Pro-Life - Original Articles

Abortion Exploits Women


by Gloria V. Heffernan, M.D.


reprinted from the Chicago Tribune



After centuries of being treated as objects, women are being presented the final mechanical insult as a constitutional right.

The strange compulsion for abortion is in reality the ultimate exploitation of women by immature men: technocrats, generally, imbued with a myopic sense of social awareness and unable to interpret or control their own sexuality.

The playboys of the Western world and the authoritarian "adolescents" of the Socialist world sacrifice their women in order to preserve their dream of libidinal freedom. It is the women who must go to surgery over and over again to insure this dream. The whimpering male refuses to take responsibility for his sexual behavior.

It is no surprise that Playboy Foundation money is now competing with Rockefeller Foundation money to promote the concept of permissive abortion. The rich man's solution has become the puerile male's solution and the last vestige of responsibility and commitment has disappeared.

It is the woman who has been deliberately misled by the male-dominated medical profession into thinking that abortion is merely contraception slightly postponed. The serious physical and psychic consequences of this self-serving deception are muted despite a wealth of medical literature from the United States and foreign countries.

It is a national disgrace that the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology is not in the forefront of the fight against abortion. The depth of this deception is brought out in two recent articles. Dr. Richard L. Burt in editorial comment in Obstetrics & Gynecology, April, 1971, terms permissive abortion "the Fifth Horseman" riding with famine, death, pestilence, and plague.

He catalogs the serious side effects reported from Scandanavian and Eastern European countries with a long experience in legal abortion. These include hemorrhage, infection, prematurity in subsequent pregnancies, sterility, perforation and the psychic sequels of guilt and depression.

This alarm is echoed in another article in the British journal Lancet, December 4th, 1971, in which Dr. J. A. Stallworthy decries the conspiracy of silence about the side effects of abortion.

A minimal adherence to the concept of informed consent is ignored by most referral services and pro-abortion professors of obstetrics and gynecology. This frightening failure of the medical profession is most apparent in the continued use of the "salting out" method of abortion by American physicians in the face of the condemnation of this procedure by the Japanese medical profession.

The recent report by Christopher Tietze in Family Planning Perspectives, October, 1971, of a 22.4 percent serious complication rate using this procedure documents the American tragedy--a needless mortality and morbidity that incriminates the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology in corporate malpractice for not banning this procedure.

The greatest tragedy, however, lies in the fact that doctors have renounced their ethics to become social technicians rationalizing their position with dreary cliches and denying their own science to make it fit vague sociological imperatives. The traditional responsibility in obstetrics for two patients has been denied by the abortionists when the whole thrust of scientific medical practice has been to bring the healing arts to the child in the uterus, just as it does to any patient.

We find the medical technicians claiming the organs and bodies of the aborted children for human experimentation; some of them still alive. What horrible echoes are these from the recent past!

What can we expect from a society that can rationalize away the most fundamental of human values--the value of life? What is to become of a medical profession that substitutes self-serving cliches for its ethics? What is to become of women who would ask the courts to institutionalize death as a legitimate tool for solving personal problems? Such a society is doomed to an unending spiral of violence if women do not change it.

Women must deny violence a legitimate place in our society by rejecting the first violence--abortion. The women of this society must say to puerile men that the game is over. You can no longer exploit our bodies either in your center folds or in your hospitals.




Pro-Life - Original Articles


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