When Americans United for Life president Catherine Glenn Foster was 19 years old, she had an abortion. But it wasn’t just any abortion. “I thought I had no other option,” she told CBN News. “What I found there was coercion, lack of information, at times outright lies, at times force.”
Catherine says she visited the second least expensive abortion facility she could find, and then, when she got there, she changed her mind and tried to leave. “I asked to get up. I said ‘please let me up. Let me off this table, out of this room. I don’t want this anymore.'” she told CBN. “I said, ‘… Just let me go. You can keep the money.’ And they shouted for more people and I had four people holding me down. One – a nurse – and a staff member on each arm. The doctor aborted my child. I’m screaming….”
Catherine experienced violence visited upon her own body, and her baby, as do all babies who are aborted, experienced violence and death:
“They didn’t care about me,” she told CBN. “They didn’t respect my opinion….”
One reason why Catherine, with Americans United for Life, fights so very hard for pro-life laws to be passed — like informed consent laws — is because she herself was denied the opportunity to see her own ultrasound on the day of her abortion: “… I asked [to see my ultrasound] and I was refused. They said no. And that’s always haunted me. I’ve always wanted and wished, again, that I could go back.”
This type of information denial is common in the abortion industry. As seen in an undercover video from Live Action, Planned Parenthood, which fights informed consent laws and most other laws restricting abortion, will not even do ultrasounds for women who intend to continue their pregnancies. Planned Parenthood will only do ultrasounds on women who want to abort, for the purpose of estimating the gestational age.
Sadly, Catherine’s story is not unusual. Many women say they have been coerced (either by the abortion facility or by others) or outright forced to abort their babies. This is the opposite of women’s empowerment, and Planned Parenthood knows it. One former Planned Parenthood manager told Live Action News that the abortion profiteer puts grief journals in the post-op recovery rooms for women to write their thoughts and feelings in after they abort their babies — and yet, publicly, the abortion corporation claims that women are empowered by their abortions, set free to go on with their lives without a second thought.
But Catherine’s experience, like the experiences of many others, left her in mourning. “It took me a long time to recover… physically, and then mentally, emotionally, spiritually. It was devastating.”
Read Catherine’s full story at CBN News.
