TEN DIFFERENT TYPES OF "ABORTION SURVIVORS"
Editor's introduction.
For perfectly understandable, if regrettable, reasons, the depiction of the participants in the abortion debate in the popular press rarely moves beyond a set drama whose featured players are freedom-loving defenders of choice versus those Neanderthal right to lifers. How can it be otherwise when they don't know us, understand us, or empathize with us (or the unborn)?
But that doesn't excuse the rest of us from probing beyond the platitudes, from investigating abortion's incredible complexity. One area that can never be looked at carefully enough is what's called the "abortion survivor."
Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life produces any number of wonderful resources, including a very useful web page and a thoughtful newsletter. In a recent edition, the Priests for Life newsletter dealt with the issue of abortion survivors to an extent and in a depth that I had not seen for a long, long time. In my judgment, this is must reading.
If you take the time to read the following lengthy excerpt, you will be richly rewarded. Following that, I will add just a few words in conclusion:
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Priestly ministry in our day, especially to those born since Roe v. Wade, cannot ignore the phenomenon of "abortion survivors." What does growing up in a society that tells you, by law and by dominant cultural thinking, that your life was disposable and your birth was subject to the "choice" of someone else, do to one's psychological landscape?
How do the young view themselves and their peers in the light of the fact that "the word person... does not include the unborn"? (Roe v. Wade, at 158). Moreover, how does being an abortion survivor affect the way today's children and young adults hear the Gospel message of God's unconditional love?
Drs. Philip Ney and Marie Peeters Ney have done groundbreaking research in this area and have written specifically about the challenges of evangelizing abortion survivors.
They have identified 10 different types of abortion survivors:
1. Statistical survivors. These are people who survived in countries or cities where there is a statistically high probability that they would have been aborted. They come to know that the odds were definitely stacked against them. In some parts of Eastern Europe, the chances of being aborted are as high as 80%.
2. Wanted survivors. These are people whose parents carefully deliberated about whether or not to abort them. They may have calculated, consulted, and discussed the possibility.
3. Sibling survivors. These are people born into families where one or more of their siblings were aborted.
4. Threatened survivors. These are children whose parents have used abortion as a threat, even if they never considered it during the pregnancy: "You wretched, ungrateful child...I should have aborted you!"
5. Disabled survivors. These are people who, because of developmental defects or other circumstances, would usually be aborted. In fact, they often wonder whether their parents would have aborted them had they known about the defects.
6. Chance survivors. These are children who would have been aborted if the mother had been able to obtain the abortion. The abortion was prevented by a lack of money, time, permission, availability, etc.
7. Ambivalent survivors. These are children of parents who could not make up their minds about the abortion and delayed until it was too late. They are often caught up in their parents' continuing ambivalence, and can wonder whether they can still be terminated.
8. Twin survivors. These are people whose twin was aborted. Twins communicate, touch, and even caress each other in the womb. The loss of the twin by abortion is deeply felt and often causes the survivor to be suicidal.
9. Attempted murder survivors. These are people who survived an actual abortion attempt. Besides the physical harm that is often done, they suffer intense psychological struggles, nightmares, confused identities, and a fear of doctors.
10. Murdered survivors. These are children who survived an abortion for just a short period of time, and were subsequently killed by the abortion staff or left to die.
Abortion survivors, to put it simply, live on shaky ground. "If my mother could have aborted me, what is my life worth?" These individuals live with a sense of worthlessness and a feeling of impending doom. They suffer existential anxiety and survivor guilt.
They are "wanted" rather than "welcomed." When one is "wanted," he or she meets the needs or demands of another. When one is welcomed, on the other hand, his or her value is acknowledged despite others' reactions or attitudes. One abortion survivor wrote, "My parents always said they had wanted me. I often wonder what would have happened if they had not wanted me? I feel I must stay wanted. Being wanted means existing."
Another wrote, "I had no right to exist. I am still a child trying to find a place in this world...wandering around, carrying the weight of something on my shoulders. I had so many unanswered questions which I could not ask because nobody would answer and besides which I could not even formulate them. All my life I have been running, running away from death, no, from something worse than death."
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"Something worse than death." Now those are sobering, soul-chilling words. Of all the forests felled and vats of ink emptied to chronicle the battle over abortion, only a few saplings and a couple of pints worth of ink have been expended to help us understand the reach of abortion. This omission is a tragedy of untold proportions: Abortion is not, and never has been, exclusively about a woman and her unborn child.
There are husbands and grandparents and siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles. Whether she likes it or not, a pregnant woman is enmeshed in a web of relationships, and there is a tremor felt throughout it when the life of a grandchild, brother or sister, cousin, niece or nephew is taken.
I did a Today's News & Views ( www.nrlc.org ) last month about some marvelously intricate surgery performed on an unborn child. The baby would otherwise have been born with an anomaly so severe that his chances of living long were very slim. But even as I--a pro-life veteran--wrote the story I was astonished how much more real, more personal, more human that child was to me just because I continually used the name the parents gave him even before he (and his mother) underwent the surgery: "Jack."
Likewise, when we put the child's fate in the larger context--especially its gigantic effect on surviving siblings--we see the loss of that baby through new eyes. It's impossible to ever again think about abortion in the same way. Thank you, Drs. Ney, and thank you, Fr. Pavone for this marvelous article.