Abortion: Is the Pro-Life Position Winnable?

Written by Rev. Dr. Peter Barnes
Introduction
In 1984 I wrote a booklet on abortion entitled Open Your Mouth for the Dumb: Abortion and the Christian (Banner of Truth), and in 2010 it was revised and enlarged as Abortion: ‘Open Your Mouth for the Dumb’. It has been an interesting, and I hope helpful, exercise to pick up the trends over a quarter of a century. What follows are some thoughts which might help us in answering the question: ‘Is the pro-life position winnable?’

1. Obviously weaker arguments used by the pro-choice side.

(a) there is a greater unease over abortion in the pro-choice camp.
Gone are the days when abortion could be compared to the removal of an ingrown toenail. It is sometimes said that we cannot know when the foetus becomes a human being, or achieves personhood. In fact, the Supreme Court of the United States maintained just this view in its momentous and tragic decision of 1973 when it virtually allowed abortion on demand. The Court stated: ‘We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins.’ That is often restated today, but with less conviction.

Janet Hadley cites one woman who wanted an abortion because she was going on a skiing holiday, but then adds: ‘Dividing reasons for abortion into “good” and “bad” is a treacherous moral enterprise.’ She asks: ‘How can anyone make such moral judgments?’[1] It is strange, but such reasoning is usually only applied to matters like abortion and sexual ethics, not racism and paedophilia.

In 1995 two well-known literary figures, Naomi Wolf and Peter Carey – one female and one male – publicly expressed their regret over being involved in abortion, with Naomi Wolf even speaking of the need for some kind of atonement.[2] Some pro-abortionists became fearful, and Beatrice Faust tried to rally the troops: ‘Feminists must hold the line at women’s right to choose and not get sidetracked into arguing about the foetus.’[3] Her strident claims were sounding less convincing. As a woman who had three abortions, she asserted: ‘For the foetuses, I felt – and feel – nothing.’[4] Ultimately, she resorts to clichés and platitudes: ‘We must cultivate the grace to respect diversity of conscience in a pluralist society.’[5]

Meanwhile, a British feminist, Amanda Platell, in 2007 expressed her horror at the scale of abortion in Britain since 1967, but maintains, rather lamely, that ‘We support the principle of abortion, but abhor the way it has come to be so misused and abused by the current generation.’[6] Antonia Senior too has accepted that abortion is killing but says that it is the lesser evil. She writes: ‘The nearly 200,000 aborted babies in the UK each year are the lesser evil, no matter how you define life, or death, for that matter. If you are willing to die for a cause, you must be prepared to kill for it, too.’[7] These chilling words are meant to be a defence of feminism. Unborn babies are indeed babies, but the sisterhood is willing to kill for the cause.

A freelance writer from Melbourne has written: ‘I am not a Christian, or a right-to-lifer, but I do know that it was my baby that I killed.’[8] As early as 1979 Linda Bird Francke, a woman who aborted one of her children, admits that ‘there was no doubt that life was right there, in my womb.’[9] Yet she still supported liberal abortion laws, and wrote of the expectant mother, ‘Who is to say what she should or should not do?’[10] Leslie Cannold plays a similar tune: ‘Any attempt to place a wedge somewhere in this gradual process and declare that before the wedge the fetus doesn’t matter, while after the wedge it does, is a decision that is as much a part of the sea of subjective values around abortion as any other.’[11] Despite this concession to reality, Cannold’s vehement defence of the woman’s right to abort her child remains unchanged. She objects to abortion on the grounds of sex selection – which usually means the death of the female child – but accepts most abortions as responsible decisions to ‘kill from care’.[12]

Janet Hadley too has become hesitant about the language of rights, and wants abortion to become more humanitarian.[13] One can pretend nobility when one kills with kindness. Even Jane Caro, the spokeswoman for Pro-Choice NSW, has written that ‘No one wants to have an abortion. It is not something women take lightly, but sometimes they decide it is the lesser of two evils.’[14] One can only assume, taking her words at face value, that she considers abortion to be some kind of evil. For what reason, one wonders. Most startling – and disturbing – of all is the view of Peter Singer who accepts infanticide but is ready to acknowledge that ‘the opponents of abortion are right to say that abortion ends a human life’ and that ‘birth is in some ways an arbitrary place to draw the line at which killing the developing human life ceases to be permissible, and instead becomes murder.’[15]

(b) use of ultrasounds.
Advances in science have made it increasingly obvious that the unborn child is a human being. The normally pro-abortion New Scientist in March 2006 reported soberly:

The task force finds that the new recombinant DNA technologies indisputably prove that the unborn child is a whole human being from the moment of fertilization, that all abortions terminate the life of a living human being, and that the unborn child is a separate human patient under the care of modern medicine.

This naturally has implications for those who participate in abortion, and so the task force concluded:

It is simply unrealistic to expect that a pregnant mother is capable of being involved in the termination of the life of her child without risk of suffering significant psychological trauma and distress. To do so is beyond the normal, natural, and healthy capability of a woman whose natural instincts are to protect and nurture her child.[16]

The pro-abortion slogans of the 1960s and 1970s were always fanciful and dangerous. Reality has started to strike home in the most unexpected places. In the West, where women are warned of possible long-term medical and psychological consequences of abortion, and where use is made of access to ultrasounds to view the unborn child, abortion rates tend to fall, often quite dramatically.[17] The idea is that ‘If wombs had windows, more babies would be carried to term.’ In Texas after 2003 it became mandatory to warn mothers of the potential consequences they could suffer from aborting their babies.[18]

The so-called pro-choice side has shown a distinct dislike for the use of ultrasounds. In May 2008 the student union at the University of Queensland would not allow the Newman Society to display a poster showing an unborn baby eight weeks after conception. The administration then refused to allow a pro-life stall to be set up in the university.[19] In one of his Jungle Doctor stories, Paul White tells of Boo Hoo Hippo who broke the mirror because he did not like the reflection.

By May 2010 twenty states in the USA had enacted laws that encourage or require the use of ultrasound for any woman proposing to abort her child.[20] The pro-abortion New York Times cited one woman in Birmingham with an eleven week old unborn child who refused to view the sonogram, saying: ‘It just would have added to the pain of what is already a difficult decision.’[21]

(c) sex-selection.
In 2007 at the United Nations a resolution was brought forward to condemn sex-selection abortion on the ground that it discriminated against women, but many feminist organisations opposed it because they feared the implications for all abortions. As we have seen, Leslie Cannold wants to retain abortion as a woman’s right – or act of kindness – but is concerned for sex-selection abortion as an assault on women. In April 2010 Canada was trying to curtail sex-selection abortions without curtailing abortion itself.

In China and India where ultrasounds have detected females in the womb, leading to more abortions. One Chinese dissident, Chi An, tells of rampant female infanticide, living babies being thrown out with the rubbish, and babies about to be born being injected with formaldehyde.[22] The situations in India and China have proved decidedly embarrassing for those feminists who are still able to blush. Both countries have witnessed female infanticide on a momentous scale, and China has a compulsory one-child policy which has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of female infants, whether born or unborn.[23] There may be something like 35,000 forced abortions daily in China.[24]

In many parts of China and India there exists a serious gender disproportion, with the number of males significantly higher than the number of females. Truly, the penalty for sin is sin. A movement that has supposedly championed women’s rights has led to cruel violence against young girls in the form of female infanticide and sex-selection abortion directed at female babies. Janet Hadley protests: ‘A society which tolerates female infanticide or abortion of female fetuses holds women in contempt, whatever status women may achieve as mothers of sons.’ Yet she fears that banning sex-selection abortions will drive a wedge into other abortion laws.[25] It is irony indeed to be ‘hoist with one’s own petard’ – blown up by one’s own bomb.

(d) evidence that abortion causes pain to the unborn child.
This was raised with Bernard Nathanson’s video The Silent Scream, first shown in 1984. It appeared to show a baby being aborted, and retreating from the threatening suction machine. In April 2010 a law was proposed in Nebraska which banned abortions beyond twenty weeks of pregnancy on the grounds that the foetus can feel pain. The New York Times was alarmed and spoke of ‘a spreading peril for women’s privacy and freedom’ based on ‘a questionable theory of fetal pain.’[26]

(e) late-term abortions.
Janet Hadley admits that ‘Late abortions represent a wafer-thin line between the tolerable and the intolerable, the merely disturbing and the truly revolting.’[27] Possibly some 500 to 1,000 abortions are born alive each year in the USA.[28] There were eight abortion survivors at the Eleventh World Conference of Human Life International in May 1992, including Gianna Jessen.[29] Almost 1% of all abortions – that is, about 40 each working day – are performed after the 22nd week.[30] On 24 October 2006 in Miami in the USA, a premature baby, Amillia Taylor, was born. She was aged only 21 weeks and 6 days, and was slightly longer than a ballpoint pen in length. Yet four months later she was strong enough to be taken home.[31]

Dr Joseph Bruner of Vanderbilt University in Tennessee has been privileged to witness some remarkable things, but few more remarkable than this. On 19 August 1999 Dr Bruner was operating on a spina bifida patient, Samuel Armas, when Samuel was just 21 weeks old in his mother’s womb. At one point in the operation, Dr Bruner lifted the baby’s hand out of the womb, and supported it with one finger. A photographer, Michael Clancy, was there to capture the moment. Nearly four months later, on 2 December 1999, Samuel was born. He has since grown into a lively young boy with his only obvious disability being his need to wear leg braces.

(f) the status of unborn children who are killed apart from abortion.
In May 2010 the NSW Attorney-General, John Hatzistergos, announced a review into NSW laws involving the deaths of unborn children. This came about because an eight month old child in utero, Zoe, was killed on Christmas Day 2009 by a driver allegedly on drugs. The driver could not be charged with manslaughter because the baby had not taken a breath. Those with vested interests in expressing sympathy for the grieving couple, but who were unwilling to deal with the abortion issue, took refuge in saying how complex the matter was. The same difficulties were raised in 2005 when Byron’s Law was passed, which allowed gaol sentences for those who killed unborn children by physically attacking their mothers.

2. Growing amount of evidence that abortion can have a devastating effect on the living.

Anne Speckhard and Vincent Rue have written of what they call ‘Postabortion Syndrome’ as ‘an emerging public health concern’.[32] In Britain the Royal College of Psychiatrists in March 2008 significantly modified a 1994 finding that the risks to mental health associated with continuing an unwanted pregnancy far outweighed the risks of regret over the abortion. Increasingly, even secular agencies were warning that abortion is linked with breakdowns in mental health.[33]

The rock singer, Suzi Quatro, has wistfully recorded that her affair with a married man in the late 1960s led to her having an abortion. Her own words, both poignant and tragic, are: ‘When I get to those golden gates (hopefully) this is the sin I will pay for. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about who that baby would be now. Children are a gift.’[34] In a typically confused way, she proclaims, with regard to abortion, that ‘right is right and wrong is wrong’, but later adds: ‘I believed in the right to do whatever I wanted to do regardless of gender. Still do.’[35]

Melinda Tankard Reist, has gathered evidence from some 250 women whose experiences have been summarised in the work, Giving Sorrow Words – a title taken from Macbeth, IV,3.[36] This work is a catalogue of human misery. Women who have abortions often take to drink, indulge in promiscuous behaviour, and have thoughts of suicide. Nightmares are common, as well as fantasising about the baby. One woman who describes herself as not religious wrote: ‘Sometimes I open my arms and embrace the air’. Six years after her abortion, she was writing: ‘In my mind, I have a son I cannot touch and cannot feed and who follows me about like a ghost.'[37]

One of the most devastating indictments of abortion has actually come from the pen of a woman who spent her life defending the practice and participating in it. With her husband, Dr Bertram Wainer (who died in 1987), Mrs Jo Wainer opened what was euphemistically called a Fertility Control Clinic in East Melbourne in 1972. In 2006 Jo Wainer published some stories that were mainly – although not entirely – accounts of illegal abortions. Rather aptly the title she chose for the collection was Lost.[38] Rather less aptly the Sydney Morning Herald in March 2006 eulogised Dr Wainer as ‘The man who saved women’![39] The ostensible aim of the book is to defend the need for legal abortion, but it faces one way and rows the other. Mrs Wainer claims that there were 90,000 illegal abortions each year in Australia[40] when the true figure was well under 10,000. If Mrs Wainer plays up the number of illegal abortions, she plays down the significance of each abortion, asserting, without obvious relevance, that ‘Abortion is a small word of only three syllables.’[41]

Unwittingly, it seems, Jo Wainer reveals how inherently dehumanizing is the practice of abortion. One woman, who had an illegal abortion in 1953, writes unblushingly: ‘I certainly had no guilty feelings as I do not and never have liked or wanted a child, and never had any. I regard having the abortion, all things considered, to be the best thing I have ever done.’[42] Another woman is quite emphatic: ‘I hate children. I especially hate babies.’[43] When she aborted her child at twenty weeks, her rage knew no bounds: ‘I should have made sure it was dead. I should have torn it apart with my own bare hands, wreaking my vengeance upon it for what it did to me.’[44] One defence was: ‘Animals leave their babies if they’re weak, debilitated, or some way malformed. It’s the survival of the fittest thing.’[45] These essays do not make for comforting reading. One woman laments: ‘I felt putrid. I felt as low as anyone could ever get.’[46] These are stories of guilt, grief, callousness, fantasy, and almost unbounded sorrow.

Thus it is that the child is not the only casualty, nor the woman. Relationships rarely survive an abortion – about 80% break up after an abortion.[47] In so many cases, abortion was meant to save relationships but instead it destroyed them. Jo Wainer records one woman who raged against her boyfriend’s total lack of care, that ‘he couldn’t bear to be in the same room as me when I came back from the doctor’s room.’[48] One woman married, then divorced her boyfriend after the abortion, and concluded that there were problems of unresolved guilt, bitterness and blame: ‘The experience degraded us both.’[49] Hatred for one’s husband or boyfriend is not uncommon.[50] To top it all off, the Elliot Institute reported in late May 2010 that some 64% of American women reported feeling pressured to abort.[51]

3. A number of converts from the pro-choice side to the pro-life side.

In recent times there have been some spectacular changes of mind on this issue. Dr Bernard Nathanson, the New York gynaecologist who in 1969 helped to form the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws and who himself performed or supervised some 75,000 abortions, came to the conclusion that the foetus is, in fact, a tiny human being, and so worthy of all protection.[52] He has gone on to denounce the culture of lying associated with the abortion industry which has made a habit of falsely inflating the figures for the number of illegal abortions in past ages and the number of maternal deaths resulting from abortion.[53] In the USA it was routinely claimed that before abortion was legalised, there were about 5,000 to 10,000 deaths per year due to illegal abortions. Since his change of heart on the issue, Bernard Nathanson has written: ‘I confess that I knew the figures were totally false, and I suppose the others did too if they stopped to think of it.’[54] What mattered was the cause, not the truth. It is also incontestable that the number of maternal deaths fell during the twentieth century in the West not because abortion was legalised but because penicillin was discovered.

The story of Carol Everett is somewhat similar. She was involved in selling 35,000 abortions in the United States, and had one herself, and felt the pain of depression, guilt, and shame – even a sense of being raped – as well as the breakdown of her marriage. Finally, she was converted to Christ, and faced her sin honestly.[55] Norma McCorvey too has swapped sides. She was the Jane Roe in the Roe v. Wade case that led to the United States Supreme Court decision of January 1973 when it struck down all abortion laws in the country, and legalised the practice of killing children right up to birth. Ms McCorvey was supposedly gang raped – but that was untrue – and in fact she never had an abortion. She was used and manipulated by celebrity pro-abortionists, and came to work for the Jane Roe Women’s Center in Dallas, Texas. Her experience is the human one that ‘It’s not an easy thing trying to confuse a conscience that will not stay dead.’[56] In Serbia in 2008, Dr Stojan Adasevic, was reported to have embraced the pro-life cause after 26 years as his country’s most renowned abortionist.[57] Towards the end of 2009, 29 year-old Abby Johnson resigned as the director of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Bryan, Texas, and went on to join a group called Coalition for Life.

Somewhat differently, the blind singer, Andrea Bocelli, revealed on 4 June 2010 that he was almost aborted because his mother had been told that he would be born with a disability. Bocelli was born with congenital glaucoma, and was blind by the age of twelve.[58]

4. Growing support for the pro-life position in the USA and significant ambivalence in Australia.

There is a paradox in this, and it may not be lasting, but it is interesting and could be significant that at a time when Americans have elected an intractable pro-choice president, they seem to have increasing doubts about the morality of abortion. A Gallup poll in the USA found that in May 2009 a majority of Americans identified themselves as pro-life for the first time in the history of the question being asked by the pollster. This fell slightly by May 2010, but the pro-life majority remained. The poll also found that some 4 in 10 Americans were unaware of President Obama’s stance on abortion – which may explain some of the anomalies in such polls. In fact, the long-term trend since 1995 has seen, with occasional dips, growing support for the pro-life position.[59] Gary Langer of ABC News in the USA has commented that the majority of Americans are actually pro-life and pro-choice simultaneously.[60] In April 2010 Newsweek expressed alarm that the abortion-rights movement was run by ageing women and few men.[61]

In July 2010 over 81% of over 323,000 citizens from 46 counties in the American state of Georgia voted in favour of the so-called ‘personhood amendment’:

Do you support an amendment to the Georgia State Constitution so as to provide that the paramount right to life is vested in each human being from their (sic) earliest biological beginning until natural death?’

At this stage no politician is obligated to do anything, but it does put pressure on the Georgian legislature to place this constitutional amendment on 2012 general election ballot.
On the other hand, the Sydney Morning Herald on 5 July 2010 was glad to report, rather belatedly, that a national survey of 1050 respondents from mid-2008 gave substantial support for mid- to late-term abortions in certain circumstances. This was not quite as substantial as the headline implied, since only 12% agreed with abortion in the second trimester, and 57% declared that it depended on the circumstances, while 28% opposed it, and 3% were undecided.[62]

Sociology may be regarded at times as somewhat akin to the ancient practice of consulting the entrails of a chicken – much depends on how the question is phrased. So, for what it is worth, let us look at some statistics, based on research conducted in December 2004 on 1200 Australians by John Fleming and Selena Ewing:
62% supported abortion on demand;
87% believe that it would be good if the abortion rate could be reduced without introducing legal restrictions;
only 15% believe that abortion is morally acceptable when the foetus is healthy and there is no abnormal risk to the mother;
99% favour counselling prior to abortion.[63]

Fleming and Ewing conclude that ‘there is strong public support for the allocation of resources to provide real choices for women.'[64] The provision of counselling before abortion in a South Australian hospital led to a 25% decrease in the number of abortions in 2003.[65] The implication from the work of Fleming and Ewing and NSW Right to Life is that the way ahead is to concentrate on the needs of the woman, and on counselling. In this way, there could be a significant reduction in the number of abortions without any moral change in people. Such an outcome is not unlikely but it must make for a shaky victory, if ‘victory’ is even an appropriate term. The conscience is a powerful weapon in this debate, and this means that the right to life of the child must remain paramount.

5. Warning.

Taking all of these trends together, none of this means that victory is necessarily near. This is the kind of issue where a number of battles may be won but still the war is lost. People will rationalise evil because they consider that that is in their best interests. Yet in 1970 the Soviet dissident, Andrei Amalrik, published his extraordinary essay, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? He was wrong, but only by seven years. Amalrik himself was killed in a car crash in Spain in 1980, but the period from 1989-1991 saw the sudden collapse of communism. We may live to see the sudden collapse of a similarly anti-life worldview. Increasingly, it is the pro-abortionists who look like they are spitting into the wind.

——-
[1] J. Hadley, Abortion: Between Freedom and Necessity (London: Virago Press, 1996), pp.79-80.
[2] See Peter Carey, ‘My Lasting Wish’ in The Australian Magazine, 14-15 October 1995; Naomi Wolf, ‘Our Bodies, Our Souls’ in The New Republic, 16 October 1995; also Weekend Australian, 7-8 October and 14-15 October, 1995.
[3] Beatrice Faust, ‘Abortion Distortion’, in Weekend Australian, 4-5 November 1995.
[4] Beatrice Faust, ‘Pro-choice but not anti-life’, in Weekend Australian, 21-22 October 1995.
[5] ibid.
[6] Amanda Platell, ‘Why I, as a feminist, abhor how the abortion law has been so abused’, Daily Mail 10 September 2007 online.
[7] Antonia Senior, ‘Yes, Abortion is Killing, But It’s the Lesser Evil’, The Times, 30 June 2010.
[8] Ginger Ekselman, ‘A chance, perhaps, to heal long after a mother’s traumatic choice’ in Sydney Morning Herald, 19 July 2004.
[9] Linda Bird Francke, The Ambivalence of Abortion (Victoria: Penguin, 1979), p. 254.
[10] ibid. p .257.
[11] L. Cannold, The Abortion Myth, (St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1998), p.37.
[12] L. Cannold, op.cit. p.128.
[13] J. Hadley, Abortion: Between Freedom and Necessity (London: Virago Press, 1996), pp.82-3.
[14] Jane Caro, ‘New wave of anti-abortion laws punish sexually active women’ in Sydney Morning Herald, 29-30 May 2010.
[15] Peter Singer, ‘Abortion, the dividing lines’ in Herald Sun, 25 August 2007.
[16] Alison Motluk, ‘Abortion: Science, politics and morality collide’ in New Scientist, issue no.2543, 18 March 2006, pp.8-9.
[17] Even Time reported somewhat favourably on the role of crisis pregnancy centers (or pregnancy resource centers) in the USA. These offer free ultrasounds in a pro-life atmosphere (Time, 26 February 2007).
[18] see A Woman’s Right to Know, Texas Department of Health, 2003. For a government document, this booklet is remarkable for its honesty.
[19] From Ros Phillips, Festival of Light (now FamilyVoice), email 5 June 2008.
[20] New York Times, 27 May 2010.
[21] New York Times, 27 May 2010.
[22] see Steve Mosher, A Mother’s Ordeal: The Story of Chi An, One Woman’s Fight Against China’s One-Child Policy, (United States: Little, Brown and Company, 1994).
[23] In January 2006 an article in the British medical journal The Lancet suggested that selective abortion had led to the deaths of up to 10 million baby girls in 20 years, despite the fact that the practice of gender selective abortion has been illegal since 1994; see S. Sheth, ‘Missing female births in India’, in The Lancet, vol. 367, issue 9506, pp.185-186.
[24] LifeSiteNews.com 3 June 2010.
[25] J. Hadley, Abortion: Between Freedom and Necessity (London: Virago Press, 1996), p.100.
[26] New York Times, 10 May 2010.
[27] J. Hadley, Abortion: Between Freedom and Necessity (London: Virago Press, 1996), p.68.
[28] Marvin Olasky, The Press and Abortion, 1838-1988, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1988, pp.131-132.
[29] See Jessica Shaver, Gianna, (Colorado: Focus on the Family, 1995).
[30] Francis Beckwith, Politically Correct Death, (Michigan: Baker, 1993), p.34.
[31] Sydney Morning Herald, 21 February 2007.
[32] Anne C. Speckhard and Vincent M. Rue, ‘Postabortion Syndrome: An Emerging Public Health Concern’ in Journal of Social Issues, vol. 48, no. 3, pp.96, 103, 111, 112. See too D. Reardon, Aborted Women Silent No More, (Illinois: Crossway, 1987); and David M. Fergusson, L. John Horwood, and Elizabeth M. Ridder, ‘Abortion in Young Women and Subsequent Mental Health’ in Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry, vol. 47, no.1, 2006, pp.16-24. Strangely enough, in 1989 Dr Everett Koop, though strongly pro-life, saw no conclusive evidence of post-abortion syndrome; see C. Everett Koop, ‘The U.S. Surgeon General on the Health Effects of Abortion’ in Population and Development Review, 15, no. 1, 1989, p.174. Apparently, Koop privately thought that abortion did harm the woman in terms of her health and psychological well-being, but he maintained that abortion was fundamentally a moral, not a health, issue; cf. D. Reardon, ‘Revisiting the “Koop Report”’, 2000, from http:www/afterabortion.info/koop.html.
[33] ‘Royal college warns abortions can lead to mental illness’, The Sunday Times, 16 March 2008, from www.timesonline.
[34] Suzi Quatro, Unzipped, (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2007), p.61.
[35] http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2007/08/24/1187462449221.html
[36] Melinda Tankard Reist, Giving Sorrow Words, (Sydney: Duffy and Snellgrove, 2000).
[37] M. T. Reist, op. cit. pp.48-50.
[38] Jo Wainer (ed), Lost: Illegal Abortion Stories, (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2006).
[39] Fenella Souter, ‘The man who saved women’, in Sydney Morning Herald, Good Weekend, 25 March, 2006, pp.20-25.
[40] Jo Wainer (ed), op. cit. p.2.
[41] Jo Wainer (ed), op. cit. p.3.
[42] Jo Wainer (ed), op. cit. p.32.
[43] Jo Wainer (ed), op. cit. p.72.
[44] Jo Wainer (ed), op. cit. p.88.
[45] Jo Wainer (ed), op. cit. pp.106-7.
[46] Jo Wainer (ed), op. cit. p.190.
[47] P. Ney, Deeply Damaged: An Explanation for the Profound Problems Arising from Infant Abortion and Child Abuse, (Canada: Pioneer Publishing Co, 1997), 2.24.
[48] Jo Wainer (ed), op. cit. p.103.
[49] Jo Wainer (ed), op. cit. p.125.
[50] M. T. Reist, op. cit. pp.13, 17, 19, 65, 212-213.
[51] Elliot Institute: AfterAbortion.org – Facts Sheets & Healing: The UnChoice.com
[52] cf. B. Nathanson and R. Ostling, Aborting America (New York: Doubleday, 1979).
[53] cf. B. Nathanson, The Abortion Papers, (New York: Frederick Fell Publishers, 1983), pp.40-41, 97-100. The New York Times has continued to foster the culture of lying by announcing the results of a study by the World Health Organization and the abortion rights Guttmacher Institute in New York, which concluded that ‘abortion rates are similar in countries where it is legal and those where it is not, suggesting that outlawing the procedure does little to deter women seeking it’ (New York Times, 12 October, 2007)
[54] B. Nathanson and R. Ostling, Aborting America (New York: Doubleday, 1979), p.193.
[55] Carol Everett, with Jack Shaw, The Scarlet Lady, (Tennessee: Wolgemuth and Hyatt, 1991; reprinted as Blood Money in 1992 by Multnomah Press).
[56] Norma McCorvey, Won by Love, (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1997), p.58.
[57] http:/veneratiovitae.wordpress.com/2008/11/18/serbian-abortionist-becomes-pro-life-activist/20/01/2009.
[58] LifeSiteNews.com Friday 4 June 2010.
[59] Kathleen Gilbert, ‘Gallup: Pro-Life the “New Normal” on Abortion in the U.S.’, from LifeSiteNews.com, 18 May 2010; also ‘Support for Abortion Slips’ in Pew Forum, 1 October 2009.
[60] Billy Hallowell, ‘America’s Pro-Life Movement Gaining Steam’, Human Events, posted 07/05/2010.
[61] Newsweek Web Exclusive, 29 April 2010 at http://www.newsweek.com/id/237137 Also, Sarah Kliff, ‘Remember Roe!’ in Newsweek, 16 April 2010 at http://www.newsweek.com/id/236506
[62] ‘Strong support for abortion heartens law reform supporters’ in Sydney Morning Herald, 5 July 2010.
[63] Cf. J. I. Fleming and S. Ewing, Give Women Choice: Australia Speaks on Abortion, Southern Cross Bioethics Institute, 2005.
[64] J. I. Fleming and S. Ewing, Give Women Choice, p.22.
[65] NSW Right to Life, Abortion in Australia into the 21st Century, Sydney, 2006, p.51.