31:00.000-07:00

Dear President Bush, Senators Jon Kyl and John McCain, and Congressman Jeff Flake,

Over the last couple of months, I’ve written to each of you at least twice asking for your help in the case of Terri Schiavo of Florida. If the court is correct, and she would rather die than live in her disabled condition, the state is assisting in her suicide. If the finding is wrong, it is still euthanasia. In either case, it is unacceptable to me, but apparently not unconstitutional (!?), for the state to kill an innocent citizen. Words fail to adequately express my disappointment in our government for once again failing its citizens on the fundamental civil right to life. Of what value are any of our liberties without life in which to pursue them? Recent legislation was so insufficient as to make me doubt the intentions that drove it. Terri’s case is not being reviewed on an evidentiary basis, but is still being denied on a point of law. We had an opportunity to change that by changing the law, but we failed.

I find the denial of her free practice of her faith as objectionable as the denial of her right to life. We were founded for the most part by men and women who sought freedom in which to practice their religion. Yet Terri Schiavo’s freedom to practice her Catholic faith is being denied. If the court’s finding is correct, and she expressed a desire to die in a manner contrary to the teachings of her faith, her soul was imperiled. In the absence of her ability to communicate a desire to be devout, why couldn’t we assume she would aspire to be? And now, a state judge stands between Terri and the practice of her faith by denying her access to daily Communion because he has ordered that nothing can pass her lips, not even two or three drops of consecrated wine. Further, he has removed the only other mechanism by which Communion could have been administered. It wasn’t necessary to deny her this freedom. The tube could have stayed in, closed off to nutrition and hydration, but available to allow her the Sacrament.

I can’t imagine the consequences of our failure in this and all other cases like it. We are killing an innocent disabled woman by court order in the United States of America. This is not the America I hoped it was. It is not the land of the free or the home of the brave. We are cowards. We don’t have the nerve to stand up and say we love life enough to protect it. We enslave the weak and helpless who live or die at our discretion. Are all men created equal? Yes, but they won’t find equitable treatment in the nation formed on that ideal.

Boy, I Wouldn't Want to Live That Way

2005-03-18T08:11:00.000-07:00

Over and over again, in polls, on message boards, in the judge's decisions, and in the media who keep referring to it as a “right to die” issue, I hear the same message – Terri Schiavo is suffering and should be allowed to die. “This is not living. This is existing,” says one comment on a message board. “She has been in this condition for years. It’s time for the suffering to end,” says yet another.

While the medical details are certainly different, Terri’s situation still reminds me of the late Christopher Reeve. Was he not trapped in his body just as surely as Terri is? Mr. Reeve could still communicate in a way we could understand. But he was completely dependent on others for life support, just as Terri is, in that he was unable to take care of his own basic needs, such as food and water. And I could easily look at him and think, “Boy, I wouldn’t want to live that way.”

Shortly after his accident, Mr. Reeve expressed his own desire to die rather than continue in a body that no longer responded to him. He could not imagine life in the condition he was in, which held little hope for recovery or even amelioration of symptoms, unlike Terri, whose condition might be improved with therapy, if only someone would try. But Mr. Reeve’s wife did not allow him to surrender to despair. She helped her husband realize that he was still valuable, and viable, and capable of living a full life as a husband and father in spite of his physical limitations. And realize this he did – he went back to work, he stayed actively involved with his family, and he even became a political activist. Disregard for the moment his seriously misguided efforts to fund embryonic stem cell research. That he fought for research for a cure shows us that he was a desperate man who had found even in his severely disabled body a strong desire to live.

We know what Mr. Reeve suffered because he had no brain injury that prevented him from telling us what he went through. We don’t know what Terri Schiavo suffers. We can only guess. She is not in a persistent vegetative state, but even if she were, there is testimony from others who have been diagnosed as such who were not at all unaware. They could hear, feel, think, see, all while trapped in a body that no longer responded to their wishes. But those around them couldn’t “see” what they were experiencing. We only know it now because they recovered, and they can tell us.

It’s very easy for most of us to say, “I wouldn’t want to live that way” when we look at either of these disabled people. It’s easy because we are not actually in their shoes. But if life with disabilities is so horrifyingly empty that we would choose death instead, why aren’t disabled people killing themselves in large numbers all over the world? We should be inundated with suicides, because medical care has advanced far enough to leave us with many people who live on in spite of great physical trauma. Dr. Kevorkian notwithstanding (and he is a convicted criminal), we aren’t. Why not? There must be something to living, after all, even when life is imperfect. Isn’t that exactly what Mr. Reeve learned and why he chose to live?

If Terri’s feeding tube is removed, she will begin to thirst and hunger. She already communicates with the people around her. There is no reason to believe she will not try to communicate her need for sustenance. Will anyone be listening? Will Judge Greer, who has not even seen her, yet claims to be her representative in the matter, make any attempt to listen if she now expresses her desire to live? Or is she bound for slow and painful execution by the state, having committed no crime, with no recourse and no right to come to the same conclusion as Mr. Reeve did, that even life in an imperfect physical condition is life worth living?

This case is less about Terri’s desire to live, which cannot be determined with the degree of certainty that should be required before she is irreversibly killed, and more about our desire to see her suffering end, not for her sake, but for our own, because we can’t stand to see her this way. We kill a lot of people (more than 4,000 every day in this nation) because we arrogantly decide that their lives are not worth living.

I don’t understand this love of death. Every one of us has suffered, is suffering, and will suffer in the future. We should be killing ourselves in droves if we hate suffering so much, but we aren’t. We love our lives even when they are filled with hardship. Still, we look at the suffering of others, and we think since we could not endure it, it must be untenable and death must be preferable. But when we are faced with our own suffering, somehow most of us do endure. We find strength, which those of faith believes comes from God, and we go on. That we don’t commit suicide more frequently demonstrates that we do love life, even a life filled with suffering – but apparently, only as long as that life is our own.

Matthew 25:41-46

“Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘Depart from me you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see thee hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to thee?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.’ And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.’”

Is There Something Missing in Me?

2005-03-16T10:24:00.000-07:00

I recently read a comment from a woman who says she just does not regret her abortion at all, and she wonders, rhetorically, I supposed, if there is something wrong with her.

It caught my attention because I have often wondered if there is something wrong with me because I do have such sorrow over the choice I made myself. In this day and age, we are supposed to be comfortable with whatever we do simply because we have done it. I’m okay, you’re okay. Do your own thing, and if it feels good, do it. As long as you are happy, then it’s a good thing. Relative morality – it it’s right for me, then it’s just plain right. We can justify all kinds of immoral and criminal behavior if we believe that right and wrong are in the doing.

True, I had some of the best coercion possible – when your mother drives you to the clinic telling you it’s for your own good and that you have merited the punishment to follow, well...it’s a bit powerful. Sure, parental influence in adolescence only stretches so far. She wasn’t in the room when I chose to have sex and create that child. She made sure that mistake wouldn’t be repeated with the abortion, and personally escorted me. She had no regrets about my abortion. But what about her own?

Years later, when I was in my early twenties, Mom and I had us a conversation over a few dozen beers and a couple of boxes of wine. My goodness, how alcohol loosens the tongue. It was then I learned for the first time about the little brother or sister I had lost when my mother had an abortion. She was a single mother and would certainly have lost her job had she continued the pregnancy. She had to choose between the children who lived with her and needed her financial support, and the child not yet born who would endanger supporting those children. Or did she?

No, she didn’t - not in reality, only in her perception of it. She believed she had difficulties because she believed she was on her own. She made herself that way. She had family to whom she could have turned for help. All she had to do was swallow her pride and go home. This was less acceptable to her. So she went to California, where it was legal at the time, and had an abortion.

Her story came out while we were sitting at the table that night, both of us drunk, when she asked me for the first time to tell her about my abortion. When I told her I had sodium pentothal, she laughed, her mouth and face twisted with bitterness. Tears were in her eyes, but she would not shed them. She stared into the distance, lost in horrifying memories, and told me she had had no anesthesia. “It took two nurses to hold me down, one on each arm. I screamed the entire time. The sound...I’ll never forget the sound.” And when I recall her speaking those words, my memory ends. Recalling the sound – forgedda about it. That’s as far as I can go before denial shuts down my thought processes.

My mind having gone into sleep mode, I don’t remember what else she said about her abortion experience. Part of that is probably due to the revelation she hadn’t intended. I was distracted by the thought that not only did she know what I was going to go through, she thought it was going to be so much worse – and she did it anyway. I was trying desperately to find the motherly love in that, and failing. My abortion was my punishment. I had known it at the time because the baby’s father was forced to go along to the clinic, “to teach him a lesson.” So, of course, I was supposed to learn a lesson too. But this way? Mom, why didn’t you lock me in a closet for two weeks without food and water? Take a belt to me? Use your fists, even? For heaven’s sake, if you wanted me physically punished for getting pregnant, why didn’t you have the guts to do it yourself? Perhaps because those things would have been illegal, but abortion was not?

But why punish the innocent child who had nothing to do with my actions or yours? And this must be where her quite bizarre expression of motherly love comes in, because I do remember some of the conversation that followed about whether or not she had done the right thing by insisting I have an abortion.

Either she had convinced herself that she felt it, or she truly felt at the time that nine months of pregnancy would have derailed my entire life. What bunk. An hour in the abortion clinic derailed my entire life instead. But she desperately wanted me to tell her it was okay. I think she might even have wanted me to thank her. In her own experience, she convinced herself that there were no regrets to be had about either of our abortions. She thought she had done the best thing possible and had even been protecting her children.

The problem is that she was wrong. She was so wrong, and I believe that on some level she knew she was wrong, or she wouldn’t have been looking for validation from me. I can’t answer the commentator I mentioned above because I cannot see her face when she says she has no regrets or sorrow. But I could have answered my mother, who was asking the same question whether she knew it or not, because I saw her expression. It isn’t polite to tell people they are in denial, so I have heard. But denial is what she was in. No one who feels neutral about a subject, or good about it, should look the way she did when she described her choice. I’ve seen that look since then – in the faces of the women who are Silent No More, and in the mirror. Grief-contorted mouths, tear-filled eyes, and deeply furrowed brows say, without words, “Oh, God help me, what have I done?”

She said she had no regrets even as her face belied the words. There are women who will tell you they have no regrets, and who will assign their sorrow to something more ephemeral than a real, living child – “I mourn the perfect child I should have had,” was the comment by a mother who aborted her baby after tests revealed he was defective. But she wouldn’t say she regretted her abortion.

At times, regret takes the form of the “If onlies.” “If only I had already had my career started when the baby was conceived,” or “If only the baby’s father had been there for me,” etc. So it was the child’s fault for choosing a really inconvenient time to be conceived. “Come back later, when I have more time, more money, more love, more of myself to give.”

Sometimes regret takes shape in the plans we make for the future, where we hope to make it right. “Next time I get pregnant, it will be planned and I will have the child.” That’s a good one. Some women get to do that. For others, the perfect moment never arrives, and suddenly, we’re past child-bearing, and “some day” has come and gone.

When our regrets and sorrows stem from our own actions, we often displace or deny these emotions in order to protect ourselves from the fact that who we think we are doesn’t match with what we have done. When we say “yes” to abortion, we say “no” not just to the child who wants to share our lives. We say “no” to selflessness. This is hard to accept about ourselves if we feel we are otherwise good people. I wouldn’t take food from the mouths of children. I think I’m a decent woman. I wouldn’t pass a dog shivering alone and cold in the street without taking action to help. But this image of myself as a compassionate and caring person who loves the young and helpless is not just tarnished, but completely obliterated, by the image of myself on the abortionist’s table failing to cry out with everything I had for him to stop, and let the baby live.

My mother died seven years ago this December. We never had a chance to finish that conversation properly. I simply could not continue discussing it with her, because I could not tell her what she wanted to hear – my life had not been made better. Drs. Burke and Reardon have found that post-abortion sorrow may not be fully realized until years after the fact – sometimes decades. Often there is a life-altering event that brings the abortion into a woman’s mind, and it seems she suddenly discovers grief. It isn’t that she suddenly feels it – she discovers it was there all along, because something has happened to bring it to mind. In my own case, it was my mother’s death. Because she was so wrapped up in it, even directly responsible for refusing to hear of alternatives, when she died, I had to face all of our unresolved conflicts.

Her ghost haunts me in every word I hear from women who say they cannot regret their abortions because if they had not had them, their lives would be too different. I am plagued by my own case of the “if onlies.” If only we could have this conversation today. If only I hadn’t run from her and her cancer, leaving her alone to contemplate her own mortality and robbing us of the chance to talk about death. Perhaps we might have come to the heart of her sorrow, and we would not have parted in this life with so much left unsaid. Her regrets were there, just under the surface where anyone else could see them, but not so close that she could put her own finger on them because she was deliberately pushing them away by thinking them through. It isn’t hard at all to convince ourselves that we are good if we think about it long enough. We know all the facts, so we can find all of the excuses for ourselves. What is hard is acknowledging our own shortcomings and trying to come face to face with the woman in the mirror who has killed her child to further her own interests.

The commentator who is not sorry wonders if there is something missing in her. I wonder how she can be so certain she has no regrets considering how much she wonders, and whether the answer lies in her having asked the question. Go ahead, call me rude if you like, but if you have no regrets, spend a few minutes saying it to yourself in the mirror. Look at your expression as you say out loud, “I killed my child, and I am not sorry,” and try to ascertain if there is more truth than wishing in that statement.

No Room on the Earth

2005-03-14T09:52:00.000-07:00

For the first time in their e-newsletter, the Silent No More Awareness Campaign is actively encouraging women who have not yet shared their abortion testimony to do so. Their newsletter has been reprinted in its entirety at this blogspot (my thanks to After Abortion for the link).

Over the last year of working to find a voice in the pro-life movement, I found that breaking my silence about the pain of my abortion has helped me begin to heal the wound. It is my hope that others will read about my experience and make a better choice for themselves and the women they love. If asked, then, I would encourage other women who have these feelings to join the crusade. Open up, and tell other people how abortion has affected your life, for good or ill. Sadly, it doesn't even matter if you are drawn to testify in the “I’m Not Sorry” campaign. In those chilling testimonies the atrocity of what abortion is and what abortion does cannot hide any more than it can be hidden in the outpouring of grief-stricken women who do acknowledge sorrow and regret.

But sometimes I wonder if what I am doing is simply another form of denial, at which I excel. Certainly, when I look back at the subjects I have tackled, I wonder how much of the truth I still hide from myself. What is the gist of what I have been writing? Abortion hurts women. Women deserve better. Abortion is a form of self-abuse. Abortion is a crime against women in poverty. Abortion forced on a young mother is another method of child abuse (well, that story is still to come). Abortion disenfranchises men from fatherhood by stripping them of their rights to their own offspring. Look at all the victims and all the ways they are victimized – but something is definitely missing.

No where in these statements do I address the primary reason why abortion is and does all of these things: abortion kills an innocent person. Sometimes, as I did this morning, I read something that penetrates the layers of philosophy, theology, and science that I have been using to coat the truth with something more palatable.

In “Remembering Thomas,” the father of an aborted child writes of what he knows is missing:

“He won't be lying on the grass by the tent at night looking at the starry sky and saying, ‘What's that one called, Dad?’ Because there was no room on the Earth for Thomas. He's dead.”

http://www.priestsforlife.org/postabortion/rememberingthomas.htm

He’s dead. That simple line brings it all into focus. His child is dead. My child is dead.

I can’t sugar coat that. It’s an ugly truth that I cannot hide behind any number of fancy words or philosophical speculation. A human life was snuffed out twenty-six years ago, whatever date it was (which I still can’t recall no matter how hard I try). He, if he was indeed a son, would be twenty-six years old sometime in the winter of this year, December, I think.

I wonder what he was like. Not what he would have been like – he lived, after all. He isn’t a “would-have-been.” He was. He lived, even if it was a brief life. He had a personality already determined in great part by his genes, which were formed at conception. He had talents and skills, even if he never had a chance to grow into employing them in this world. He was like me in some ways, and like his father in others, and like himself in his own unique, and not-to-be-repeated way.

He lived, and then he died. I welcomed him into the world while he was still in my womb even as I feared he would never see the light of day. How could I have done that? And having done that, as so many have suggested, why don’t I just find a way to live with it? Be comfortable with yourself. "You did the best you could under the circumstances. You wouldn’t have this or that today, you wouldn’t be here or there, yada yada," none of which is truly known. It’s all speculation, just as it was all speculation that led to his destruction. What isn’t speculation is that he lived, and then he died, and that I am responsible for both of these facts.

Abortion is all of the things I have said it is. It is abuse. It is the most violent action taken against women in thousands of years of human existence. It is the destruction of fatherhood. It is a punishment for those who live in poverty. But above all of these things, I must remember that abortion – my choice - killed an innocent human being who had every right to be born, and who had every right to expect me to see to it that he was. I am his mother. There was more than enough room for him on earth, but he is dead.