Following the fall of Roe v. Wade, the founder and CEO of a large abortion business chain is taking steps to ensure her business is profitable — and in the process, she is dismissing the experiences of countless women who suffer regret, grief, or trauma as a result of their abortions.
While shutting down four abortion facilities in Texas in the last year due to the enactment of the state’s pro-life laws, the founder of Whole Woman’s Health, Amy Hagstrom Miller, began plans to open a new facility in abortion-friendly Albuquerque, New Mexico, where there are no limitations or restrictions on the killing of preborn human beings via abortion at any time during pregnancy.
A travel agent
Hagstrom Miller said that moving from Texas to the New Mexico facility, which commits abortions through 18 weeks, has made her feel like “a travel agency on some levels.” Whole Woman’s Health launched a progam called Wayfinder that books airline tickets, purchases gas cards, and makes hotel reservations for women in pro-life states to get to abortion-friendly states. When the new facility opened, she considered ending this “abortion travel” portion of her business, but ultimately decided to keep it going.
Positioning itself as supportive of women who travel for abortions looks good on paper in the pro-abortion world, but this can actually put more pressure on women to choose to end the lives of their preborn children.
Studies show that 64% of post-abortive women felt pressured to abort — by parents, by a boyfriend, or because of financial pressures, school pressures, and more. Organizations or employers who willingly fund a woman’s abortion and/or abortion travel applies even more pressure to “choose” a certain way. Once a woman has accepted the offer and the abortion-related costs have been paid for by someone else, it becomes extremely difficult for her to change her mind about the abortion. At that last moment, if she reconsiders her decision at Whole Woman’s Health, she may be reminded of the “generosity” of the abortion chain to secure funding for her abortion and put her up in a hotel.
“By the time they get here [to New Mexico], they’re even more committed to obtaining this abortion because the abortion facilities, the referral centers in Texas have already given them a gift card,” said Dominique Davis, president and CEO of Project Defending Life, a pregnancy center in New Mexico. “[The women] feel more pressured to obtain the abortion because it’s already been paid for.”
Ignoring abortion regret
For Hagstrom Miller, there can be no such thing as abortion stigma or abortion regret; otherwise, there are negative connotations associated with the products and “services” she sells.
“The stigma and shame are manufactured,” she claimed. “All of that stuff has driven me to the work. I know it’s not normal.” She added, “Everybody looks at us through the lens of stigma. The arc of our work is long. The goal is to eradicate abortion stigma in this country. That part of it is the big work.”
In claiming that abortion shame is “manufactured” Hagstrom Miller is in turn asserting that women who regret their abortions are lying. She’s telling every woman who has mourned the loss of her child to abortion that it isn’t “normal” to do so. She is shaming them for their emotions.
If the “big work” of “eradicating” abortion stigma and shame convinces women to bury their emotions, hide their painful abortion experiences, or even ‘celebrate’ their abortions, this will ultimately serve to benefit Hagstrom Miller’s abortion business.
The truth is, there are thousands of women in online post-abortion support groups, such as I regret my abortion. There are also programs like Rachel’s Vineyard, which helps women process the grief and trauma of abortion, and Silent No More Awareness, which has over 3,000 personal testimonies of abortion regret – as do other sites that have compiled similar stories of abortion trauma and regret.
It isn’t hard to recognize that abortion can cause emotional trauma for women, but abortion profiteers like Hagstrom Miller make a financial windfall if women’s abortion trauma is trivialized.
Funding abortion
Hagstrom Miller said she struggled financially after shutting down the four facilities in Texas. Whole Woman’s Health also does business in Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, and Virginia, and she was able to sell two of the Texas buildings while having to buy out the leases on the other two.
She started a GoFundMe account, which has reportedly raised nearly $450,000 of her $750,000 goal to date. Part of those fundraising dollars, according to GoFundMe, will allow the New Mexico clinic to abort children up to 24 weeks — again, in New Mexico, these abortions can be carried out for any reason. Children born as young as 21 weeks can survive outside the womb, but Hagstrom Miller is willing to kill them for thousands of dollars.
Preborn child at 24 weeks
Pushing abortion
Now that the New Mexico facility is open, Hagstrom Miller is pushing for Texas women to make the trip there for an abortion. She said the majority of women coming to the Albuquerque clinic for abortions appear to be from Texas and it seems Hagstrom Miller is trying to rebuild her clientelle from that state. She told NM Political Report that she thinks many women in New Mexico are unaware of her facility’s existence, yet she has focused on advertising to women in Texas.
According to Houston Public Media, a social media video ad campaign in the Austin and Fort Worth areas — two cities where the abortion chain shuttered clinics — will ask, “Think access to safe legal abortion is a thing of the past? Think again.”
These “splashy” videos are intended to lure more women to New Mexico from Texas for abortions at Whole Woman’s Health. They may be legal, but they aren’t safe (after all, abortion intentionally and directly kills a human being, every single time). According to both researchers and abortionists, second trimester abortions are “significantly” more dangerous for women than first-trimester abortions, and the risks increase as gestational age increases.
As previously reported by Live Action News:
Research published by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, part of the U.S. National Library of Medicine, found… the “risk of septic (life-threatening blood infection) abortions is markedly increased with advanced gestational age.”
Additional research published in Obstetrics and Gynecology revealed that “late-term abortions carry a 91 times greater risk of death than first trimester abortions.” And research published by BMC Women’s Health found that “[g]estational age and the method of surgical abortion have been reported to be the most significant and interrelated factors that cumulatively affect abortion-related morbidity” and that the risks of complications “increase exponentially with increasing gestational age.”
In 2017, Keisha Atkins underwent an abortion at 24 weeks at Southwestern Women’s Options (SWO) in New Mexico and died as a result. After her death, Atkins’ mother filed a lawsuit claiming that the abortion facility did not provide proper care to Atkins, failing to diagnosis sepsis two days into the multi-day abortion procedure. Both SWO and the University of New Mexico (which referred Atkins to SWO) settled that lawsuit.
