It’s a question few people ask when it comes to abortion: What happens to the bodies of the babies who are killed? For Laura Mann, though she did ask this question after her 21-week abortion at just 19 years old, she never received an answer.
In 2019, Mann appeared on the BBC’s The Victoria Derbyshire Show, where she discussed the abortion she underwent at a Marie Stopes abortion facility in the UK, and the trauma she endured as a result. Right to Life UK recently shared a clip of Mann’s interview on its social media accounts — and her story is absolutely heartbreaking to hear and still relevant today, six years later.
“When I went to discuss that I am pregnant, the first option I was given was abortion,” Mann said. “We stepped out of the room, we spoke for five minutes, went back in, and I was so afraid, so confused. I had no clue what to do. All the voices around me at the time were telling me I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t [be a mother at 19]. So I felt so much pressure.”
She said she was led to believe that abortion was the only option, even at 21 weeks. Babies born at this age have a chance at survival if given proper medical care. Feeling pressured by the abortion workers, she felt she had no other choice but to have an abortion.
“When I left that clinic,” Mann said, “that was the beginning of my nightmare.”
“I questioned month-after-month – had nightmares – what happened to this baby’s body?”
Laura Mann regrets having an abortion aged 19
She says she was not well informed by doctorshttps://t.co/cue8t0DZAM #VictoriaLIVE pic.twitter.com/8WqKFJA1Pz
— Victoria Derbyshire (@VictoriaLIVE) July 2, 2019
“In hindsight, I know that I wasn’t well-informed in making that decision at the time,” she explained. “So when I came out of Marie Stopes clinic in Brixton, the first thing that went through my mind was, ‘Where’s my baby? What’s happened to the body of my baby?’ And I kept asking myself that question. The nurse that escorted me down to the recovery because I was in so much pain and I was sobbing, she said to me, ‘You silly girl, don’t you know what’ve you done?’ That even put a shockwave through my system and made me so depressed.”
Laura went on to say that she spent months questioning where her baby was. “Month after month, nightmares and cold sweats, ‘What happened to this baby’s body?'”
Also at the interview that day was Caroline Gazet, Marie Stopes UK Clinical Director, whose immediate response to Mann’s story was to state that “95% of women don’t regret abortion,” and that abortion businesses don’t want to ‘frighten’ patients with the details when they come for abortions.
READ: Kate Cox’s abortion fundraising email lies about her pregnancy and dehumanizes her aborted baby
For Mann, that answer wasn’t good enough. She knows now what abortion did to her baby, but she still wonders why she didn’t know beforehand, arguing that if it had been any other procedure, the doctor would have explained what was to happen.
“Why is it with abortion that it’s so secret? Why don’t you let us know what we are going for and what’s going to happen to our babies? It’s not a matter of ‘scaring people.’ It’s a matter of informing people.”
Mann is not alone in her abortion regret, and Gazet’s claim that 95% of women don’t regret their abortions is highly inaccurate. She is likely referring to the heavily flawed and debunked Turnaway study, which claims that 95% of women who had abortions felt it was the right decision and 90% of women who had abortions didn’t regret it five years later.
But this data is unreliable; only 27% of the thousands of women who were handpicked by abortion workers to be interviewed about their abortions for the study actually consented to it. In addition, by the study’s final year, participation had dropped to just 17%. The women who initially felt the highest sense of relief about their abortions were less likely to be lost during the follow-up. Interestingly enough, despite this stark drop in participation, the study showed that at the end of five years, only 4% of the women who were denied abortions (and who actually remained in the study) still wished they could have aborted their babies. That means of the women who didn’t abort (and continued in the study), 96% didn’t regret being denied an abortion.
Live Action’s compelling new “Face to Face” video series includes women who have had abortions.
“I never believed that what I was doing was okay,” said panelist Emily Rarick, who had two abortions. “I always felt that it was wrong, but I felt that I had to, I didn’t feel like I had another option. So for me, there wasn’t this moment of like realizing, oh, I killed, I committed murder. I think in my heart, I always knew that it was just finally coming to the point that I admitted it to myself. And that was when I saw the humanity of my son and learned about his development. And it was very, very hard. It was very shocking. And finally having to just come to terms with that was very painful.”
Gigi Davis, who had five abortions, said it took her a decade to heal from the trauma.
“I call it a blackout moment,” she said. “Every time I would go into an abortion appointment, I would literally shut down my mind, my thoughts, my emotions. I would shut down my senses. Anyone that tried to speak to me in that moment, I just would block them out. I would like, blackout, like as if, you know, someone gets really drunk and they just, they don’t remember what happened the previous night or whatever, so that I could get through the appointment and then just deal with the emotional, mental consequences later. And it would work temporarily, it will work. And then when I would get through the emotions, however long that lasted, whether it was weeks or months, then… somehow I went back to normal and then I was able to do it again. And it wasn’t until I broke free of the deception and I confessed what I was doing and I was honest about what I was doing that all the pain really hit.”
Davis added, “So I know many women, they go into these abortion appointments and it looks as if they are just okay with it. It looks as if they are, you know — they woke up that morning like, yeah, I’m ready for this. But I can guarantee most of them are blocking something. They’re turning off something in their heart so that they can go through that, that horrendous act.”
Tell President Trump, RFK, Jr., Elon, and Vivek:
Stop killing America’s future. Defund Planned Parenthood NOW!
