December 28 marks the Catholic Feast of the Holy Innocents, a day in which mothers wept for the needless and brutal slaughtering of their infants and young children. Mothers are still crying out over the violent and unnecessary killing of their children today through the tragedy of abortion, but few are listening to their cries.
The Feast of the Holy Innocents is held in remembrance of the children slaughtered by King Herod in his quest to kill the newborn Jesus. Herod was willing to kill anyone whom he saw as a threat, including three of his own sons. When he learned about the Christ Child, he set a plan in motion to ensure Jesus didn’t live to take his throne, ordering that every little boy age two and under in Bethlehem be killed. He deduced that if Jesus was indeed in Bethlehem, his death would be guaranteed through this horrific, violent act.
Artwork depicting this mass murder features the pain of the mothers who tried desperately to save their babies and the grief they felt upon their children’s deaths. Today, similar cries can be heard by anyone who is willing to listen to the pain countless women are experiencing in the modern-day mass slaughtering of innocents through abortion.
Pressure to abort
While pro-abortion advocates maintain that abortion is a right that empowers women (it isn’t) and provides them true equality with men (it doesn’t), the reality is that when faced with an unplanned pregnancy or a pregnancy complication, most mothers want to protect their children and will choose life when given the support they need.
The majority of women who have had abortions didn’t do so out of complete free will. Studies show that 64% of post-abortive women felt pressured to abort. At the same time, 67% received no counseling before undergoing the abortion and 79% received no information about available alternatives. Women have reported feeling pressured into abortion by parents, boyfriends, employers, finances, and friends.
Even when she wants to choose life, a woman may feel she shouldn’t because of that pressure. Many women have been led to believe abortion is their only option.
Teen girls have offered personal accounts of their parents threatening to kick them out of the house unless they end a baby’s life in abortion.
Sometimes, it’s a boyfriend who threatens to abandon her if she doesn’t abort. One mother who underwent an abortion against her wishes said, “I allowed my baby’s father to threaten me. He told me if I chose adoption like I wanted to, he would make my life a living hell.”
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Many of these women report feeling extreme emotional turmoil. Jacinta, who was pressured into an abortion by her partner, said it left her in her “own private hell.”
She explained, “He told me that I would destroy his life by keeping this baby. He made me feel so guilty that I felt I had no other alternative but to abort my precious baby…. I was consumed with my partner and making him happy, his happiness at the expense of my sanity and self-respect.”
After the abortion, she suffered from the level of grief one would expect from a mother whose child had been murdered.
“The pain and despair I felt for the past seven years has been my own private hell. I didn’t realize that my behavior for those past seven years was due to the suppression of the pain and guilt I felt … In fact, the pain and shame I felt has now been suppressed for seven years and it has been so strong it resulted in me having three breakdowns, a lost relationship, lost career… The hardest thing for me to accept for seven years was that I couldn’t and didn’t fight for my baby,” she said.
A woman named Christina recalled her own abortion that she was pressured into by her mother. She said that during the abortion, “I began to scream and cry, but to no avail. The nurse… told me to be quiet. Immediately after the abortion, I felt dead inside. I awoke weeping, bleeding profusely, and in the fetal position in a room filled with other women who were all doing the same thing.”
Abortion regret
Even when they are not pressured into an abortion, women live with the intense pain and regret of their abortions. An October 2018 article in SAGE Open Med, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal, revealed that researchers found abortion is “consistently associated with elevated rates of mental illness” compared to women who haven’t had abortions, that abortion “directly contributes to mental health problems for at least some women”, and that certain risk factors like mental illness may put certain women “at greatest risk” of struggling after an abortion.
A woman named Laurie, who worked at an abortion facility, didn’t understand post-abortion emotional trauma until she went through an abortion herself. “The short-term effect of my abortion experience was far more devastating than I anticipated. I bought the lie that says once the ‘procedure’ is done, all would be back to normal. Instead, I felt an overwhelming sense of loss. My arms ached for the child I would never hold,” she said.
Another woman shared, “The abortion tore through my life like a hurricane, leaving destruction in its wake. The post-abortion fallout with my boyfriend left only devastation. Our previous deeply nurturing relationship shattered into a mass of scattered, broken, irreparable pieces.”
Another woman, named CG, took the abortion pill and came face-to-face with her baby’s body. “I screamed,” she said. “Hesitantly I looked closely, examining every inch and there was no denying it: This Was a Baby!”
Having had three previous abortions, she realized, “I had killed my four babies!”
The pain of abortion can also lead women to suicide. In 2020, a woman went to an emergency room after having an abortion, but not because she was physically injured.
An ER staff member called 911, and told the dispatcher, “We have a patient who just underwent an abortion. Everything is physically fine with her, but she is having a mental health crisis. She’s threatening, uh, suicide, she’s trying to harm herself… so we need to get her to a hospital.”
A 21-year-old woman named Jade was “upset and distressed” following her abortion. She wrote a note to her parents and her two-year-old son explaining that she was struggling with abortion regret — and then she hanged herself. She had a history of depression and it seemed the abortion may have been the final blow.
Unfortunately, this is not unusual. A study in The British Medical Journal discovered that the rate of suicide in women after birth was 5.9 out of 100,000. Among women who had abortions, the rate was 34.7.
Abortion trauma denial
It’s bad for business if abortion advocates and businesses admit that women cry out for the lives of their children killed by abortion. To protect that secret and promote abortion as a source of female empowerment, pro-abortion media outlets tout the heavily debunked “Turnaway Study” as proof that women don’t regret abortions.
According to this “study,” women who had an abortion were compared to women who were unable to access abortion. It claimed that just five percent of women regret their abortions. But Dr. Randall K. O’Bannon, National Right to Life Committee’s Director of Education & Research, pointed out the truth in his critique of the “Turnaway Study.”
“Within a week after their ‘denial’ [of an abortion], even before the baby was actually born, 35% of those women were no longer willing to say that having the abortion would have been the right decision. After the birth, we know that 86% were living with the baby; 59% perceived their relationships as good or very good; and nearly half (48%) had full-time jobs,” he wrote.
Even if only five percent of women regret their abortions, that percentage works out to a lot of women. Adam Fadel, a licensed clinical therapist and founder of the Charlotte Clinic “The Corner: Institute for Transformation,” explained, “Guttmacher estimates that 23.7% of women have abortions, which using the Turnaway Study’s numbers means that nearly two million women regret their abortion. Leaving these women to suffer in silence is a disservice to them, their families, and their communities.”
The organization Silent No More encourages women who have had abortions to share their sufferings. Perhaps other women may be spared the same pain. Without their testimonies, abortion will continue to be held up by the media, pro-abortion politicians, and abortion businesses as a right, an empowering act, and the only way in which women can be free. In reality, abortion traps women in years of mourning for the children who should have brought them a lifetime of joy.
Tell President Trump, RFK, Jr., Elon, and Vivek:
Stop killing America’s future. Defund Planned Parenthood NOW!
