How Ending the Abortion Nightmar

Bush can go down in history as another Lincoln. (Lincoln was considered dumber by the media of his day than our present media consider President Bush.) All that Bush has to do is not attempt to abolish abortion, but rather limit its spread by protecting women's health and human rights as well as letting women in abortion trauma know that he and others are there offering help to free them from their nightmare of abortion.

Dr. Theresa Burke's latest book on post-abortion therapy, Forbidden Grief: The Unspoken Pain of Abortion, is endorsed by the great enemy of the feminist agenda, Dr. Laura Schlessinger. Burke concurs with Dr. Laura that the feminist movement has brought us deep psychological problems.

This is especially true with the abortion culture, because "if you examine the women's movement you can see that many of the women who laid the groundwork were women traumatized by their own abortions. They believed that legalizing abortion would take away the trauma."

Instead, as Dr. Burke shows, they created trauma, which brought us the nightmare culture.

She applies psychology to cure this trauma, but says that the abortion trauma can only be completely healed if one asks for and receives God's mercy. If the grief of abortion is not healed, then the world becomes a Freddy Krueger-like nightmare. Burke maintains that the horror icons of the United States such as Freddy Krueger and the "evil child movies" are symbols of a culture running away from its guilt.

"I think that evil child movies are all around us. The child is the victimizer, the one who torments. Other movies, like Freddy Krueger, illustrate the horror of being tracked down by an 'abortionist' figure who is out to kill her baby," Burke said. "I've watched MTV where baby dolls are thrown off cliffs, discarded, abused and unwanted � revealing the unconscious conflict shared by all who have rejected children or been abused themselves after having been used for sexual pleasure."

E. Michael Jones, editor of Culture Wars, in a review of Forbidden Grief agrees with its thesis that when one represses guilt one creates even greater monsters in the unconscious. He said, "... depression, suicide attempts, compulsive political activism, reveals itself upon closer inspection to be neurotic compensation for the guilt from abortion, which the culture of death instructs women to repress."

"Feminists could hardly suppress their glee when Lorena Bobbitt castrated her husband," Jones said. "What they did suppress was the connection between this bizarre and otherwise inexplicable act and the fact that her husband had forced her to abort their child."

This is only one example of what happens to a culture when millions of men and women have the memory of an aborted baby haunting their unconscious. Forbidden Grief tells us in story after story of "bizarre" behaviors. In one account we find a dorm party in which the students, many post-abortive, played "baby soccer."

The "baby soccer" story reminds one of a Stephen King novel with its broken heads of dolls being kicked around, their eyes gouged out, doll cheeks burned with cigarette butts and a boyfriend burning cigarette holes between the doll's legs as well as ripping off their legs. This account and others convinced Burke that abortion is connected to the horror games that our culture plays.

"The college students I witnessed playing 'baby soccer' were actually trying to master their trauma by belittling it through a game with decapitated baby doll parts," Burke said. "This amusement and mesmerizing allure to engage in the traumatic play is a symptom of our culture's need to overcome the horror � like the baby in the blender jokes, which all surfaced coincidentally after Roe v. Wade passed."

The baby soccer game and other horror genres are symptoms showing that millions of Americans need to overcome the "collective guilt" associated with abortion. Burke says, "As the group's enthusiasm for this game demonstrated, the acting out of post-abortion trauma can be contagious ... collective guilt and trauma have the capacity to disguise massive injustice."

According to Life Dynamic's Mark Crutcher, this massive injustice � in which millions have been killed � can be stopped by ending access to abortion-bound women. His booklet Access states that between 40 percent and 60 percent of American women of childbearing age have had at least one abortion. There is also a similar percentage of males who are post-abortive as well.

The booklet claims that the reason for our increasingly pro-abortion elective government is these percentages of persons who are in internal conflict. After violating the moral commandment of "Thou shall not kill," they vote pro-abortion, seeing the stance of the pro-life politicians as a personal attack on themselves.

"What I'm saying is that since the vast majority of elections are decided by slim margins, anything which influences even a small percentage of voters can be a powerful force," Crutcher said. "The point is that the potential impact is staggering. Moreover, this force grows considerably more powerful every day as another 4,000 abortions are racked up."

His booklet says studies have found that these women do not have abortions unless there is easy and local access to them. The vast majority of these women, according to these studies, will not travel long distances or pay large amounts of money for an abortion.

The way to defeat the abortion nightmare on the political front, according to Crutcher, is to sue doctors. And Steve Mosher, head of the Population Research Institute (PRI), says there are many legitimate reasons to sue. Says Mosher, "The failure to stop an abortion procedure on request, or even depriving women of their right to full information, can be construed as a denial of a woman's freedom of access to reproductive health."

Access says, "... our opponents' ability to continue fighting comes from a high abortion rate. That is what fuels their political machine. As long as they have $64,000 an hour to draw on, and the potential for at least 4,000 new pro-abortion voters every day, the legal status of abortion will not change."

According to Access, very few new doctors want to be abortionists, so malpractice suits make the abortion business even more unattractive. As fewer young doctors enter the field, access to abortions becomes costly and inaccessible.

The abortionists and the pro-abortion media seem to agree. In 1992, abortionist David Gritmes said, "Distance clearly matters in women's reproductive choices ... abortion rates were found to be inversely related to the distance to a provider."

In 1998, the New York Times Magazine said, "... abortion is retreating into a half-lighted ghetto of pseudonyms, suspicion and fear ... today 59% of all abortion doctors are 65 years old ... nearly two-thirds are beyond legal retirement age."

Access presents 81 such quotes from abortionist and pro-abortion publications to show, as it says, "access doesn't just influence abortion politics; it is the determining factor in which side wins and which side loses."

Along these lines, another way to end the abortion government is to reach out to the millions of post-abortion trauma voters with God's mercy, as Dr. Burke is doing. If even a small percentage changes sides, as Crutcher said, these slim margins in elections may start going to pro-life politicians. And it is never too late to start reaching out to persons in post-abortion trauma.

"We had one woman come on our retreat who was 87 years old. She suffered over half a century with this secret that she had never revealed to anyone until she came to Rachel's Vineyard. She was so relieved to be with others and to finally receive God's forgiveness," Burke said. "We can offer the Lord's mercy by not seeking to judge or condemn them, but by inviting them to thoughtfully reflect on their experience � by being the one ear that will listen, or the one heart that cries with them for the loss."

That 87-year-old woman's conversion represents millions of voters who could convert to voting for pro-life Republicans because the Democrats have steadfastly "positioned" themselves as the abortion party. The problem for the Republicans is that those women swing voters must be reached with psychological and religious help such as the 87-year-old experienced.

The way this can be done is for the Republican leadership and President Bush to attempt to pass legislation that offers psychological assistance to women with abortion trauma. The Democrats and media would go crazy, but if this legislation were positioned as a woman's right to reproductive health, then the Republicans would have the moral high ground.

Even if the legislation didn't pass, the mere publicity would get it into the consciousness of millions of woman in abortion trauma. The pro-life movement and conservative churches could then get into action and start offering those women the help they need.

After this is done, then Bush's Justice Department must prosecute all abortionists who, as PRI president Steve Mosher said, fail "to stop an abortion procedure on request, or even depriving women of their right to full information." PRI's recent pro-life conference introduced new legal campaigns to sue abortionist doctors who fail to provide complete information about the risks of abortion to their patients.

"We're working with these attorneys to inform more and more Americans of their rights," Mosher said. "It's time America does an 'about face' on the abortion industry. Women deserve genuine health and human rights, not violations so routinely committed by the abortion industry."

According to Pennsylvania's Dr. Chris Kahlenborn, 28 out of 37 studies worldwide show that induced abortion increases the risk of breast cancer. Thirteen of 15 studies done in the United States reported an increased risk. (See: abortionbreastcancer.com).

The increased risk of having breast cancer after an abortion is 50 percent if it's your first baby. If you're under 18 it goes to 150 percent. If you're under 18 and your baby is more than nine weeks old, your increased risk is 800 percent!

"As soon as there comes a woman who has breast cancer who has had an abortion and takes it to court, she's got a very strong case," Kahlenborn said. "The problem is a lot of young women when they do get breast cancer die from it so quickly � because it's so aggressive when you're young � they might not make it to court."

As Kahlenborn showed, this is not just about winning elections; it's about doing the right thing. Unfortunately or fortunately, for the Republicans this is also about politics. Any increase in abortions � as Crutcher graphically shows � leads to the demise of the Republican Party. The recent California elections showed that Gray Davis and the Democrats will not hesitate to play baby soccer-type mind games with women voters in order to win.

But the Republicans are running out of time. Their base is the conservative religious voter � as the recent Bill Simon win in California elections showed again � so they cannot allow the abortionists to have the "$64,000 an hour to draw on, and the potential for at least 4,000 new pro-abortion voters every day." As Crutcher said, this is "the determining factor in which side wins and which side loses."

The party of Lincoln must make a choice. They can become like the Whigs, who kept compromising on the issue of slavery until they were replaced before the Civil War by the Republicans. Or they can stand firm, like Lincoln, and limit the spread of a great evil.

Lincoln never attempted to abolish slavery directly, because he knew that if he limited its spread to only the South, then, like a disease, it would die a natural death. The Democrats � the slavery party � knew this, too. That is why they started the Civil War.

(The South was correct in its claim that it had the constitutional right to secede, and it had the Founding Fathers' idea of federalism to back its states' rights claims. This is what gave the South the moral courage to fight a great war.)

The Democrats � the abortion party � know also that the abortion industry will die a natural death if limited in its ability to exploit women. But they will not start a civil war on this issue, because they are cowards and have no moral high ground.

Can anybody imagine Teddy Kennedy and company having the courage to fight for anything more than six more years of luxury at the taxpayers' expense?

So Bush can go down in history as another Lincoln. (Lincoln was considered dumber by the media of his day than our present media consider President Bush.) All that Bush has to do is not attempt to abolish abortion, but rather limit its spread by protecting women's health and human rights as well as letting women in abortion trauma know that he and others are there offering help to free them from their nightmare of abortion.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Fred Martinez. "How Ending the Abortion Nightmare Could Make Bush the Next Lincoln." NewsMax.com (May 6, 2002).

This article reprinted with permission from Fred Martinez. Articles by Fred Martinez can be found on Conservative Monitor.

THE AUTHOR

Fred Martinez is staff religion editor of the Conservative Monitor and a frequent contributor to the San Francisco Faith, a Northern California newspaper. He can be reached at MrtnzFred@aol.com.

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