From UPI today comes news that a team of researchers, including the Guttmacher Institute, are looking into the issue of abortion’s stigma. Here is a new front in the abortion war. In many ways, it is the vulgar inverse of post-abortion healing ministries such as Lumina and Rachel’s Vineyard.
CINCINNATI, June 29 (UPI) — U.S. and British researchers say they are examining the social issues surrounding abortion and the stigma sometimes associated with terminating a pregnancy.
Danielle Bessett, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Cincinnati, and colleagues at The Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, the University of Cincinnati, the University of California, San Francisco, the Guttmacher Institute in New York, Goldsmiths College, University of London and Center for the Study of Women, University of California, Los Angeles, say there is little research on abortion stigma.
“What does exist focused on women who have had abortions and on their experiences,” Bessett says in a statement. “We’re looking at stigma in a broader context.”
Each researcher is exploring a specific group that could be affected by stigma, such as healthcare providers who perform abortions, supporters of women who have had abortions, the male partner of a woman who had an abortion, women’s experience in pregnancy after previously having had an abortion and women’s self stigma after suffering miscarriage, Bessett say.
“This is new territory into research around the social issues surrounding abortion,” says Bessett, who adds the research will be conducted in both national and international settings, including the United States, Zambia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Mexico, Brazil and countries in Europe.
“Understanding abortion stigma will inform strategies to reduce it, which has direct implications for improving access to care and better health for those whom stigma affects,” the study authors say.
It will be interesting to see what their data have to say. The intent, however, is pretty dark, and is contained in the last line of the report. The researchers wish to reduce stigma with an eye toward improving access to “care,” which is proabort-speak for “abortion.” The goal here is to identify the stigma and then embark on a new campaign of verbal engineering in order to preemptively deaden the collective conscience.
This new campaign will be the most perniciously evil to date. The first wave of verbal engineering sought to distort and deny the scientific truth of the embryo’s development. Sonogram technology has since demolished those lies and shifted the momentum to the pro-life side. Post-abortion healing ministries such as Lumina, Rachel’s Vineyard, and Silent No More have similarly done severe damage to proaborts through the ever-increasing numbers of post-abortive women and men flocking to them for healing.
The cat is out of the bag.
Since the proaborts can no longer deny or suppress the truth, they can only acknowledge that abortion does indeed hurt women, and then begin to spin like mad in the newest attempt at distortion. Knowing their evil, it should come out sounding something like this:
There has been confusion surrounding the stigma of abortion. Abortion is nothing more than a medical procedure that terminates a pregnancy. While it is true that the human embryo is indeed a human animal in its earliest stages of development, much of the stigma comes from the mistaken notion that the human embryo is somehow to be equated with a sentient human being, that is to say, a human person. Reinforcing these notions are religious belief systems which claim that there is no distinction between the single-celled zygote and the newborn baby at its mother’s breast.
In a world increasingly overpopulated, with an environment increasingly devastated by human activity, with climate change accelerating out of control, with famines and wars over economic resources, it is worth pointing out that institutions such as the Catholic Church that encourage indiscriminate reproduction by stigmatizing access to reproductive freedom (contraception and abortion) should be held up to appropriate criticism. Those who advance the cause of responsible reproduction and a greener planet need to be lauded as the true heros and responsible individuals.
The stigma, then, is a misplaced sense of responsibility, both personal and global. The role of the counselor is to reorient the focus of the pregnant woman and abortion clinic staff.
If that sounds too far-fetched, consider this week’s quote from that scientific luminary, former Vice President, Al Gore:
“One of the principle ways of [stabilizing the population] is to empower and educate girls and women,” he said, as reported by the Daily Caller. “You have to have ubiquitous availability of fertility management so women can choose how many children to have, the spacing of the children.”
“You have to lift child survival rates so that parents feel comfortable having small families and most important — you have to educate girls and empower women,” he continued. “And that’s the most powerful leveraging factor, and when that happens, then the population begins to stabilize and societies begin to make better choices and more balanced choices.”
Get the rest of Gore’s story here.
Lost in all of this is the truth of the human person, the truth of who we are. The stigma of abortion will never be programmed out of the human soul. At best, all that will be accomplished is that the researchers will add to people’s confusion, but in the end, the pieces just won’t fit together. We are either integrated, or disintegrated as humans. These folks will add to the disintegration, but will never kill the conscience.
They can’t. We’re made in the image and likeness of God.
Thoughts?
Coming Home 
Spread the word:
http://www.overpopulationisamyth.com/
How does their message about “empowering women to choose the number and timing of their children” apply when women (couples) want to have children are can’t? I have only two children right now, after 8 years of marriage, and I don’t feel empowered about it at all. I would love to have more.
I think I had an early miscarriage this week… no, that didn’t make me feel empowered. But they only want to increase the child survival rate after pregnancy; they want to make sure less babies make it out of the womb alive.
And what if my choice is to have a kid every year for my entire reproductive lifetime? Something tells me that if I felt empowered to make that choice, Gore’s followers would have an issue with it.
And did anyone else notice that men have zero choice or responsibility in the number of children they have? Odd message for a man to be giving.
Silent No More and Rachel’s Vineyard must be doing something right!!
Is that hissing I hear and sulphur I smell????
They are terrified of the truth, THAT is empowering! Not killing our own children like cowards. God wins over evil, the truth will prevail against any lies they could possibly come up with. There is nothing they can do to erase what ultrasound or pictures of dismembered unborn children have proven; the unborn child IS human, deserving of protection, love and respect.
“The goal here is to identify the stigma and then embark on a new campaign of verbal engineering in order to preemptively deaden the collective conscience.”
I agree. This isn’t scientific research. It’s simply more manipulation of the truth to further the lies of abortion.
Glorifyhisson, I am so sorry to hear of your possible miscarriage.
I agree with empowering women so that they have “choices” but what if that choice is to have 19 children like the Duggars? Will that be an acceptable choice? It seems Mr. “I invented the internet” Gore believes all women will choose to have few children. Because having babies is SUCH a waste of time and education. 😦
Your use of “proabort” is really disturbing. Pro-choice people are not pro-abortion.
I find your views very narrow-minded and disturbing. I believe abortion is not a good thing, but I also believe personal religious beliefs should dictate laws.
I hope you become more tolerant of the people in this country. I respect pro-life views, but I cannot respect the amount of hate it creates.
I have known a good friend, who comes from a religious background, who was in the saddening situation of teenage pregnancy. She told me that she simply forgot to take her birth control pill one day, just as easy to forget as losing your keys. She hated herself for being another teenage pregnancy statistic, and truly did not want to resort to abortion. She did, though. She knew she did not have the resources to raise a child and she mentally could not handle pregnancy at her age. She says she does not regret her decision. She is no longer with the same young man, and she is now in college. She certainly is not evil.
*should not dictate
Typo. I do believe in the separation of religion and state.
Ann,
To be pro-choice is to be a supporter of the right of women to contract for the tearing apart of a baby in the safety and sanctity of its mother’s womb. Inasmuch as the very essence of the “choice” in pro-choice is the introduction of abortion as the legalized murder of other human beings under the sanitized euphemism, “abortion,” pro-abort is an apt description of you and your fellow travelers.
That you cannot bring yourself to admit openly and proudly exactly what it is you support should give you pause. I take it that you support the right of a woman to have her baby, as do I. But you also support the right to abortion. That makes you pro-abortion (a pro-abort). Be proud of that, or else get your human decency back on track.
I don’t support such a grisly and barbaric practice. Therefore, I am proudly anti-abortion and pro-life. Since I support a narrower spectrum of what is acceptable and decent, then I suppose that I am indeed, in one sense, “narrow-minded” as you say. On the other hand, my narrower spectrum of accepted human behavior is informed by, and reinforces, a much more expansive and sacred understanding of the nature and dignity of the human person at every stage of their development.
You on the other hand, Ann, have a less sacred view of human nature and dignity, which allows you to support the contract killings of 53 million babies in the womb. Your shallow understanding and value of the human person’s dignity gives rise to your broader spectrum of accepted practices in dispatching the unloved and unwanted among us.
I have found that it is a near-universal phenomenon that such people have themselves been devalued as human beings, and often brutalized in one manner or another. Nobody who loves themselves with an authentic love born of humility and grace could ever sanction sucking a baby into a sausage grinder. From my armchair psychologist’s perspective, countenancing such actions, championing them as rights, stems from having had one’s dignity similarly treated.
I hope and pray that you resolve the trauma from whatever injustices you have suffered that lead you to champion such a barbaric institution and label those who work to bring that institution down as, “narrow-minded”. If you do, you’ll notice that your love and your understanding of the great dignity of human nature will widen your perspective and deepen your own self-regard immeasurably.
Surrender to Love, Ann.
Soon.
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We need a decent president in the White House. Thank you for ALL of your writings. They are much appreciated.
“Silent Souls for Santorum” on FB
“Although SILENT SOULS FOR SANTORUM is for anyone who wants to join the uphill, but righteous journey of the former senator and father of seven to the White House, it is especially dedicated to the post-abortive women and men who see Santorum’s pro-life fight as our country’s salvation, and is in a special way guided by the prayers of their unborn children.” -Tom O’Toole/Jeanette O’Toole/Lisa Graas/Christine Harrington