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Hush, Now
In what my husband, at least, regards as a masochistic quest to understand the phenomenon of abortion in America, I watched yet another documentary, this one entitled “Hush.” In it, a pro-choice director, Punam Kumar Gill, investigate the question of whether the health effects of abortion on the women who have them are being generally, even systematically distorted or concealed.
The short answer, it seems, is yes. The supposedly debunked link between abortion and breast cancer hasn’t been debunked at all. And there are excellent reasons to believe that abortion rates explain why our neonatal intensive care units are full of wanted infants delivered too soon. There are also (duh) clear links between abortion and increased vulnerability to mental illness in women. Why aren’t women warned about these risks?
It can’t just be that the data is inconclusive. There are many dangers that are unproven — mere correlation, not proven causality — that we are given urgent warnings about, and told we must make adjustments or even significant sacrifices to protect ourselves from even remote risks. Don’t use plastic in the microwave! Discard your kitchen sponge! Coat your entire body with SPF 50 every day! And, of course, don’t smoke or drink, and for God’s sake, lose some weight and take a walk!
As Gill, to her credit, repeatedly makes clear, “choice” is meaningless unless it is a truly informed choice. If breast cancer, depression or premature deliveries are part of a woman’s family medical history, for example, the possibility that abortion would increase those risks could (and even should) tip the balance in favor of her choosing to continue the pregnancy, for her own sake (if not for the sake of the baby). Given what the data shows, even if it cannot be called “settled science” the way, say, the melting of the polar ice caps can, wouldn’t any responsible doctor want to take a medical history that reveals these risk factors, and introduce them into the cost-benefit analysis that pre-abortion counseling of panicked (if no less “trustworthy”) pregnant women presumably entails?
And surely any truly comprehensive sex education program should include information about these risks, even if they aren’t proven 100 percent, if the aim is to empower young people to make good, healthy decisions about their bodies and lives? My denomination will happily frighten its youth into believing that the sight of a deer in the backyard is a harbinger of doom; wouldn’t you imagine they’d be willing to say “oh, and by the way … it is possible that having an abortion increases your risk of breast cancer, depression, and premature birth?”
Gill is an honest storyteller, and she really does go where the facts lead her. That’s impressive. To her great credit, she documents exactly how strenuously the scientific establishment protects abortion from inconvenient truths; she does not spend as much time as she might on the question of why this is happening.
She primarily ascribes it to the anxiety pro-choice advocates and abortion providers feel over the imminent threat Pro-Lifers pose to a woman’s right to choose.
And indeed, “protecting choice from those religious nutters” is probably the motivation when it comes to physicians, journalists, public health advocates, state regulators and other groups that are not directly concerned with abortion, and yet nonetheless are found helping to maintain the manifold deceptions that the abortion industry demands — e.g., parroting the line that late-term abortion is rare and only used when the mother’s life or health is endangered or the baby is catastrophically deformed.
Because everyone would prefer to believe this to be the case, Americans, in general, go along with it too. Invited not to think too much about the grubby details, we … don’t. Then we dress in pink, join in those “Awareness” 5k fun runs, and encourage our friends and relations to have mammograms and donate to the Susan G. Komen foundation.
However, to put it mildly, this culture of defensive deception is putting the lives of women (as well as babies) in jeopardy.
Published in Healthcare
There is an ’emotional blackmail’ aspect to the pro abortion movement. The more abortions they can enable, the more pro abortion supporters they will have. So, any reasons to not have an abortion must be suppressed. Maximum numbers are needed.
Once you have had an abortion, it is very hard to admit that yes, abortion kills the child. Your child. It’s much easier to believe you are a strong feminist woman who stands up for your rights than to admit you killed your own child for your own selfish reasons.
I firmly believe that many of the most fervent pro abortion types are fervently trying to assuage their own guilt for what they deep down know, and always knew, amounted to killing their own child so they could live the life they wish. “If the majority agrees it isn’t the killing I know it to be, maybe it isn’t? If ‘most’ women have done the same, maybe I’m not wrong to follow suit? Maybe I don’t have to feel guilt?”
Why else would the pro abortion movement resemble religious evangelism? If all you care about is that abortion be legal, why would you wish to see more and more of them? Legal and rare has been rejected by the movement. An abortion in every womb is their goal. The only way they can justify their own unthinkable act is to ensure millions more infants die.
I read some of those stories. They seemed to largely confirm what pro-life women have been saying…regret, depression etc. I was also struck by how many of the stories included coercion by a partner to have the abortion and then the relationship failed anyway. (Way to stand up for yourselves ladies!!) I have also thought that abortion is such a “right now in my life” consideration, rather than a bigger view of your life. 21 year olds don’t have the same perspective as a 41 year old because they just don’t yet realize that life has phases and the “right now”phase will pass then the next phase comes along. The abortion takes care of the “right now” issue, but five years, ten years, twenty years later…many women understand the perspective of ending a life by abortion over “right now” rather than embracing that ten year old child which would be here, but for the abortion, and now seems such an indispensable part of that woman’s life. So sad!
Try this site. Click on the link.
Because if they are warned they might not have an abortion. As was said earlier, these risks are known and out there in the pro-life literature. Abortion is a sacrament in feminism and has to be protected at all costs. Even if they have to lie about the health risks to women. In my opinion feminism is more about women’s anger at nature not men. The inequality of the sexes is not the fault of some invisible patriarchy but due to the fact that the burden of childbearing is exclusive to females.
To feminists elevated careers and positions of political power are revered, but the bearing and raising of children usually takes women away from going after those goals. This is why feminists really hate women who are happy to stay home and raise their children (as most women really want to do) because it tears down their view of a feminist utopia with women at the top of every profession and political position. It started with the pill, but the problem with birth control is sometimes it fails and to feminists they can’t have women having babies and dropping out of the work force, because that just messes up all their plans. So they pushed for the legalization of abortion, so that women can just get rid of the baby and back to work or school or whatever.
Everything about abortion is built on lies. Lies, upon lies. Due to technology their lies are being exposed and I think it is a matter of time before more and more people realize the evil of abortion. It has nothing to do with choice. That too is a lie. It is about feminist goals to keep women from their natural role of motherhood.
That’s my experience too, @westernchauvinist.
I have long assumed this is why there has been higher support for abortion among men than among women. Abortion as “choice” with no downside removes one of the great defenses a woman has against a guy who wants to get under her skirt (or into her pants).
Kate, it may be too personal a question, but if you’re willing to discuss it, I’d very much like to understand what led you to this “masochistic quest to understand the phenomenon of abortion in America.” My general impression is that your exposure to more conservative ideas here at Ricochet played a part and that concerns about the direction of your denomination played a part, and that political rhetoric directed at cops played a part. There may be several other factors.
That’s interesting. I suspect the difference stems from our theological associations: I am Catholic, and most of the women I know who have had abortions but are now ardently pro-life are Catholic as well (some becoming Catholic as a result of their profound regret), whereas I think you’re Unitarian. The Catholic position has always been pro-life, but isn’t the Unitarian church pro-abortion?
Honestly, no. They believe this is ground that has been well-covered before, in numerous studies already done, and that the weight of the evidence demonstrates that abortion is not clinically riskier to a woman with a problem pregnancy than is adoption or single motherhood.
Now, is this belief of theirs a massive conspiracy to cover up the truth, or is it actually a reasonable thing to believe, based on the evidence available? I happen to suspect it’s the latter, and that, as dearly as we wish abortion to be clinically bad for the mother, because it is morally bad, it may not be so.
I love your entire comment Mate De, but that is spot on. It is near literally a sacrament in some circles.
Famed abortionist, turned pro-life advocate Abby Johnson converted to Catholicism mostly on the pro-life issue, though I suspect there was more theologically involved than that.
If these were indeed the mechanisms involved, wouldn’t anyone having a D&C after a missed miscarriage have the same heightened risk as someone having an abortion? Why is the claim that abortion, but not a miscarriage with medical intervention, increases risk?
(I have a personal interest here. We’re expecting our first — and given our ages, probably only — child in the next few weeks. But 2016 was the Year of All the Miscarriages, which meant two D&Cs in the space of four months. Both were for missed miscarriages, which means the baby’s heart had stopped beating but the HCG levels were still rising, the body still producing hormones and basically giving no indication of knowing that the pregnancy was not continuing. For mental health reasons, the doctor advised surgical intervention over waiting it out. But perhaps that means a bonus dividend of a higher risk of breast cancer.)
I’d expect a miscarriage to carry with it extra unspecified risk simply because of whatever malady that prompted the miscarriage. Some miscarriages result from a fatal genetic combination, but others are prompted by ill-health in the mother. Perhaps miscarriages get mentally binned into the category “of course there’s extra risk, we’re not thinking about that extra risk”?
All the literature I’ve seen on this suggests black fetuses mature faster, supported by how premature black vs premature white infants fare outside the womb. But I don’t know if any of those studies have data that pre-dates Roe.
You listen to TV ads for various medication and, without fail, they end with (usually rapidly) spoken warnings about possible side effects and dangers. Yet for possible side effects like this documentary mentions…nothing. How can there not be major issues post-abortion?
Reported today, in a 51-46 vote, the Senate fell short of the 60 votes needed to advance the House Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act to prevent abortions past 20 weeks.
How important are the innocent? “…the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to those who are like these children.”
If y’all watch the movie, you’ll see that one of the things that the director unhappily discovered was that a later miscarriage is indeed correlated with a higher risk of breast cancer, for exactly the same reasons.
I remember finding out that being widowed or orphaned is—in itself—correlated with a shorter lifespan. Yeah. Ain’t life great?
Umm… OK, but I wasn’t the one who said that. Should I try to fix the attribution for you, then?
Update: Done, fixed!
So… not breastfeeding also carries with it the same risk?
How long one must breastfeed to mitigate the risk? I’d say inquiring lactivists want to know, but they’re probably pretty sure they already know.
Breastfeeding has been known to decrease risk for some time. I don’t know if 1+ year breast feeding gives more protection that 3+ months, though. https://www.fitpregnancy.com/baby/breastfeeding/does-breastfeeding-really-reduce-your-risk-breast-cancer
I know to some of you this might sound just like I’m concern-trolling to secretly support an abortion agenda (which is not true), but I genuinely wonder if the temptation to exaggerate medical risks and benefits, evaluating studies according to their polemical, rather than research value, is too great to be resisted among many in the pro-life movement. There are lives at stake, after all, so what do these other risks (cancer, etc) really matter, compared to the risk that, if fear of cancer was the thing that would talk some women out of an abortion, and you didn’t appeal to it, lives would be lost?
We mock the left for an “else people will die” attitude, but are we so sure we’re avoiding it ourselves? Would we insist on the virtue of investing in untruth, if it meant fewer deaths?
For example, is it really true that physician groups’ relative lack of concern over abortion as a mental/physical health risk to the mother has to do with those groups’ enslavement to the abortion agenda? Or is it actually possible that their relative lack of concern for the mother reflects clinical experience, and the studies we rely on saying otherwise are outliers or confounded?
Perhaps because I’m a natural pessimist, I quickly stop believing people who overpromise consequences, who sound like they’re giving me the “hard sell”. Maybe I’m the exception, or I simply don’t count, since I wouldn’t try to have an abortion anyhow. But I wonder about the temptation to overpromise the negative consequences of abortion, in a way that undermines the credibility of the pro-life position (or at least it would undermine its credibility with me, if I were the target, which fortunately I am not).
I know, I’m a huge wet blanket about these things.
I think it is a natural response to the pro abortion lobby’s attempts to make the whole process seem like a normal part of health care, as if the baby is a tumor and the woman will be healthier if she aborted.
I tend to discount most of these correlation based arguments in healthcare. Coffee is killing you one day, making you live longer the next, etc. Rush likes to say that Science has proven that every person who has ever eaten pickles has eventually died, so pickles cause death. Long term health just isn’t that cut and dried.
I suspect that abortion is traumatic to the body, but birth certainly is. So all in all, I would suspect that abortion vs childbirth is an overall wash when it comes to the woman’s long term health.
But it certainly isn’t for the babies!
But cut and dried pickles aren’t really pickles any more. (sorry, couldn’t resist)
I too am leery of reading too much into correlation studies, both for the temptation to see results that are not there, and for the risk one runs should those correlations be later debunked and give fodder for the other side.
This is analogy is admittedly imperfect, but: would you advise a would be murderer that he runs the risk of long-term lead exposure to himself if he shoots someone, or would you instead argue that murder is itself wrong because the guy he wants to shoot is a fellow human?
Unfortunately, that cuts both ways.
I, too, have skepticism toward correlation studies. And it doesn’t go away when the correlation study happens to be on my side of the agenda.
I suppose if you took the attitude these kinds of statistical studies are all more-or-less bunk, but enough people believe ’em that the other side benefits from using theirs, so we might as well use ours, especially when we’re on the side of goodness and light and they’re not, then the cutting both ways wouldn’t be a problem.
Given that most murders are crimes of passion, I’d use the latter argument. If I threatened something, it would make more sense to threaten jail than long-term lead exposure – the average murderer kills one person, and a single event isn’t long-term exposure.
Now someone psychopathic enough to be a serial killer whose risk aversion is nonetheless high enough to see lead exposure as a deterrent to his killing schemes, I figure he’s more likely to be making a metaphorical killing in white-collar crime – or perhaps even legitimate endeavors. How to succeed in evil and all that!
Admittedly, picturing the abortion industry as a kind of corporate psychopath, the people involved just cogs in one giant mecha-psychopath, seems pretty common.
Physical traumas are different and hormonal profiles are different and have different effects.
In menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, post-partum recovery, and breastfeeding, there’s a lifecycle of hormonal change that, when disrupted, could be a tiny speck that starts a chain reaction like a ripple in water.
Women’s hormones are still a huge mystery and poorly understood, because there are huge amounts of hormones besides sex hormones that work in tandem to create different physical environments. It’s hard to place controls for a good study.
For me, if we go against our body’s natural inclination for reproduction, I think it can be potentially no-good. So studies that support that seem to be credible.
It isn’t surprising to me that a woman may struggle with mental-illness post-abortion. She broke the natural order and made a safe haven a death chamber. There is so much talk of how shooting and kilking someone (even when justified) changes you that we don’t question it at all, but to suggest abortion might have as strong affect when it involves your own offspring is met with skepticism. How do you square that circle?
We are coming up on an interesting time in female hormone study – birth control has been around long enough that we can study how it affects our physical and mental health through a lifetime and gain new insights on female hormonal effects. Maybe then we might be a bit more confident about this subject.
I think this is most sensible. Exaggeration can always be a useful ideological tool. For example, while reading these threads and how abortion seems more morally acceptable when the baby is diagnosed with a catastrophic condition, I’m reminded of two cases (one my oldest daughter and one the daughter of a friend) where doctors scared the grapes out of mothers and were laughably wrong! Imaging showed a potential brain abnormality — underdeveloped brain with enlarged ventricles. Both girls are top scholars, and my friend’s daughter is an athlete as well — a dancer.
That skeptic’s knife should cut both ways.
My mother had very bad hypermedia gravidarum with her 2nd pregnancy and she didn’t know she was pregnant. She was just sick. Very very sick. Doctors did so many tests, x-rays, radiation… no idea what was wrong. When they found out she was pregnant, they encouraged abortion because of damage from the treatments she had had.
My sister is a detective in a very good police department. I agree with you.
Well, exactly. Every choice we make increases risks of something, and lots of horrible things happen in which we have no say and no choice but leave us more vulnerable. Since that’s a given, and any correlation between abortion and breast cancer is going to be a.) small and b.) highly disputed, it’s hard to see that succeeding as an argument against abortion that would realistically change someone’s mind who was faced with that choice.
One of the oddest stories that I ever heard about any pregnancy was told to my spouse by a co-worker. She had grown up in South America. Her family was a practicing Catholic household. She came to school here, became a citizen, got married and had two adorable youngsters.
But she and her husband always planned on having a third child. It didn’t come about as easily as the first two. Eventually she got the news she was pregnant. By then, here in the US, her ob/gyn doctors were all about the various tests and sonograms that determine how healthy a fetus really is.
So it was with a great deal of alarm that she found out she was being called in to the family clinic to hear distressing news about the pregnancy. The results of the sonogram were horrendous. Such huge amounts of unexplainable massive birth defective tissue inside and all around the fetus. She was told that even though she was half way through her fifth month, the “kindest” thing she could do for the baby and for herself was to have hospital-induced abortion.
She couldn’t believe it. She was in shock. Her main ob/gyn doctor phoned repeatedly to convince her that this was the course that she must follow. Despite all her years of Catholicism, and despite how much she wanted the baby, she apparently realized that medical know how and experience should probably trump her religious views on such. (Although not once had she been told that she would die or anything like that. Just that having this late term abortion would be better for her emotionally.)
Anyway in the midst of the plans for her to have this abortion, her family that still remained in So America called her to explain that her grandmother was dying. Since this relative was one of the top loves of her life, she packed in a frenzy and went off to her home country. There she became obsessed with nursing her grandmother back to health. The next thing she knew, the months had flown by and she was having contractions.
The delivery went smoothly, but of course she was terrified at the idea in her head that this malformed and perhaps dying baby would only enter this world to quickly depart it.
But lo and behold, there was not a thing wrong with the baby.
Her doctor in So America explained that due to her having had surgery while a teenager for some serious “female problem,” then perhaps the scar tissue that resulted and that lined her womb had allowed for the total misread by her American doctors when they viewed the sonogram results. In any event, the baby came home and was a happy, healthy little boy several years later when my husband met him.
It makes a person wonder how many other women have been misled by some of these poorly understood tests.
I think you’re right. I don’t know if there’s an a priori conscious intent to make more women guilty (and therefore prone to energetic denial) but it does seem to have worked out that way?