Survival

"Evolution is imperfect and often a violent process. A battle between what exists and what is yet to be born. Amidst these birth pains, morality loses its meaning, the question of good and evil reduced to one simple choice: survive or perish."
(From heroes Better Halves [1.06])

I have been trying to understand why women have abortions. I mean really understand, sort of on a primal level.

Recently I had a conversation with someone on the subject who is somewhere in the middle on her views on abortion. Not completely pro-life, not completely pro-choice. She is someone I respect, and who also defends a woman's choice to have an early abortion. In other words, someone who is not an extremist on either end of the abortion debate.

My thoughts below do not apply to the pro-abortions. The pro-abortions are those people, who tell us that abortion is always acceptable and moral whenever a woman decides it is. No if, ands, or buts. They believe in full abortion rights for any and all reasons and vehemently oppose any legal limits or restrictions on abortion. They speak out loudly and usually rudely, any time any other human being has the gaul to suggest that limits should be placed on abortion.

What the pro-abortions motives may be, I couldn't even hazard to guess.

So I am not trying to understand this group and their noisy hateful attack dog tactics. I am trying to understand the reasons a majority of the rest of women have an abortion.

The woman of whom I speak now, is the average woman, the one out there who finds herself unexpectedly pregnant.

She is paralyzed with fear by an unwanted, unplanned pregnancy. The way she sees it, either the baby survives, or she survives. The anguish and torture she feels is psychological torture. Because she literally believes that her life is being threatened (rightly or wrongly), she believes that she acts in self-defence. This is about survival for her.

It is analogous to her, to a situation where someone were to physically attack her from the outside, and she reacts to protect her body. Only this time the threat is psychological and comes from within. But the threat is the same, maybe even worse. In both cases she is fighting for her life.

The reason this woman would choose to have an abortion is because of this psychological trauma she experiences from the pregnancy. She feels that to make the trauma go away, she must have the abortion. The pregnancy causes her such anguish that she must stop the pregnancy in order to be able to breathe, to live, to be human and to live her life. She has no other option. She is trapped. This is not about logic for her, this is about survival. For her to survive she must do this.

So why doesn't this woman give the child up for adoption? It is because even though she acknowledges that there will be psychological effects from the abortion, she believes that the psychological effects of giving up her child would be far worse than the abortion. She has the abortion instead.

We must also throw into the mix, the fact that society has normalized abortion to such an extent, that it has become just another medical procedure. The woman knows that it is a 100% socially accepted "solution" to her problem.

And of course, abortions are extremely easy to get; they are paid for by our health care system and most politicians strongly support it and are deathly afraid to speak its name.

They even say that abortion is a "medically necessary procedure" when in most cases it isn't.

In a letter I received from the Ontario Minister of Health in a response to a letter I sent her, she opened up her first paragraph repeating not once, but four times, that abortion is a medically necessary procedure. I stared at those words wondering if she really believed what she wrote. It made me very sad.

Logically we know that abortion is not medically necessary. But the pro-abortions have said it is so often, that we don't even give it a second thought.

Finally, and maybe the most troubling for our anxious woman, is that if she doesn't buy into all this abortion propaganda, she will be attacked by other women (and men) for her lack of belief, her lack of worship at the altar of abortion. If she doesn't buy into the pro-abortions' "abortion rights" bible, then she isn't a true feminist.

Where does this leave us?

It leaves us with concerning ourselves for that women who feels there is no solution but to have that abortion. To encourage her to speak out like "Anna" did about her experience, even when there were hateful anonymous comments against her. I think a lot of women feel like Anna felt. Marginalizing her, or any woman, because she regrets her abortion is not respectful, and worse, it is not helpful.

It leaves us with talking about putting limits on abortion, about debating abortion, about getting our politicians to get over their fear of saying the word.

The status quo is not acceptable. As long as it continues, women will suffer. The pro-abortions have it wrong when they say the opposite.

As a society we need to build in some reason, some logic, and some compassion to the psychological trauma we have imposed on these women.

We need to help her, and we need to help her child. And this will allow her to save her own life--and survive.