Abortion – Abortion Clinics, Abortion Pill, Abortion Information

“Don’t kill your baby.  Just put her up for adoption!”

Any of you who have debated a pro-life person has heard this one before.  They make it sound oh so easy.   Just carry a child for nine months, an unwanted child at that, and at the end of that nine months just hand it over to some agency or to an eager young couple.

Pro-lifers like to talk about how women who have had abortions ultimately come to regret their decision.  I’ve written about that before.  But what they don’t want to hear is how the adoption process is not as optimal as one might think. 

First, there is the simple fact that a woman who wants to put her child up for adoption must first carry that child for nine months.  Let’s say it’s a fifteen year old girl.  That young girl will have to deal with all of the issues that other women deal with during a pregnancy.  Morning sickness or worse, regular doctor visits that she might not be able to afford, going to school every day and having to explain what is going on.  I mean, you women out there know that pregnancy is not always a walk in the park.  But, that’s okay, say the pro-lifers, just go with the flow.   

Then that woman has to give birth.  I hate to remind everyone, but did you know that more women die of childbirth each year than abortion?    The pro-lifers don’t mention that minor statistic. 

But let’s say everything goes well and the woman/girl finally has a baby.  Don’t you think that, despite the fact that it was an unwanted pregnancy, the mother is now going to have very mixed feelings about giving the baby up?  Do you think it is going to be easy to just have the baby and send it off to a foster care situation or to a private adoption agency?  

And speaking of regretting one’s abortion, don’t you think that twenty years later, that woman who gave up her child will have recurrent thoughts about the baby she gave birth to?  In the case of a closed adoption, the birth parent will have no idea where her child is, but she’ll know her baby is out there somewhere.  Think of the pain, the recurrent thoughts about where her child is and what the child looks like.     

Pro-life people like to say that there are “people lined up to adopt a child.”  It’s just not that easy.  

Most couples that want to adopt need to pass some very strict tests.  Clearly, they need to have a stable home and a decent income.  So, picture that couple, living up there in Westchester, New Yord, waiting for a baby.  They’ve already paid the lawyers thousands and thousands of dollars and one day they get a call that a baby is available.  It’s the baby of that young fourteen year old girl.  The couple is Caucasian, in their mid-thirties.  They look at the paperwork and see that the baby is African American and that the mother is a crack addict. 

So, do you think that couple is going to jump all over that one?   Give me a break. 

It’s a harsh world out there and at times I really think the pro-life movement is living in la-la land.  Indeed, on the abortion.com Facebook page, a question was posed to the pro-lifers, asking them how many children they have adopted.  

Not one person has replied yet.

About two weeks ago, I wrote about Congressman Bart Stupak, a Democrat from Michigan.  Over the last few months, Stupak gained national attention as the leader of a group of pro-life Democrats who supported healthcare reform but were concerned about language in the bill that may have permitted federal funds to be used for abortions.   Ultimately, Stupak and several other members of the House of Representatives voted for the healthcare bill when they convinced President Obama to sign an “Executive Order” verifying that no federal dollars would be used for abortions.  The bill, with those crucial votes, passed and is now law.

Today, Congressman Stupak announced that he would not seek re-election.    When I heard the announcement, I felt sad.  

Now, I know that in my earlier blog I said I had no pity for Stupak who received a number of death threats after his vote.  I argued that when he called abortion doctors “murderers” and other things he ran the risk of inflaming some less than stable people.  Ultimately, he became the target of the hatred as well.

My sadness comes from the fact that Congressman Stupak’s actions of a few months ago took balls.   That’s because he had to have known that voting for the healthcare bill and getting others to vote for it would be his political death knell.

Stupak feels strongly that federal dollars should not be used for abortions.  So, when the House and Senate passed their versions of the healthcare bill and the right to life lobbyists said that both bills still might allow federal dollars to be used for abortion, Stupak met with the President.    At Stupak’s urging, the President signed the Executive Order, but the anti-abortion crowd said it wasn’t enough to protect their concerns because the Executive Order was not law.  Still, Stupak organized this action and his comfort with it led him to ultimately vote for the healthcare bill.

When Stupak voted for the bill, he knew he was done for.  He knew that the anti-abortion groups would call him a traitor, which they did.  He knew that he could no longer rely on their political support.  Without their support, he was basically dead meat in his district in Michigan.  That’s why he made his announcement today. 

Stupak could have taken the easy way out.  He could have held firm and withheld his vote on healthcare and feigned outrage that federal dollars would be used for abortion.   But he saw the bigger picture and, at the risk of pissing off a key interest group, he accepted the Executive Order, basically trusting Obama’s word.  

For that he has paid a big price.

I totally disagree with him on the issue of abortion, but I have to quietly applaud that he was true to his principles.  He remained against abortion and for healthcare reform – and it precipitated the end of his congressional career.  You don’t see that very often these days.

We talk a lot about abortion on this blog but we rarely talk about the clinics where the abortions are performed.  We all know about them to some extent but for years their work has been shrouded in secrecy.  As a consequence, there are lots of misperceptions out there.  Let me give you a quick profile. 

The vast majority of abortions in this country are performed by “independent” abortion providers.   By “independent,” I mean clinics that are NOT associated with the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.   Many people are surprised to learn that, despite their visible public persona, PPFA clinics actually perform only about ten percent of the abortions in this country.  The other clinics are free standing facilities that are owned by a physician or a private individual.  Abortions are rarely performed in hospitals. 

It’s hard to get an exact count, but there are about 700 independent abortion clinics in the country.  There are some chains of clinics, such as the All Women’s Health Centers in Florida and New York or Family Planning Associates in California.  But, for the most part, each clinic has one owner. 

The average clinic is open three to four days a week.  Saturday is the busiest day, mainly because many women work during the week and Saturday is the most convenient day for them.  The average price of an abortion in the first trimester is $450.  That fee normally includes the abortion, counseling services and a follow up visit.  In rare cases, a clinic will perform an abortion for free.  As the pregnancy advances, the price goes up.  An abortion at 23 weeks can cost several thousand dollars. 

Every clinic has its own personality.   There are some clinics that are purely “medical” in nature in that the waiting rooms look like your average physician’s waiting room.  That is, a little austere.  Then, there are other clinics that might have different “cozy” kinds of furniture or pictures on the wall.  Some clinics that are run by former “hippies” reflect, well, you can imagine what they reflect. 

There is a group of clinics that subscribe to the “head and heart” mode of counseling, where the counseling is a little more intense.  Some clinics do very cursory counseling, just giving the woman her options and talking about the surgery.  Some of these clinics believe it is “insulting” to “counsel a woman to death” because it presumes they are not smart enough to make the decision on their own. 

Some clinics have protestors out front.  But, for the most part, it’s not like it used to be in the 1990’s when dozens and dozens of people would gather in front of the facility and block access to the clinic.  While there are always some exceptions, for the most part the pro-life movement has adjusted its tactics and many of them just stand outside a clinic and pray.   That, of course, is their constitutional right.

Believe it or not, some clinics also have adoption agencies.  Some clinics have a lot of security, some have none.  Some have female doctors but most of the clinics still have male doctors.  Many of the doctors are older as young physicians are concerned about getting into the field.  On the other hand, there are some cities that have too many abortion doctors.   

The clinics belong to national organizations and get together for annual conventions to discuss reproductive health issues.  Speaking of, all of these clinics do more than perform abortions.  For example, they insert IUDs, offer wellness programs, some do botox injections. 

I’ve worked with clinics for many years.  If you have a specific question about how they perform their job, fire away and I’ll respond!

I follow with great interest the fascinating conversations on the Abortion.Com Facebook page.  There are close to 3,000 “friends,” both pro-choice and pro-life, who have some very interesting and, usually, civil dialogues about the issue.  I say “usually” because there are always those who need to SCREAM at you and those who just spout the usual “ABORTION IS MURDER” stuff.  You come back and ask a simple question like “do you support birth control?” and they just disappear.  Maybe they’re exhausted from all of the intellectual energy they just expended.    

The other day, there was an interesting admission by a pro-lifer.   This woman is a very reasonable, calm, smart woman from Florida.  She is always quick to chime in when pro-choicers ask the tough questions and she, in turn, asks tough questions as well.  Of course, no one expects to change any minds and she is just as locked in as others, but I do have the sense that she is learning more about the mindset of a woman who decides to have an abortion and she is also learning about doctors who perform them.

Suddenly, just the other day, in a very long thread towards the bottom of the page, she “quietly” admitted that years ago she had had an abortion. 

What the heck?  

I had to read her comments several times to make sure I was reading it correctly. 

So, it seems that years ago, when she was much younger (well, weren’t we all?), she became pregnant and she CHOSE to have an abortion.  Yep, that’s right.  This pro-lifer exercised her constitutional right to choose.  But now, she wants to take away that same right from millions of other women.  It was good for her then, but it’s not good for others now.

She says that she has now come to regret having the abortion.  Okay, I get that.  Indeed, I addressed that issue just the other day in another one of my potentially Pulitzer Prize winning blogs.  She has even gone so far as to join the “Silent No More” campaign that I referred to in the same blog. 

So, I’m trying to sort this out.

 She had an abortion and she regretted it.  Okay.  Now if she were just out there telling women to really, really think hard about the decision, I’d have absolutely no problem with that.  But she doesn’t stop there.  She takes it to the next level and says that women should not be able to access the same procedure that she took advantage of years ago.  That sounds a little hypocritical to me.

Years ago in her youth, she “got in trouble,” as they used to say.  She made what she thought was the right decision for her at the time.  She CHOSE to have an abortion.   Then, many years later, now that her life has been “straightened out,” as she says, she wants to take away that same right from other women who might be in the same situation as she was.

What am I missing here?

Just down the block from my house is a Catholic Church.  Of course, it being Easter Sunday, the parking lot is mobbed, police are directing traffic.  This gets to me to thinking about my own religious background.  

For many years, I was your typical New York, Irish Catholic.   Went to church every Sunday, got my First Communion and then was confirmed.  I never really understood what the confirmation ceremony was all about except that I was suddenly a “soldier of Christ.”  Cool. 

When I was about 16 or so, I stopped going to church.  Or, more accurately, my mother decided that she could no longer force me to go.  Let’s face it, I was not going to church all of those years because I wanted to go.  I was being dragged there against my will every weekend.  The only thing I enjoyed about going to church on Sunday morning was stopping at Calanzo’s Italian Bakery after services to pick up donuts, scones, a rhubarb cake and cruellers.  After all, we hadn’t eaten since the night before (against the rules) so I gobbled those carbs down as fast as possible. 

I left the church because I was scared.  I was always taught that God was a vengeful God, everything was about what you couldn’t do.  Every one of the Ten Commandments started off with a “thou shall not….”   I was constantly afraid of going to hell for committing a mortal sin.   Sure, you could always go to confession every Saturday to be absolved of that sin but what if you looked upon a member of the opposite sex with lust in Monday’s Algebra class and you died on Tuesday before you could get to confession?  You just got a one way ticket to hell, baby….

Indeed, to this day I remember standing in a field across the street from my house one fine Saturday afternoon.   I was 13 years old and was going to confession in about an hour when I decided to say my first curse word out loud.  After all, I could scream the word and then go straight to Father Costello and confess, right?   The slate would be wiped clean.  

When the time was right, I yelled out “shit” and waited for the lightning bolt to strike. 

Nothing.  

“Shit!” 

Nothing.  

Hey, this ain’t so bad, I thought.  Shit, shit, shit, shit….

Went to confession an hour later and all was forgiven.

For many years after that, I didn’t think about the Church.  But when I got involved in the pro-choice movement on a national level, my fear of the church returned.  I soon learned how the church could incite people and organize mobs of protestors to block access to a clinic.  I watched priests stand in from of an abortion facility and scream at women who were there to obtain an abortion.  Heck, they even yelled at women who were just going in to get some birth control.  I sat in on sermons and heard about the “evils” of abortion and how women who had them would burn in hell.  I remember one priest in Alabama say publicly that it was “justifiable homicide” to kill an abortion doctor.   

There was so much hatred emanating from those pulpits and I learned all over how to fear the church.  And when I look at all of those cars in that church parking lot across the street, I wonder what they are being told about women who have abortions.  And the interesting thing is that the majority of women who get abortions are Catholic.

There is an interesting conversation going on at the Abortion.com Facebook page. 

It seems like every other day, a pro-lifer comes on shouts “ABORTION IS MURDER!”  Real simple and to the point.  Nothing about how we can all work together to reduce the need for abortion.  Nope, just a plain ole “ABORTION IS MURDER!”   In response, the pro-choicers will say that “murder” is a legal term as defined by the state legislatures and that, if abortion were “murder,” then it would be against the law. 

I’m not going to haggle about how one defines abortion.  I personally acknowledge that abortion is a form of killing.  Something is alive in the woman’s body, she goes to the clinic and that something is gone.   How you define that act is up to you.

What I want to talk about is how some pro-life people can be so mean-spirited.  Yes, there are many out there that are well-intentioned, that actually adopt children or volunteer at the local homeless shelter.   They are to be commended.   But then there are the mean ones.

Imagine the woman who has just learned she is pregnant and has decided to have an abortion.  She is not feeling good about things.  Her whole life has flashed before her.  She knows that, if she did not have an abortion, she would give birth to a child.  She thinks about those possibilities with some hope, but ultimately decides it is not time.  She is either too young or does not have the resources to bring a child into this world, so she decides to have an abortion.  She nervously picks up the phone and calls a clinic for an appointment.  She arranges to take the day off from work, giving her employer some lame excuse.

On the day of her appointment, she drives to the clinic.  She is probably accompanied by her husband, boyfriend or a family member.  As she drives up, she sees a bunch of people in front of the building waving signs and shouting.  At first, she is not sure what they are doing but as she focuses she realizes they may be anti-abortion protestors.  The pictures of the bloody fetuses confirm her suspicions.

She parks her car and as she walks to the front door of the clinic she hears people in the group shouting “Don’t Kill Your Baby!” or “Choose Life, not Death!”    Then someone yells out at the top of her lungs:   “Murderer!”

The pro-life movement is quick to claim that they have God or Jesus on their side.   The Bible says this, the Bible says that.  God says you will burn in Hell if you have an abortion. 

But if Jesus really was pro-life, would he really go down to the local abortion clinic on a Saturday morning and stand outside screaming at women?  Can you imagine Jesus yelling “Murderer?”   Would he really try to embarrass this woman who is already in a very difficult emotional situation? 

There is something very mean-spirited about the use of these words.  Oh, sure, a pro-lifer would say that “we need to tell the woman the truth.”   Well, earth to the pro-life movement:  women know the truth.  They know they have a living organism in their body and they have made the extremely difficult decision to “kill” it, to abort it, or even, yes, “murder” it.   How she defines that act is her decision. 

So, why stand outside of a clinic on a Saturday morning (don’t these folks have kids with Little League games or Girl Scout meetings?) and scream at a woman as she enters a clinic in an already emotional state?   Why make things even more difficult for her?  Why be so mean?    

WWJD?

Yesterday, the convicted murderer of Doctor George Tiller was sentenced to life imprisonment.  I am not going to mention that person’s name lest I give him the publicity he so badly craved. 

When he was sentenced, the murderer said that his action was responsible for saving “the lives of the unborn in Wichita,” where Doctor Tiller practiced.  That’s why he killed Doctor Tiller?   Because he thought he was “saving lives?”    Let’s think about this for a second.    

Since March 10, 1993, when Doctor David Gunn became the first abortion provider to be killed by a “pro-life” zealot, several other doctors and clinic staff have been killed.  After Doctor Gunn’s murder, a man named Paul Hill was suddenly on all of the talk shows saying that it was “justifiable homicide” to kill a doctor who was going to “kill babies.”  A small organization was actually formed touting the same nonsense.  Then, a year after Doctor Gunn was killed, the same Paul Hill murdered Doctor Baird Britton and his security guard in Pensacola.  Hill was convicted quickly and later was executed in Florida. 

Did any of these murderers really believe that, if they killed a doctor, it would stop abortions, that they would be “saving the lives of the unborn?”    Get real. 

A woman becomes pregnant and decides to have an abortion.   Chances are extremely high that, if she has a regular ob-gyn, that doctor does not perform abortions.  So, the woman picks up the Yellow Pages or does an Internet search for an abortion provider.  Ultimately, she makes the appointment. 

Then, the doctor who she was going to see that day is killed.  The woman might find out about it when she actually goes to the clinic but chances are that the clinic staff called her to tell her what happened.  The woman, who didn’t know the doctor, might feel sad, a little puzzled, but do you really think she suddenly decides to not have the abortion?   No, she starts the process all over again and makes an appointment at a different clinic.   She will ultimately have the abortion.

So, when people like Doctor Tiller’s murderer say they “saved babies,” they are being delusional. 

All they did was take one life and “saved” none.   And they call themselves “pro-life?”

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been pro-choice.   I’ve always felt that a woman has a right to do what she wants with her body because, basically, I trust women. 

Still, as many of you have seen and have commented on, while I am pro-choice I have always had some reservations, I’ve asked difficult questions, I’ve pushed the envelope.   And, honestly, the only people who seem to respond are those who oppose abortion.  They are the ones that have been coming back at me with cogent, directed arguments that, frankly, have really been having an impact on me.  Indeed, these arguments inspired me recently to go talk to an old friend who has been a Catholic priest for about 30 years now (I am a former Catholic).  We had a great conversation about life and death.

This is very hard for me to write but all of this has made me re-think my position on this very difficult issue.  I mean, the fact is that at some point it is a baby, at some point you can see the fingers, the toes, the head, the arms.  And women – women who took a risk – are scurrying down to the local abortion clinic and killing these living creatures.    It just seems all too easy, doesn’t it? 

Meanwhile, I’ve done a lot of research on adoption and have learned a lot of things that I never knew.  There really are long waiting lists of couples that are willing to adopt.  Yes, I know that it might be tough for that women to give birth and just hand over her baby but, again, why wasn’t she thinking that when she decided to have unprotected sex?        

We all need to take more responsibility in this world.  Too many people are taking way too many chances.  I mean, c’mon, if you’re gonna have sex, get a condom.  If you get pregnant, suck it up, it’s the baby you created and you have to live with the result of your action. 

On the other hand, it is April 1.  I’ll be back tomorrow in full pro-choice regalia.