Group tries to put happy face on abortion
As part of a 'loving act,' girls write letters to the babies they are about to abort

As pro-lifers, we have long been bemused by our lack of success in convincing the general population of the reasonableness of our position. The September 2003 issue of Glamour magazine features an article about a group of 12 abortionists and abortion "counsellors," who call themselves "the November Gang."

The article entitled, "Are you ready to really understand abortion?" explores the unusual practices of the facilities these women run, practices that are frowned upon by Planned Parenthood, NARAL and other big abortion groups. The article is interesting to pro-lifers because it reveals in a candid way the strange madness behind pro-abortion thinking. It shows the "logic" that allows a person to believe that killing a child is an acceptable solution to one's problems and that allows abortionists and abortive mothers to ignore, or at least live with, the horrific nature of their acts.

Abortuaries will sometimes ask patients if they can see abortion as a "loving act" toward their children and themselves. Glamour reports that the answer is often affirmative. Kate Michelman, the president of NARAL, goes so far as to claim, "Women can have abortions to be good mothers." In response, Hilary White, Campaign Life Coalition's director of research, asks, "If abortion is such a loving act, if it is the act of a good mother, why don't women do it to their five-year-olds?"

Some of the mothers seem to feel that due to financial or time constraints, they have done their born children a favour by aborting the children in their wombs, thus avoiding the pitting of siblings against each other in a deadly and unnecessary struggle for resources. They don't seem to consider how their surviving children will feel when they find out later that their college education was made possible by the bloody sacrifice of an unknown brother or sister.

Some women, however, express the feeling that they had an abortion for the good of the child they aborted. None of this is new to pro-lifers. The interesting revelation is the reasoning behind these women's decisions to abort.

Debi Jackson, the director of an abortuary in Cincinnati, Oh., claims that most patients are initially taken aback at the suggestion that abortion can be an expression of love, but once the suggestion has been planted in their minds, she says, "They're like, 'Yeah, that's what I'm doing. I do love this child, but I can't (have) it right now.'" This is one of the most telling statements in the whole article, and quite possibly the key to understanding how many women are able to rationalize killing their own children.

Our society has suffered greatly from the infusion of philosophies such as theosophy and "new age" religion. Such thought systems espouse ideas including reincarnation, and while most women would probably tell you that they don't believe in "past lives," it is an idea that has been subtly infused into our culture. This is obvious in women's attitudes toward abortion.

The unstated - and quite possibly unconscious - attitude is that if a pregnancy comes at an inconvenient time, a woman can have an abortion and have that same baby at a later date. Several women in the article make mention of such an idea. "You are better off in the hands of God than mine at this moment," one woman writes to the child she is about to lay on the executioner's table.

Of course, we know both scientifically and morally that this is not true. Every child who is conceived is a unique individual, and when that child is aborted, she is lost to society for good.

This thinking may also be a product of the video generation. For women who grew up using VCRs, tapes and CDs, it may be that they are under the impression they can "pause" their lives, or the lives of their children. Having only a fuzzy grasp of embryology and reproductive realities, these women may have some vague notion that they are halting the progress of an ill-timed pregnancy, rather than irreparably taking the life of another human being. In any case, it is disturbing that few of the women interviewed seemed to grasp the permanence of their decision.

The reporter, Daryl Chen, notes that she is surprised the November Gang discusses God and spirituality with their clients. She seems to find this peculiar, but it has long been known that George Tiller, the infamous late-term abortion specialist in Kansas, has a Lutheran minister who works on contract with him to baptize dying or dead abortion victims if the family wishes it. It is, however, fairly unusual to find an abortuary that will discuss abortion in religious terms.

One young woman, Tanya, having already given birth to two children, wishes to abort her third. "I'm killing my baby," she states to the abortuary worker. "Will God forgive me?" The worker's response is "Do you think there are any things that God considers completely unforgivable?" Tanya decides that no, there are not, and goes ahead with her abortion, despite her reservations.

The pro-life movement has long supported efforts to help post-abortive women understand that God will forgive their actions if they truly repent of them, but it is clearly dishonest to encourage someone to do something she knows is wrong, simply because she can be forgiven. The old cliche "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission" was not meant to apply to taking people's lives.

Chen reports, "Patients are invited to share their religious beliefs and permitted pray over their fetuses, even to sprinkle them with holy water in impromptu baptismal rites." It appears many women or family members participate in these macabre acts. This highlights the fact that they recognize the humanity and the personhood of their children, and even shows a bizarre, distorted maternal instinct that wishes to ensure a child's safe entrance into heaven.

The reporter uses interesting language in reference to prayer and religious activities, stating that the abortuaries "permit" baptisms and "allow" prayer. If abortion is about a woman's choice and a woman's body, who are the abortion staff to be granting such "favours?" How is it that they decide whether or not a woman will involve God in her experience?

The November Gang has women fill out a pre-abortion questionnaire that asks them about feelings and concerns regarding their abortion, rather than having them simply fill out a medical history like most abortuaries. These abortuaries claim to try to "help the women vent their feelings and heal," but this flies in the face of conventional pro-abortion policy, which is to deny post-abortion syndrome.

The realization that women did suffer from their abortions came to Charlotte Taft when she was director of a Dallas, Tx. abortion mill. She had women complete a questionnaire at a two-week, post abortion check-up. It included questions such as "Have you had any dreams?" and "What do you wish you'd known?" When she looked over the answers, she found that women were struggling with the aftermath of their abortions.

"I didn't know what to do," she reports. "This did not match my pro-choice message of 'everybody's fine, it's just tissue.'" Upon her "epiphany" that the "pro-choice" message was a lie, Taft, rather than denounce her lucrative profession, put the questionnaires away for three years. This was apparently the length of time it took her to think up ideas like giving women coloured stones and having them write letters on pink hearts to their about-to-be aborted children. She makes no mention of how she thinks this helps women heal, or why she didn't come to the conclusion that it would be better not to wound them in the first place.

Glamour has revealed for the first time - almost certainly unwittingly - how hard pro-abortion people work to convince themselves that what they do is right. It reveals their convoluted reasoning, and shows that they come to the right conclusions, then ignore them. Pro-lifers have long believed, naively, that pro-aborts don't understand the evil of what they are doing. The women of the November Gang admit to us that they know, but will do everything in their power to ignore that knowledge.

So we must ask ourselves: if we can't reach women with reason, how can we reach them?