Nobody wants to have an abortion. Sara* didn’t. But when the Topeka senior was pregnant at 17, without health insurance and with three younger siblings to help provide for, abortion seemed the only answer. Her mom had gotten pregnant with her at 17, and Sara knew the poverty and neglect this had caused. She didn’t want to perpetuate the cycle.

“There was no way I was going to bring a kid into this,” she says. “It would not be nourished. It would not be loved. It would be a burden on me.”

Sara doesn’t regret her choice. The second her pregnancy ended was when her second chance at a good life began, she says. Rather than dwelling on the child she doesn’t have now, she is thankful for what she does have and she is proud to be the first person in her family to go to college. She hopes she’ll have children someday — when she’s ready.

Sara is far from alone in choosing abortion. Studies indicate that in the United States, 25 percent of pregnancies end in abortion. This amounts to more than 47 million abortions since the procedure became legal in 1973, and 50 percent of the women who undergo the procedure are in the 15 to 24 age range, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. These statistics show that — no matter how overly debated the issue may seem — the most important issues surrounding abortion deserve consideration, as do the experiences of those affected by them.

Joy Lawson, Olathe senior and president of Students for Reproductive Rights, says she has several friends who have had abortions and, like Sara, they don’t regret the choice — if they felt like they had a choice at all. Not every woman does, Lawson says. She adds that because not every woman can afford a child, abortion is something some must choose to sustain themselves. And about 1 percent of the time, abortions are performed because a woman is physically endangered by her pregnancy. Sometimes people concentrate too much on what abortion does to the fetus, Lawson says, and forget about the woman carrying it.

Anna* understands feeling that abortion is the only answer. When the Kansas City woman found she was pregnant during her senior year at KU, she didn’t consider other options. She didn’t want to think — all she wanted was to not be pregnant. Her fiancé agreed abortion was the right choice.

Immediately after the procedure Anna felt relief, but the feeling didn’t last. Within a few months she began to wish she hadn’t had the abortion. Regret hit especially hard years later, after she was married and had suffered several miscarriages. As she mourned the loss of these children she’d wanted, she also grieved for the life she’d chosen to end.

Now, 15 years after her abortion, Anna has two little boys and has been through a post-abortion healing process. She says she knows God has forgiven her, but this doesn’t mean the past never hurts.

“The one thing I’ll always remember is the moment she was taken from me,” she says of her aborted child. “And that was my doing — mine and my husband’s. I would do anything to protect my boys. It’s very hard to think I didn’t do that for her.”

Regret like this is not typical, says Vanessa Cullins, vice president for medical affairs at Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Women are more likely to experience psychological trauma after giving birth than after having an abortion, she says, adding that the women who are most likely to have negative emotional reactions to abortion are those who had psychological problems beforehand or who had to end a pregnancy they wanted. Numerous studies support her statement. One published in the American Journal of Psychiatry reports that up to 98 percent of the women it surveyed did not regret having abortions and would make the same choice again in similar circumstances.

But there are also numerous studies that say otherwise. One published in the American Journal of Psychiatry reports that 50 percent of the 500 post-abortive women it surveyed expressed negative emotions and that close to 10 percent had developed “serious psychiatric complications” since their abortions. Among the negative reactions to abortion that studies report are guilt, nervous disorders, sleep disturbances, regret, eating disorders, sexual dysfunctions, loss of self-esteem, drug and alcohol abuse, depression, thoughts of suicide and even suicide attempts.

Pat Klausner, the program coordinator of Project Rachel, an outreach program for women suffering after having abortions, has witnessed some of these reactions in women she has worked with. She says she’s also seen abortion lead to failed relationships. Often the emotional trauma caused by an abortion is too much for a relationship to withstand, she says.

Unlike the women Klausner has worked with, Melinda* hasn’t experienced any emotional burden from her abortion. When the senior at the University of Missouri-Kansas City was pregnant two years ago, she already had a 5-year-old and didn’t want to double her difficulties as a single mother. Plus, she had her son to think about.

“I felt that I had made a commitment to be the best parent I could to him under less than ideal circumstances, and that having another child at that time would have broken that commitment,” she says.

She adds that although she hadn’t understood the repercussions of having a child when she’d had her son, by the time she was pregnant again she knew them well. She says her decision to have an abortion had a lot to do with her being more mature than she was at 16 and with her desire to finish school and to give her son the best future possible.

Even when women, like Melinda, do not suffer emotionally from abortion, their physical health may be at risk. The National Cancer Institute does not recognize a link between abortion and breast cancer. Some studies indicate, however, that a woman who aborts her first pregnancy increases her risk of breast cancer by up to 50 percent. Other risks include infection, hemorrhage, uterine damage and cervical damage, which the National Abortion Federation acknowledges, but says occur in fewer than 1 percent of cases.

Other studies report higher occurrences of these complications. One published in The Lancet, a British medical journal, found that of more than 1,000 women who underwent closely regulated hospital abortions, 27 percent acquired post-abortion infections. Another, published in Family Planning Perspectives journal, found that abortion led to cervical lacerations in 22 percent of the women it studied. This damage can weaken the cervix and cause a woman to miscarry or prematurely deliver future children — if she can conceive again at all. Three to 5 percent of post-abortive women are left sterile., according to a study published in the British Medical Journal.

Women turn to abortion because they see it as something that will help them, but these possible physical and psychological consequences raise a question as to whether it actually does, says Carol Everett, author of the books Blood Money and The Scarlet Lady: Confessions of a Successful Abortionist. In the 1970s and 80s, Everett owned several abortion clinics in the Dallas area. For her and her colleagues, she says, performing abortions wasn’t about helping women. Rather, it was about how much money they could make — even when this meant selling abortions to women who weren’t pregnant. Everett says that in 1983, she was on target to make $260,000. Once the additional clinics she’d planned were up and running, she says she expected to take home $1 million a year.

When money was all that mattered, Everett says, she could look beyond the destruction she witnessed every day in her clinics. Seeing a baby’s form on a sonogram, seeing it pull away from the instruments inserted into its mother’s womb, piecing the body parts back together after the abortion to make sure no parts had been left inside the mother — these left her no room to believe the unborn was only a glob of tissue, she says. Witnessing physical complications and emotional devastation left her no room to believe abortion could be a woman’s best option. But when money spoke — loudly — these realities couldn’t make her abandon the practice.

What did make her leave it behind, she says, was becoming a Christian and believing she’d received validation from God that he wanted her out of the business. Now Everett runs an outreach that helps women deal with unplanned pregnancies in ways other than abortion.

“There are no words to describe how bad abortion really is,” she says.

Despite Everett’s testimony concerning her motives, not all abortion providers are more concerned with money than with helping women, says Peter Brownlie, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri. Abortions may be pricey (procedures offered at Planned Parenthoods in this area range from $375 to $2,000), but there are much easier ways for a physician to make money than through abortion, Brownlie says. Doctors that provide abortions face significant personal costs. They may be harassed, ostracized and marginalized, but they choose their work anyway, because they see it as a service that needs to be offered — even if it’s not the most desirable one.

“Nobody wants to have an abortion,” Brownlie says. “People decide to end a pregnancy because, while it’s not an attractive thing to do, it’s the best of the options they have available. It’s sort of the least-worst.”

There’s no one factor that determines whether a person should have an abortion, he says. Women and men faced with unexpected pregnancies must deal with many issues in deciding what to do about them, including the nature of their relationships, their aspirations and their economic situations.

Despite the complexity of the decisions people must make in dealing with unplanned pregnancies, however, all the debate of the rightness or wrongness of abortion can be whittled down to a single question. That is not, Brownlie says, a question of when life begins. Sperm and egg are alive. The fetus they create is living. The fundamental question, rather, is at what stage is that emerging life human? Spiritually human? Legally CONTINUED FROM PAGE 11

believe the unborn was only a glob of tissue, she says. Witnessing physical complications and emotional devastation left her no room to believe abortion could be a woman’s best option. But when money spoke — loudly — these realities couldn’t make her abandon the practice.

What did make her leave it behind, she says, was becoming a Christian and believing she’d received validation from God that he wanted her out of the business. Now Everett runs an outreach that helps women deal with unplanned pregnancies in ways other than abortion.

“There are no words to describe how bad abortion really is,” she says.

Despite Everett’s testimony concerning her motives, not all abortion providers are more concerned with money than with helping women, says Peter Brownlie, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri. Abortions may be pricey (procedures offered at Planned Parenthoods in this area range from $375 to $2,000), but there are much easier ways for a physician to make money than through abortion, Brownlie says. Doctors that provide abortions face significant personal costs. They may be harassed, ostracized and marginalized, but they choose their work anyway, because they see it as a service that needs to be offered — even if it’s not the most desirable one.

“Nobody wants to have an abortion,” Brownlie says. “People decide to end a pregnancy because, while it’s not an attractive thing to do, it’s the best of the options they have available. It’s sort of the least-worst.”

There’s no one factor that determines whether a person should have an abortion, he says. Women and men faced with unexpected pregnancies must deal with many issues in deciding what to do about them, including the nature of their relationships, their aspirations and their economic situations.

Despite the complexity of the decisions people must make in dealing with unplanned pregnancies, however, all the debate of the rightness or wrongness of abortion can be whittled down to a single question. That is not, Brownlie says, a question of when life begins. Sperm and egg are alive. The fetus they create is living. The fundamental question, rather, is at what stage is that life human? Spiritually human? Legally human? Deserving of the same rights as the woman carrying it? These, he says, are not questions science can answer.

Dianne Irving, a bench research scientist and philosopher, agrees that science does not answer all of these. She does believe, however, that both scientifically and philosophically, the immediate product of fertilization is human.

In her scholarly article “When Do Human Beings Begin?” Irving makes a distinction between a human being (which she says is defined by science) and a human person (which she says is defined by philosophy). She adds that believing a human person begins at any time other than conception requires a belief in a mind/body split that is “totally indefensible,” but spends a majority of this article addressing scientific, not philosophical, issues.

Biologically, Irving says, the product of conception is a human being. The single-cell zygote created at conception has 46 chromosomes — the number characteristic of humans. It produces specifically human proteins and enzymes. It, rather than its mother, directs its own growth and development. This shows that it is not merely a piece of its mother’s tissue, as does the fact that it is genetically different than both its mother and father.

An international committee of experts in human embryology — the Nomina Embryologica Committee — accepts these facts as proof that a human being begins at conception. The field of human embryology is required to follow the facts sanctioned by this committee, which means that every human embryology textbook teaches that the product of conception is biologically human.

Jill*, a Kansas City woman, knew all of this. She was a biology major. She’d taken a class in embryology. But when she was 20 and pregnant, none of this knowledge mattered. She closed her mind to everything except the fact that she had a crisis and had to fix it. Immediately following the abortion, she was able to convince herself she had.

“I think everyone is initially relieved, because the procedure is over, and you think the problem is over,” she says. “But it doesn’t take very long to recognize from now on, you’re going to have to play a different game in your head. Now you have to pretend it was the right thing, though you know it wasn’t.”

Jill pretended her abortion was right for 20 years, she says, and suffered the entire time. She says her husband, who is the father of the aborted child, suffered as much as she did. The abortion was a breach of everything they’d created together, she says, and the stress their decision placed on their relationship was immense.

Unlike many relationships affected by abortion, however, Jill’s survived. Because it did, she can speak to the fact that psychologically, abortion can harm men as much as it can women.

“I don’t know how we made it,” she says. “It has to be by the grace and mercy of God. It’s a unique position to be in, to know where the guy is and what he’s going through.”

It wasn’t until she and her husband acknowledged they’d made a mistake that they could receive forgiveness from God and begin to heal, both individually and as a couple. Now, whenever Jill shares her story, she encourages people not to react hastily to a crisis pregnancy — because the decision will be there for a lifetime.

“Don’t hurry,” Jill advises anyone in the position to have an abortion. “It’s your life, and you are worth a well-thought-out response.”

ABORTION PROCEDURES

According to data from the Alan Guttmacher Institute, about 90 percent of abortions are performed in the first trimester of pregnancy. The proper procedure is determined by how many weeks pregnant a woman is.

First Trimester

Mifepristone (formerly known as RU486) and Misoprostol: This medical abortion, which involves two pills, causes the uterus to expel the embryo.

Early Vacuum Aspiration: In this surgical abortion, the doctor inserts a syringe into the uterus and suctions out the embryo.

Suction Curettage: A suction machine connects to tubing that the doctor inserts into the uterus. The suction pulls the fetus apart and out of the mother. This procedure may be performed into the beginning of the second trimester.

Second and Third Trimesters

Dilation and Evacuation (D&E;): The doctor uses forceps to pull the fetus out of the uterus in parts.

Dilation and Extraction (D&X;): This is also called partial-birth abortion. Medication causes the cervix to dilate and labor to begin. The doctor begins to remove the fetus from the womb, feet first. He or she inserts a sharp object into the base of the skull, then places a suction catheter into the opening and extracts the fetus’ brain.

Source: www.pregnancycenters.org

LIFE AFTER CHOOSING LIFE

For Monica Dutcher, time and finances are always a strain. But the Cody, Wyo., sophomore has never regretted refusing to have an abortion when she was 17 — even though her boyfriend left her because of it and has never wanted to meet his daughter.

For her first two years of college, Dutcher went to school full time and had two part-time jobs. Now, although she’s down to one job, her days are packed with classes, work and caring for her daughter from 7 in the morning, when she takes 4-year-old LexiAnne to school, till 9 at night, when she puts her to bed. After that it’s time for homework — and the next day it all begins again.

“It’s tough, but definitely worth it,” she says. “To raise a child is amazing.”

Unlike Dutcher, Mary Crouch wasn’t up to taking on the responsibilities of motherhood during college. That’s why she’d chosen never to have sex. But after being raped while studying abroad in Italy, the St. Louis University senior found she was pregnant.

Abortion wasn’t a possibility for Crouch. Despite the awful circumstances that caused her pregnancy, she says she couldn’t end it knowing she had a real person inside her. Because she wasn’t ready to be a mother, she knew adoption was her best option.

Crouch gave birth to Abraham on April 6, 2005. She had decided early in her pregnancy that she wanted a couple in her hometown to adopt him — one she’d known for years and who hadn’t been able to have children of their own.

After carrying Abraham for nine months, there was grief in giving him away, Crouch says. But she knows it was best for both of them. She knows, too, that changing nine months of her life to have him was by far a better choice than abortion would have been.

“Holding this child that at first I thought was a mistake — there’s nothing that says to me it would have been better to end life,” she says. “I can’t imagine him not existing. I think he was as much a person when he was conceived as he is to me now.”

DEVELOPMENT OF THE UNBORN

Although not a complete list, these are some of the things that occur in the unborn during the first months of life.

Conception: The 46 chromosomes present in the zygote determine sex, eye color, hair color, height, facial features and — to some extent — intelligence and personality.

Three weeks after conception: Heart begins to beat.

Four weeks after conception: Basic facial features begin to appear.

Six weeks after conception: Fingers and toes form.

Seven weeks after conception: The embryo begins moving.

Eight weeks after conception: The brain produces almost 250,000 new neurons every minute.

10 weeks after conception: Fingernails and toenails appear.

11 weeks after conception: The fetus flexes and kicks.

14 weeks after conception: The fetus begins making facial expressions and may have frequent bouts of hiccups.

16 weeks after conception: The fetus begins to hear noises such as the mother’s heart beating.

21 weeks after conception to birth: The fetus may be able to survive outside the womb if it were to be born prematurely.

Source: The Mayo Clinic

RESOURCES AND SERVICES

Advocate Pregnancy Center

1 Riverfront Plaza, Suite 100 (inside The LEO Center)

785-842-6499

The center offers free pregnancy tests, sonograms and pregnancy counseling, as well as free baby clothing and other items for newborns. It also provides post-abortion counseling, says director Barbara Watkins.

Birthright

204 W. 13th St.

785-843-4821

800-550-4900 (toll-free 24-hour hotline)

Birthright offers free pregnancy tests, as well as free baby clothes, formula and diapers. It educates women on resources available to them, such as programs that help single mothers financially, and helps them connect to these resources. Most of all, says director Tracy Waring, it tries to be a listening, caring ear. Birthright is open only part time, but women can call the toll-free hotline any time.

Planned Parenthood

2108 W. 27th St. # J

785-832-0281

Lawrence’s Planned Parenthood offers pregnancy tests for $18 and medical abortions up to nine weeks of pregnancy. Clinics also provide counseling, says Peter Brownlie, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri.

Project Rachel/ Project Joseph

7315 E. Frontage Rd., Ste. 110

Shawnee Mission, KS 66204

913-621-2199

These outreach programs provide support groups for women and men who are suffering after abortion. They are confidential, says program coordinator Pat Klausner.