The tragic, deceptive way that some parents twist the abortion issue to justify it to young children is nothing short of tragic.
The pro-abortion blog Bustle recently featured the stories of several women who told their living children about their abortions. It claimed sharing such stories “can help eliminate the stigma” of aborting an unborn baby.
One was Stephanie, a 28-year-old who recently told her 10-year-old daughter about abortion.
Seeing the true nature of the matter, as children often do, Stephanie’s daughter asked if an abortion kills a baby. But Stephanie clouded the issue for her impressionable young daughter by claiming abortion is ok because “fetuses aren’t people yet.”
“She asked if that kills the fetus, and I told her, ‘Yes, because the fetus needs a human body to grow in. But fetuses aren’t people yet; they don’t have feelings or thoughts or experiences, and sometimes it’s kinder for everyone involved to end a life before it has a chance to begin,’” Stephanie said.
Then, Stephanie told her daughter how she aborted her sibling and how she would abort another one, too, if circumstances weren’t right.
“Then I told her about how I had an abortion before I got pregnant with her because I was very young and not ready to become a parent or put a baby into foster care,” she said.
Stephanie continued: “… I explained abortion about a year ago, around the time my husband and I started trying for another baby. She asked what would happen if I got pregnant and got really sick, so I told her I’d have another abortion.
“I explained that sometimes people end up getting pregnant when they don’t want to be, or circumstances change that make them have to reevaluate a wanted pregnancy. And if that happens, they go to a special doctor who helps end the pregnancy by taking the embryo or fetus out of the person’s body,” she said.
Stephanie related the story from her own perspective. But how those talks affected her young daughter, we may never know. Psychological research indicates her daughter’s thoughts on the matter may have been painful and traumatic. Siblings of aborted children can experience intense psychological pain and trauma after learning their parents killed one of their unborn brothers or sisters.
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Child psychiatrist and psychologist Dr. Philip Ney has done extensive research on the effects of abortion on siblings. He found that many siblings of aborted children experience survivor’s guilt and struggle with their sense of self-worth. Siblings of abortion victims also can suffer from depression, anxiety, low self esteem, fear of the future and other psychological problems, according to Ney’s research.
“The most prominent symptom of PASS [post-abortion survivor syndrome] is existential guilt, ‘I feel I don’t deserve to be alive,’” Ney wrote in 2011.
A few years ago, the child of an abortion activist shared how deeply the news that she had aborted siblings affected her.
“Suddenly, I realized my mother carried me to term not because I was a mythical child loved from the outset, but because I happened to be in the right place at the right time. I wasn’t any more special than my siblings—just lucky enough to have been a planned and wanted pregnancy,” the writer said.
