Coerced Abortions: The Hidden Abuse of Women Feminists Won’t Address

By Colin Lecroy
Life News

It’s no myth: Parents and partners use violence, threats, and emotional manipulation to force mothers to abort against their wishes.

While traveling recently, I stopped for lunch with a new relative in her mid sixties who recently married into my family. From across the table, the woman, who had met me twice before, learned that I worked for a pro-life organization and began to tell me of how, decades ago, she’d placed her newborn son for adoption. And then she told me about how her mother tried to force her to abort him and almost succeeded.

Although some within the abortion industry acknowledge the problem of coerced abortion, abortion supporters downplay the scope of the problem by focusing almost exclusively on women who face pressure not to abort. Abortion proponents are known to allude to force and coercion in the context of abortion restrictions and their effects. 

Activists dressed as characters from The Handmaid’s Tale have recently taken to protesting legislative hearings on abortion restrictions; they claim that pro-life laws are no different from the forced breeding program described in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel.

But when it comes to legislation to prevent coerced abortion, abortion proponents trivialize the problem as a “myth,” as Think Progress’s Tara Culp-Ressler recently put it in her article “Anti-Choice Activists Use Myth of ‘Coerced Abortion’ to Push for Restricting Women’s Rights.” 

A legislative counsel for NARAL Pro-Choice Texas recently described a proposal to protect women forced to experience abortion as “creating a problem where none exists to push yet more abortion legislation . . . that is not needed.”

I recently came across the story of a Georgia woman’s lawsuit against her former pastor. The woman alleges that the pastor began sexually abusing her when she was 15, twice impregnated her, and both times paid for her abortion.

 She contends that the pastor abused his leadership position in her church to force her “to do what he wanted.” When she became pregnant at the age of 16 as a result of the pastor’s statutory rape, the pastor posed as her father and procured an abortion for the girl.

The young woman’s story is not anomalous. On the contrary, coercion and force are hallmarks of the testimonies of countless women who’ve had abortions. The concept of coercion is not limited to the use of violence or threats of violence to force a woman to abort. 

To coerce means “to compel by force, intimidation, or authority, especially without regard for individual desire or volition” or “to dominate or control, especially by exploiting fear, anxiety, etc.” Thus, any selfish use of a power disparity — for example, the Georgia pastor-rapist’s social preeminence over his teenage parishioner — to compel a vulnerable woman into an abortion is morally objectionable.

The use of force and domestic violence to compel abortion is a widespread problem, especially in the domestic sex-trafficking industry and sometimes within families. 

But control can — and is — exerted without the use of violence in a multitude of ways. We use “coercion” to denote the process by which partners, family members, or others in a woman’s community selfishly pressure her to undergo an abortion she does not want.

Life News continues

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