Reasons for Abortions in Real Life

I used to work in child protective services. We had 1500 cases among the county government programs - about evenly divided between child protective services, the juvenile court system, and the aid to dependent children (ADC) program, which gave out checks to the needy for the care of their children.

People joked about the ADC program, saying it was simply a system filled with women having kids every couple years so they could stay in the system of dependency. Many had never finished school; most were poor; that's why they needed state help for survival. Many came from broken homes with drug abuse or alcoholism, or they had parents who were in prisons or mental hospitals. It was hard to break the cycle of poverty and ignorance.

Many of the children that came to us had been physically or sexually abused. Many became pregnant in their teens or earlier; some were as young as 9 or 10. Abortions weren't legal then, so they pretty much had to go through with a full-term pregnancy. Many of those pre-teen mothers existed as the result of incest.

Most normal, white babies could get adopted. The retarded, deformed, drug- or alcohol-addicted babies, and the ones of color, had a much harder time getting a home.

I remember going to a group home to check up on a foster mother of 12. This was a home of last resort for disabled or deformed children. Most were in cribs; two were severely retarded, crippled and drooling in wheel chairs; a couple had tubes in their throats, chests, or noses. Almost all of them were in diapers - even though a few were over 6 years old.

Such homes had to have a full-time nurse on hand so there were always two adults present for constant care. The children could not afford a lifetime of hospitalization, although most of the care was paid for by the state. The parents paid some child support for the care of children they rarely saw.

The foster mother told me a few parents would come around to visit for a few weekends before they would get caught up in normal family life with other children and full-time jobs. Then they stopped coming.

I said she was a saint. She offered to show me a picture of a teen-age boy with hydro-encephalitis (water on the brain) who had just died the week before. She said his head was 33 inches round when he died in the crib he never got out of. She couldn't find the picture, and I felt rather relieved. I left as soon as I could.

I talked to my supervisor about this case and wondered aloud how anyone could live around that kind of constant sadness, sickness, crying, and pain all of the time. My supervisor had been in the "business" for 30 years and had a much larger perspective of things.

She said such people were absolutely necessary to the system for those kids who could not have afforded hospital care for life terms. But such caregivers had serious pathologies themselves. They were so co-dependent, so needy to feel needed, that they gave up normal lives to dedicate themselves to a lifetime of care for others. The result: they didn't have to perform in society with other people, with normal jobs, with serious relationships or marriage. They had virtually excluded themselves from regular life. And they got the "deserved" label of saints assigned to them by a grateful society.

After that, I saw the woman's "dedication" in a much different light. In fact, when the woman got involved in a normal relationship with a man, and left the children in the care of the nurse for hours while she went out, we had to close the home and move the children to other "holding pens" until they died, which is what happened to all of those "terminally ill" and seriously-disabled children. Few lived into their teens.

Would anyone stop a mother or a pair of parents from aborting a pregnancy that they knew would end in such a disastrous way? Could anyone blame those parents for "dumping" their child in a group setting like this while they got on with fairly normal lives, which may have included other children?

I remember a couple who lived in a trailer with 12 kids, which included 3 sets of twins. They were on a couple of our welfare programs, and I was responsible for one set of twin girls. The kids slept 4 in a bed. A couple of bigger children slept on the floor. They didn't have enough food. They wore shabby clothes and were always dirty. In school, other children avoided them or taunted them.

One 13-year-old twin told me how her brother forced her to have oral sex, and her mother didn't believe her. I told her to bite him, leave teeth marks, and the agency would get involved, get it stopped, and have him removed from the home, or we would put her in a safe, foster home. What was her chance of getting pregnant before she was 14? And what would happen to another child born into those circumstances?

Many people talk about how guilty some women feel after an abortion. An abortion is not pleasant. It is a serious surgery with potential complications. Many people won't go to have regular dental work done, and yet they act like abortions are a simple form of birth control for many women.

Many women who express ongoing grief or guilt about an abortion are sorry about "What might have been," and it is often a greatly-distorted fantasy over what the reality actually might have been.

Women who abort might wish they had been more mature or better off. But those addicted to drugs or alcohol, those stuck in abject poverty, those who were sexually abused by family members, those who were malnourished and couldn't afford prenatal care - those were probably the most in touch with reality; the ones who did not want their child to experience the grief and horror of the kind of life they were experiencing.

Such thinking is, I believe, a form of compassion.

Thousands of aborted women never talk about having had an abortion; they have gone on with life - with careers, with new relationships, with higher education, with better life skills - and then had another child they could devote themselves to.

I am personally aware of distant family members who had a baby born with serious birth defects. It had a deformed heart, lungs, kidneys, and brain. Even with $50,000 worth of multiple surgeries, the child could not live for more than a year and would probably spend its entire life in a hospital setting. They could not afford it.

No one in the family offered to pay the bills or to take on the child's care if it survived. With much sadness, they told the doctors not to do anything; not to try to keep the child alive. No further efforts were made. Of course, the child died in a few hours, probably from starvation and dehydration.

Such cases are devastatingly sad. Who is going to point a finger and try to shame such people for allowing their baby, born alive, to die?

What about asking pre-teens to go through with pregnancy and give up their babies for adoption? Do you want your 10-year-old to experience the "joy of childbirth" and then give up her child? No one can ask anyone to simply give birth and expect their progeny to be taken care of for a lifetime by some strangers chosen by an adoption agency.

How many of those adoptive parents' marriages ended in divorce? How many of those children were truly, lovingly cared for until they were mature? How many nightmares did those relinquishing mothers suffer over the years, never really knowing what kind of lives their children were living? Or even if they were still alive?

We talk about the poor and uneducated in large part because the wealthy, the well-educated, the well nourished, the women who come from normal homes, don't need to go through unwanted pregnancies. If they have an "accidental pregnancy" - from a broken condom, failed birth control, rape, incest, or during a wild sex party with 10 men - they can simply have the pregnancy "taken care of" in a sanitary hospital by a qualified doctor, whether abortion is "legal" or not, even if it needs to be done in another country.

I think abortions are private matters and the government does not have the right to say who can have an abortion and when - or by what medical technique. Abortions are not pleasant. Neither is the removal of a diseased eye or the amputation of limbs, but some surgeries are necessary. I would not want to watch any such surgeries being performed. They are gross, unpleasant, and visually disturbing. So many people talk about how "human" an aborted fetus looks... but they don't all turn out looking human.

Why would a woman in late-term pregnancy wait so long to make the decision? Maybe because society forces her to delay: "Don't do it; it's murder; you'll regret it" - until she acts out of sheer desperation because she couldn't make the decision any earlier.

About one third of pregnancies end in miscarriage. Some fetuses get fully reabsorbed into the woman's body, and the pregnancy never gets to full-term. That's why you hear about some 11-month pregnancies. Maybe those women prayed for such an event and, when it didn't occur, they realized they had to make a hard decision.

I support the decision of any girl/woman who chooses to prevent the birth of any more unwanted, seriously-deformed, retarded, alcohol-addicted, or crack-addicted babies.

When does life begin? Let's ask instead, "When does life end?" One moment the person is here; the next they're not, even though all organs are intact. I believe there is a spiritual aspect to human life, and it does not occur before birth, no matter how "human" the form appears to be when it comes out of a human being. Thumb-sucking in the womb is a reflex that many people romanticize beyond the reality of any animal instinct.

If it has 4 legs and 4 arms, as the Indian baby did that made recent news, or they are conjoined twins, or the spine is outside the body, or the physical form is brainless, or it's missing other major organs - you can call it human if it is born "alive" from a female human being.

What is done with it after that point is up to the doctors and the family - not the government or other outsiders. But if any female wants to prevent it from being born to begin with, let her have sterile, legal, medical intervention and abort.

People say some women who have had abortions talk about suicide. Does anyone know the number of children born into these afore-mentioned conditions who have committed suicide?

Many of those welfare kids were not grateful to be here; they wished they had never been born. They often used alcohol or drugs, and they often recycled the ignorance, poverty, and abuse they came from.

Children can go to jail for juvenile offenses like running away, truancy, and incorrigibility. Adults can not be jailed for running away or missing school. Why do these kids run? Can anyone blame them, after knowing what they are running from?

One foster boy was jailed as a juvenile for running away. His caseworker was called at 3 a.m. He told them to hold the boy till he got there at 8. The boy hung himself at 7. Do you know how much that tragedy affected the caseworker? The foster parents? The boy's biological parents? And he had a good home and was seemingly well off.

If any girl or woman chooses to have an abortion, for whatever reason: maybe she is 9 years old or she is a woman who has 10 other kids at home or her husband is threatening to divorce her and leave her with a seriously- handicapped child or her father raped her or she is addicted to something, or maybe she simply doesn't want a child to experience her lifestyle. Whatever her reason is for "wanting" an abortion, it should be offered to her as a safe, legal, medical procedure.

If abortions become illegal, the mothers, by definition, become criminals. What will society do with the 12-year-old who aborts? Put her in a juvenile facility for a couple years? How about the mother of ten children who decides to abort number 11? Put her in jail and let the rest of the family survive without her, perhaps under government programs or in foster homes?

No one, including the government, has the right to force a woman to go through with an unwanted pregnancy. The decision to abort is up to the woman and her doctor... and, perhaps, her God.