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Abortions Two Victims - Why Abortions deeply affect women
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...Marshall Fightlin
Why do abortions produce psychological traumas in women? In many respect, women are the more “together” sex. Mind, emotions and body are more integrated in women than they are in men. Hence, the somatic configuration of the woman has produced effect on her feeling and thinking. Because she cannot forget that she is a giver and sustainer of life, her maternal capacity is an integral element of her self image. Abortion, as a solution to a problem pregnancy, is a typically “masculine” solution. It is a solution that can be decided only by a mind that is capable of distancing itself from feeling and from the procreative truth of the body.
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When a woman submit to an abortion, she is doing violence not only to her body, but to her innermost feelings. Even if she does not fully understand that she is taking the life of her child, she feels the abortion as a negation of the truth of her body as a lifegiver and nurturer. It is not at all surprising that intense feelings of anxiety, guilt and shame arise from such profound experience.
Although the unborn child is the victim in an abortion and the abortionist is the aggressor, the mother’s role carries elements of both. That is, she is both victim and aggressor. She is an aggressor because she facilitates and consents to the abortionist’s aggression taken out on the unborn child. However, in a less obvious sense, she is also a victim. By destroying the life of her child, she is insulting the meaning of her body. Since “our bodies ourselves” is especially true form women, when her body is insulted, when its meaning is denied, the woman herself is insulted and her own meaning is denied. Every woman is insulted and devalued by abortion. In this sense the mother is not only co-aggressor with the abortionist against her child, she is, along with her child, a co-victim of the abortionist.
Because of the psychological inseparability of mother and child, there is no opposition between her concern for unborn children and our concern for mothers who have had abortions. In fact, the one calls for the other. This course of action becomes clearer when we realize that we must distinguish the motivation of the mother from those of the abortionist. Generally, she feels ambivalence about submitting to an abortion, whereas the abortionist feels none. Pro-life people must recognize women who have had abortions as truly victims. This is all the more warranted since pro-life people have rightly accepted former abortionists who have repudiated their pasts and joined the pro-life ranks.
Source: To Rescue the Future
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