Forced Abortions in America

[Legalizing abortion opened the door to parents, boyfriends, abusive husbands, pimps, and peers, allowing them to pressure, coerce, or even force young women to abort their babies.

Many states now have laws that permit a mother to "choose" whether her baby is human. Through this twist in the law, reality is determined (for legal purposes) not by genetics or viability, but by a "choice" made a single person. Thus, a teenage girl or a woman under duress might "choose" to kill a baby, and legally, it magically ceases to be murder.

On the other hand, if a drunk driver had injured and caused that same woman to miscarry a day earlier, a few magic words spoken by that overwrought woman would turn the driver into a killer. The woman's "choice" effectively makes a law that could send a man to prison. She says "nay" and it's just an accident. She says "yea" and it's manslaughter.

Here's where the logic goes: Suppose an incestuous father coerces his daughter to abort her -- their -- baby. If the daughter doesn't want the baby, it's just a coagulated lump of protoplasm, no legal big deal. If the daughter does want the baby, however, magically, it becomes human, with human rights. And if the drunken driver's accidental taking of the babe's life constitutes manslaughter, then the forced abortion becomes murder and the doctor becomes a contract killer.

Abortion and gay marriage share the same quirk: One or two citizens' choice takes on the force of a law that can severely impact the rights of those they deal with.

I'd love to see this tested in a court of law.
-- rw]


Forced abortions - America's secret epidemic
Charlie Butts -
OneNewsNow -
1/11/2009 4:00:00 AM
http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=378732

The Elliot Institute <http://www.afterabortion.org/> has released a report that exposes America's forced abortion epidemic.

Elliot Institute spokesperson Amy Solby tells OneNewsNow that one study found 64 percent of women who had abortions reported they felt pressured to abort by others. "Something like 80 percent of them said that they didn't get the counseling they needed to make a good decision, that often they were not given counseling at all, or that the counseling they had was inadequate," she explains.

Solby also mentions forced abortions, which are not widely discussed in the U.S. An article released from the Institute cites two cases in 2006 in which teenage girls were violently persuaded to have abortions. In Maine, a couple abducted their 19-year-old daughter, bound and gagged her, and drove her to New York for an abortion. However, she escaped from her parents in the parking lot of a store and called police from her cell phone.

That same year, a Georgia mother forced her pregnant 16-year-old daughter to drink turpentine in hopes of aborting her baby. She was later arrested for criminal abortion after her daughter told the school counselor about the incident. The Institute has studied other cases where women are commonly threatened, pressured, or subjected to violence for refusing to abort.

"There's not any necessarily real hard numbers on violent [coercion] but, if you consider that homicide is the leading killer of pregnant women according to several studies, and then the fact that a large number of them have to do with the fact that the woman was killed or assaulted...because she refused to have an abortion or in an attempt to force her to abort," Solby concludes.

The Elliot Institute is trying to convince states to pass laws forcing abortion facilities to screen women for coercion and not to do an abortion where coercion is involved. Solby believes women then could be helped with whatever situation they are facing.