Planned Parenthood reports that over 90 percent of abortions are done to please someone other than the woman. It sounds nice doesn’t it – choosing to please a boyfriend, a husband, parents, school counselors, social workers or even just friends? What they don’t tell you is that there is often physical or verbal abuse or threats of abandonment involved when the woman chooses abortion. She believes she has no choice. No one supports her in her desire to carry the baby to term, so she succumbs to the pressure.

According to Dr. David Reardon of the Elliot Institute, forced abortion has become an epidemic in America, but it is a hidden epidemic, reinforced by the propaganda of “choice.” When the Unborn Victims of Violence Act was passed into law this year, the debate in Congress exposed the violence by calling women to testify at the hearings who had suffered from this violence. These were women who had been shot or stabbed or beaten because they had refused to abort their baby. The abuse had caused them to miscarry. Dr. Reardon reports that homicide has become the leading cause of death in pregnant women today. Many who survived the abuse suffered the loss of their baby.

Women know that abortion is not good for women. In a national opinion poll commissioned by the Elliot Institute in 2002, women were asked if they believed that abortion makes a woman’s life better, worse, or has little impact. Fifty-two percent believe it generally makes a woman’s life worse. People suspect that the negative affects of abortion are wreaking havoc in women’s lives and that they are not being fully informed of the emotional risks.

The American people were sold a bill of goods about abortion from the beginning of the debate in the later 1960’s when the laws of all of the states were being reviewed. They were told that legal abortion was needed for the hard cases – rape, incest, and life of the mother. Then came the push for autonomy – my body, my choice. Finally, we were told it’s not about the choice, but who makes it. Fortunately, there are women who are finally coming forward to tell the real story, that choice is a fraud and that no one makes a free choice at the end of a gun. They are confronting the myths and fighting the abortion mentality that has killed their children and broken their hearts. Let’s hope and pray that their voices will be heard.

Mary Anne Hackett