Why Abortion Is Not Women’s Health Care

How much money can an abortion clinic make by selling fetal tissue to a medical research company? It all depends. If you don’t use too much suction, and you can extract an “intact specimen” (that’s a clinical term for a fetus that is not butchered beyond recognition), then you might get $30 to $100 each for a tiny liver, thymus or brain stem.

Oh, and those fees are just for “shipping costs.”

These are just some of the grisly facts we learned during the past two weeks after conservative journalist David Daleiden posted a series of videos on YouTube alleging that Planned Parenthood is selling baby parts for profit. Planned Parenthood denies any wrongdoing while some Republicans in Congress have vowed to cut off federal funding from the organization.

These videos nauseated me when I realized how callous our nation has become about human life. I felt even sicker when President Obama made it clear he would stand behind Planned Parenthood—and veto any effort to defund it—because it provides “health care for women.”

I have always felt it was insane to claim that abortion promotes “women’s health” when the facts show the opposite. Abortion may be convenient for some women, and it has been legal in this country since 1973, but no health care provider can prove it is healthy to have an unborn child ripped or sucked out of a woman’s uterus before it is viable. Here are three reasons you can never convince me otherwise:

1. Abortion harms women physically and emotionally. Various studies in recent years, including one by Britain’s Royal College of Psychiatrists, show that women who have abortions become much more likely to develop cervical cancer, sterility, nervous disorders, sleep disturbances, eating disorders, suicidal thoughts and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Another study revealed that women with a history of abortion face higher rates of anxiety (34 percent higher) and depression (37 percent higher), heavier alcohol use (110 percent higher) and marijuana use (230 percent higher). It has also been shown that women who abort are twice as likely to become heavy smokers.

2. Abortion is sexist. It has always amazed me that women have campaigned the loudest for abortion rights, yet the majority of abortionists are men who profit off of this horrific procedure. It is also a fact that many women, including many pregnant teenage girls, are forced by their fathers or sex partners to have unwanted abortions—resulting in increased trauma for the mothers. Why are feminists not outraged by this?

In India, many families abort female infants because they don’t want girls. This is why there are skewed sex ratios—like 1,000 men for every 618 women—in India’s Daman and Diu regions. Even though sex-selective abortions were banned several years ago in India, many female babies are aborted or abandoned at birth because of gender discrimination. Why is there not a feminist outcry about this injustice?

Mother Teresa, who ministered most of her life in India, understood the pain abortion causes women. She said: “Abortion kills twice. It kills the body of the baby and the conscience of the mother. Abortion is profoundly anti-women. Three quarters of its victims are women: Half the babies and all the mothers.”

3. Abortion is racist. This is the ugly truth few of us are willing to face. African-Americans make up 12.6 percent of the U.S. population, but the Centers for Disease Control reports that black women accounted for 35.4 percent of all abortions in 2009. Of the 55.7 million abortions in the United States since 1973, about 17 million of aborted babies were black.

Abortion kills minority children at more than three times the rate of white children. Today, abortion is the leading cause of death for African-Americans, more than all other causes combined, including AIDS, violent crimes, accidents, cancer and heart disease.

So when people talk about Planned Parenthood promoting “health care for women,” I guess they only mean white women. Let’s not forget that Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was an avowed proponent of eugenics—the elimination of “unfit” races. She worked tirelessly to keep minorities supplied with birth control (even though she herself believed abortion should be avoided.)

This might explain why 62 percent of Planned Parenthood clinics are located in areas with high black populations.

It baffles me that our first African-American president would be OK with this, and that a mostly white male Congress would talk about “women’s health” when our nation is guilty of government-funded genocide.

J. Lee Grady is the former editor of Charisma. You can follow him on Twitter @leegrady. He is the author of 10 Lies Men Believe and other books. You can learn more about his ministry, The Mordecai Project, at themordecaiproject.org.