We Wrestle With Death

Philip G. Ney, MD, MA, FRCPC, FRANZCP, Rpsych

12/3/1983

By their experience everyone in the helping and healing professions perceives there are anti-life forces which they battle when wrestling with disease and death.

An increasing number of God-fearing physicians and nurses and others are beginning to question the general drift in medical morality toward an ethic which seems to be more often promoting easy death than treating those with difficult lives. Unfortunately there are few who are attempting to grapple with one of the most insidiously evil killers of humanity. Abortion

Wholesale abortion is the latest, and possible the greatest manifestation of death-dealing anti-life forces. Abortion is made to seem easy, painless and generally beneficial to all, but it may be the greatest sin humanity has every committed.

In North American, abortion results in one quarter of pregnancies ending in the death of the baby . In the last ten years approximately 370 million unborn babies of this world were deliberately killed. Almost all were killed by doctors who argued that it was good medical practice. Yet there are very few medical indications for abortion and there are no purely psychiatric indications for abortion.[1] In fact the best evidence indicates that psychiatric illness is a contraindication to abortion. The more severely ill the psychiatric patient, the worse is her post-abortion psychiatric state.[2] According to one official psychiatric body, the justification of abortion using pseudo-psychiatric rubrics is practice to be deplored.[3] By ignoring the problems of abortion we are trying to avoid coming to grips with a major killer. We are forming a tacit pact with death, believing that if we ignore the threat we won’t be threatened.

When the Israelites of ancient times were threatened by the invading Assyrians they tried to ignore the real problems and ensure their safety by making an alliance with Egypt. Isaiah said very bluntly, “You’re making a deal with death but it won’t protect you.”[4] Like those Israelites we are attempting to make a short-term contract in order to protect our comforts and lifestyle. But as Isaiah predicted, the threat won’t go away just because we believe it isn’t there.

Demographic data is beginning to show that this implicit deal with death is not working for us. Abortion has not solved any individual or social problem. Personal and interpersonal problems are worsening, not improving. Rates of rape, wife-beating, divorce, child abuse and suicide are persistently rising.

In countries with negative population growth, neither tightening the abortion laws nor providing monetary incentives seem to reverse the disinclination to have children. From an ecological point of view it appears that we may have undermined an important species-preserving mechanism and the trend may not be reversible.

As Isaiah prophesied, our complicity with death will not protect us. We will be swept away by the very horror with which we are refusing to grapple.

Survival of the Species

Our species is sustained by three God-given factors that are built into every human; hope, sex and a parent/child mutual care system. If anti-life forces could distort those drives, humanity would be threatened.

Hope

Having children drives us to search for life support. The search for life and a better life is sustained by the hope that more abundant life is possible. Thus, children representing the future of humanity are important, both as a cause and as a source of hope. Anti-life forces seek to quench hope by devaluing and destroying children.

Children are now considered the cause of the world’s greatest evil: overpopulation. Nowadays it is thought to be individually beneficial and socially responsible to be a childless couple.[5] Yet without children the world will become increasingly pessimistic and self-destructive.

A child not only demands that we hope, but as he grows he insists we mature. With a declining fertility rate, there is an increasingly large proportion of people who now have little reason to hope and less to drive them toward maturity. Couples may become increasingly resentful of children, their or others, who interfere with their lifestyle.

Sex

Sex is the most powerful psycho-biological drive given to mankind. It has enabled the survival of the species by overcoming any lust for power, greed for money, ambition for territory, or determination for fame. Since anti-life forces have not been able to destroy that drive they have distorted sex. With the easy availability of contraceptives, the object of sex has become the orgasm: the more the better. The “great climax” is what many people want, and they want it more than they want children. Children were once every couple’s greatest joy and prize. Now they are an inconvenience to the pursuit of sexual pleasure.

Nowadays, the sex which results in pregnancy ends with the death of one-third to one-quarter of all the unborn children. While most of the media strives to increase the expectation of pleasure from sex, other information tells men that their sex ends with killing a very small, but recognizable fellow human. Is it possible the association of sex with death is resulting in a higher rate of impotence and homosexuality?

Parent/Child Bond

From recent research it appears that abortion results in depression during a subsequent pregnancy[6] and immediately post-partum[7] The depression from an abortion or loss of a previous child appears to delay a mother’s preparation for the newborn by diminishing her anticipation of a new child.[8] Abortion of the first pregnancy seems to especially truncate the mother-infant bonding mechanism so that it does not develop as well in subsequent pregnancies.

Parents have real difficulty adjusting to the loss of their newborn[9] and grief is not significantly related to birth weight or duration of life of the dead infant.[10] Though longer and more intense mourning was seen in mothers for whom pregnancy was a positive experience, mothers grieved whether an infant lived one hour or twelve days, whether he weighed 3000 grams or a non-viable 580 grams and whether the pregnancy was planned of unplanned.

To be able to bond well a mother must have finished mourning the loss of previous babies.[11] Mourning is more difficult when there has been an ambivalent relationship with the deceased. It is difficult to complete the mourning of an aborted infant and thus depression which interferes with mother-infant bonding may persist for many years. Less well-bonded infants are more subject to abuse and neglect.[12] To facilitate mourning and pave the way for attachment to the next infant during pregnancy, it is now recommended that parents hold the dead infant from stillbirths, miscarriages or abortions.[13]

Physical Contact

Mary Ainsworth[14] clearly describes how a child’s early physical contact with his mother builds into him confidence to explore the environment and to become independent of his mother. Without that confidence, education and maturing are interfered with.

Some mothers who have had an abortion develop an aversion to touching babies. This may be a factor that interferes with the development of intelligence and maturity. An aversion to touching babies may be part of the reason why more young couple so desperately cling to each other, resenting anything that might disturb their relationship or lifestyle.

Restraint of Rage

Almost every parent is periodically enraged by his or her child’s irritating behavior. They would more frequently enact that rage were it nor for built-in restraints to aggression directed at dependent and helpless human life.

Is it possible that women who have struggled to overcome their aversion to killing newborn babies by abortion are less restrained when it comes to enacting rage toward visible babies?

Need Awareness

The ability to parent depends upon a mother’s and father’s ability to recognize the subtle and changing needs of their infant. If that responsiveness has been weakened, the baby will be neglected. Small unborn babies have been dehumanized with the arguments that the fetus is not a person. Up to 50 percent of fertile North American men and women have learned to deny the reality of their helpless unborn offspring with its needs for protection and care. The increased ability to deny this response to the infant’s helplessness may make it harder for them to see the dependent needs of the baby they hold in their arms.

Father’s Attachment

Under normal circumstances father become increasingly attached to and protective of their child during a pregnancy.[15] Now that men have no legal right to restrain a woman requesting an abortion, they cannot protect their unborn baby. Since their unborn baby might be destroyed at any time, they hesitate to become involved in the pregnancy and attached to that baby. Rather than suffer a possible loss, the father may remain aloof and unconcerned. Thus, he is less likely to be committed to, and caring of his child after it is born.

Also, there may be a growing resentment toward women which may result in more wife-beating. Spouse abuse appears to result in child abuse.

Child Abuse and Abortion

If any of these hypotheses are correct, one would expect that as rates of abortion increase, the rates of abortion increase, the rates of child abuse and neglect by both parents will also increase. In Canada, the provinces with the lowest rate of abortion have the lowest rate of child abuse. Those areas with the highest rates of abortion have increasingly higher rates of child abuse.[16]

In the United States child abuse has become the number one killer of small infants.[17] In the next decade abuse is expected to kill 50,000 American children and leave 300,000 permanently maimed.[18]

It has been argued that abortion is necessary to prevent the birth of unwanted children who will be abused.[19] Yet, the best evidence indicates that wanted children are more likely to be abused.[20] Moreover, there is support for a hypothesis that suggests women who have aborted unborn infants are more likely to batter small children.

Breaking the Taboo

From time immemorial it was taboo to attack the helpless, defenceless, wounded or female in the species. Even in times of uncontrolled, unleashed aggression or war, it is unnatural and an atrocity to attack children. But society is legally sanctioning and paying for the destruction of helpless life on a massive scale. That taboo has been broken by so many people that there are few who can respond with protective concern to the deaths of the unborn.

Conditioned Avoidance

Every time one of those who still could respond contemplates rescuing the baby that is about to be aborted, they think of all the impossible obstructions. Although the helplessness of the baby demands a response, I can become very anxious in facing the disapproval of my neighbourhood and colleagues. Whenever I decide, “No, I couldn’t” and turn away; I relax. That relaxation rewards me for avoiding a difficult but necessary protest. My avoidance of doing anything about abortion, even discussing or thinking about it becomes a conditioned response. The voiceless plight of the baby is then no longer effective in evoking my individual outrage. So many millions of people have a conditioned avoidance to tackling the problem of abortion the current practice is unlikely to change.

Fear of Ridicule

Almost everyone is basically pro-species survival and therefore pro-life, but most are afraid of confronting the issues. The media have given the false impression abortion is good and aborting is popular. To be outspokenly pro-life is unpopular. Behind the fear of ridicule there is the fear of losing one’s lifestyle, one’s income, one’s comfort, one’s social status, one’s health and one’s life. Why are so few prepared to risk even their popularity for the lives of the unborn? Are we controlled by fear?

The Net Effect

If these observations and deductions are correct, then the species is endangered. Statistics for the current practice of abortion show that in countries with long periods of abortion the negative population growth is not stopped by tightening the abortion laws.[21] Even when turn-around monetary incentives have been used by Communist countries there is little desire to have children. The species may be endangered by denying the basis of hope, distorting the drive to propagate and interrupting parent-child mutuality. Although we know other species have become extinct, we tend to assume humans will live forever and therefore we aren’t concerned about the delicate balances of human ecology. But is it possible anti-life forces have brought a life and anti-life imbalance which threatens the species?

Recent technology has developed the morning-after pill and prostaglandin suppositories.[22] Now every woman can do her own abortion in her own home and attempt it at any stage of pregnancy. When it becomes common practice there will be many medical complications of incomplete abortions and hemorrhages. There will be even more psychiatric disorders arising from the impossible from the impossible conflict of a woman trying to decide whether to flush the struggling live infant down the toilet or rush it to the hospital for resuscitation.

If the government outlaws prostaglandins they will be sold by drug dealing syndicates on the black market and they will be poor quality. If self-procured abortions remain illegal, women will not rush to the hospital and report their incomplete abortion. For these two reasons there will be tremendous pressure on the government to legalize the sale of prostaglandins and to decriminalize self-induced abortions.

The natural consequence of wholesale abortion may become a continuing, irreversible population decline. Those robust and resilient species-preserving mechanisms that God built into us a re protecting us from the inevitable consequences of stubborn stupidity. Though His mercy endures forever, His righteousness becomes apparent when we continue to ignore His natural laws. Maybe the natural consequences of world wide killing of unborn babies will be an irreversible population decline or global war.

Approximately 50 percent of North American women of childbearing age are procuring abortions and 50 percent of fertile men are coercing or colluding with them in an abortion.[23]

Since the greatest crime is to destroy one’s own helpless offspring, the accumulating guilt will be overwhelming. Men and women may welcome war to divert them form their own inner suffering. To be killed would be a relief and to kill would be nothing new.

Though every human life should have the right to exist independent of its quality or wantedness, we have gone beyond the point where tightening abortion laws will save the lives of unborn babies. The best way to gain the people’s desire to protect life is to impress on everyone the fantastic value of every life, to uphold, defend and enhance the life of every human.

May God grant us sufficient wisdom to see that to allow babies to die is to die ourselves. To kill those most helpless is to make us helpless to the attack of others. Only when we love God can we love our brothers and sisters and only when we love them can we love ourselves. For life and love come from God. With Him we can have life and life abundantly.