About abortion 47

A Wounded Generation

The availability of readily accessible and easy-to-use birth control has ushered in an era in which there has been an open discussion of "planned" or "wanted" children.

The drawback, however, is that as children become more "planned" they also seem to become less "welcome."

Dr. Philip Ney, a child psychiatrist from Canada who has done a great deal of work with abortion survivors, points out that there is a significant difference between "wantedness" and "welcomeness."

With the arrival of the birth control pill in the early 1960's, however, there was a dramatic and widespread shift in mindset toward the importance of planning when and how often, and even if couples would have children. Even before children are conceived, planning parents have begun "fitting" their child into a planned life.

Many children who are planned and wanted are aborted if it is discovered that the child may have a physical disability that would be in conflict with the parents expectations for the child, a form of 'quality control.'

In essence, on some level these siblings of aborted children feel themselves to be the "abortion survivors."

In a growing body of literature researchers in the field of pre- and peri-natal psychology are showing that inadequate bonding in utero, or traumatic birth experiences can have lasting impact on the emotional development of children.

Thomas Verny, M.D., in his book The Secret Life of the Unborn Child, cites a case handled by an obstetrician in Scandinavia. After delivering a normal, full-term child he observed that it failed to nurse at the mother's breast.

Puzzled by this unusual behaviour, he experimented by taking the baby to another nursing mother who agreed to put the child to breast. Amazingly, the child responded by nursing vigourously.

Upon returning to the child's mother, he asked if anything traumatic had happened during the pregnancy.

She told him that she had not wanted to continue the pregnancy and had, in fact, planned to have an abortion. However, her husband was determined that she not do so and she continued with the pregnancy.

Verny concluded that the child experienced maternal rejection in utero.

With mother- child bonding  the birth of a subsequent child (after an abortion) is often the trigger event that releases repressed guilt or anxiety about the previous abortion.

Dr. John Sonne, a psychiatrist, writes of the abortion themes present in contemporary music and album covers, for example that of Kurt Corbain and Nirvana. The abortion images are clear and graphic.

Howe and Strauss also talk about the impact of the "evil child" movies on our society. They have identified at least 20 evil child movies for this generation. This trend first surfaced in the 1950s with the movie "The Bad Seed." (13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail? by Neil Howe, William Strauss, 1993)

Through these movies, children have been portrayed as unpredictable, evil and indeed, dangerous. Children have in fact been demonised.

Generation 13 is aware of this, describing itself as lost, empty, and no good.

This message is reinforced in school programs where children are taught that the birth of children impacts negatively on the environment and adds to the pollution of the earth.

Therefore, through school programmes, children are taught that babies (1) pollute the earth, (2) cost a lot, and (3) are a great deal of trouble.

The disruption in the formation of any stable attachments can carry over into adolescence and adulthood, making trust and intimacy difficult to obtain.

The absence of a father squelches and confuses the process of male identification in the son. Boys deprived of a father lack a male role model of relationship. This predisposes young men, when faced with a crisis experience such as a pregnancy, to do what they perceived their own fathers did when the going got tough - they abandon.

When men have experienced the absence of their father when growing up, they fear intimacy.

Girls are also seriously affected by a divorce. If the father leaves they grow up in a home where they are poorly protected from other "sexually opportunistic males in the surrounding community."

Once a girl has been sexually abused, she is subsequently more likely to become involved in adolescent sex because her sexual boundaries have been violated. She has come to believe that sex equals love and attention. When propositioned, she has no boundaries to invoke.

She is more likely to pair with partners who will abandon her in a crisis and is also more likely to get pregnant. These pregnancies are often sought for many reasons:

• she hopes to escape an unhappy home life,
• she hopes to secure a commitment of marriage from her boyfriend,
• she hopes to prove her maturity and autonomy to her parents,
• she simply wants to satisfy the desire to have a child whom she can love better than she has ever been loved.
In choosing abortion, she is sacrificing her dream of a better life because, on a practical level, abortion "makes sense" - for everyone else.

Once she is pregnant, however, the pressures to abortion can be overwhelming. Because of an underlying low self-esteem, lack of support from her family, and pressure from the boyfriend in whom she has invested her love, she is more likely to give in and abort.

In doing so, she is sacrificing her dream of a better life because, on a practical level, abortion "makes sense" - for everyone else.

In such cases, it is clear that abortion does not solve the problems of these young women, nor does it help them to achieve their goals in life. Instead, it often sets these girls up for a pattern of repeat pregnancies and repeat abortions.