When Abortion Isn’t a Choice: Parents Coerce Minors Into Abortions

By Sarah Terzo
Live Action News

Much has been written about women who are coerced by their partners into having abortions. But minors are also pressured into abortions by their parents. One study found that 18% of minors whose parents found out about their pregnancies were coerced into abortions, with 6% of these minors reporting physical violence.

JoAnne Crough, professional counselor at Meier Clinics in Pittsburgh, says of forced abortions:

This happens more often than you might think. In most cases it’s the teen or woman’s parents who suggest this way of dealing with the pregnancy. They make it clear that an abortion will “solve everything.” They typically keep the entire process as secretive as possible. 

The young woman in this situation is extremely vulnerable to being coerced to make the others in her life happy. She has upset those closest to her with the news of her pregnancy. She feels confusion, shame, and fear. She becomes isolated from other forms of support. Combined, these put tremendous pressure on her to comply.(1)

READ: I was coerced into an abortion at Planned Parenthood by my baby’s father, and I wish I could go back and undo it

Ruth, who became an alcoholic after she aborted her baby, describes forcing her teenage daughter, who was an incest victim, to have an abortion:

I continued drinking and my husband took custody of the kids. He got drunk one night, molested my daughter Rosemarie, and got her pregnant. I believed there was a chance the baby would have birth defects, so I used that to justify my insistence that she have an abortion. She didn’t want an abortion so she ran away. We had her picked up and went before a judge who agreed with me that an abortion would be the best thing under the circumstance. Rosemarie finally relented and had an abortion. 

Later when she married, she lost three babies due to an incomplete cervix. That was really hard for me because I felt it was more retribution.… I bought into a lie and convinced myself it wasn’t a baby until it took a breath. That way I could justify my own abortion and forcing my daughter to have one too.(2)

In an article in People magazine, a young woman recalls being forced into an abortion at age 12:

When my mother found out she went through the ceiling. She helped me make my decision. I remember her words, “I want what you want as long as what you want is what I want. And what I want is an abortion.”

Pro-life feminist Frederica Mathewes-Green tells the story of a young woman’s forced abortion:

Becky says that she had at first resolved to have the baby. But her mother took her to a counselor, ordering her to wait in the reception room while the two of them conferred. When they called Becky in, she was told that the counselor and her mother had agreed that Becky should have an abortion. Her mom added, “If you continue this pregnancy, you can’t live in my house.”

Becky was stunned, but at a loss for alternatives. She had a vague idea that there might be places for rejected pregnant women to go – “there were some Catholic maternity homes, somewhere” – but had neither the resources nor the self-confidence to track down that possibility. She had the abortion. Eight years later, she is still grieving: “I was already attached to that baby.”(3)

Live Action News continues here

Voices for Life is an e-publication dedicated to informing and educating the public on pro-life and pro-family issues. To read our Mission Statement, use this link.  Follow us on Facebook, Google, and Pinterest.  Help us spread the pro-life message by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks.

Pregnant, need help or know someone who does?  

National Hotline: Call 1-800-712-HELP or Text 'HELPLINE' to 313131.
In Southeast Penna:  Call the Community Women's Center at  215-826-8090

If you or someone you know is suffering after abortion, confidential non-judgmental help is available.  Call Project Rachel's national toll-free number 888-456-HOPE (4673) or visit hopeafterabortion.org. 

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

Voices for Life is an e-publication dedicated to informing and educating the public on pro-life and pro-family issues. To read our Mission Statement, use this link.  Follow us on Facebook, Google, and Pinterest.  Help us spread the pro-life message by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks.

Pregnant, need help or know someone who does?  

National Hotline: Call 1-800-712-HELP or Text 'HELPLINE' to 313131.
In Southeast Penna:  Call or text 610-626-4006  

If you or someone you know is suffering after abortion, confidential non-judgmental help is available.  Call Project Rachel's national toll-free number 888-456-HOPE (4673) or visit hopeafterabortion.org.