What Effect does Abortion have on Families?

Lisa Musil's Story:

..... Lisa, who is now 45 years old, said that at the age of 19 she was a hairdresser and living with her boyfriend in Southern California when she discovered she was pregnant. She said she was terrified. She felt she had no one to talk with about her pregnancy and was too frightened to admit it to anyone.

“I had my whole life ahead of me,” she said. “I felt there was nothing else I could do.”

When she was almost three months into her pregnancy she went to an abortion clinic in Inglewood, California and arranged for her baby’s life to be ended. But instead of bringing the crisis to a close, it only opened the door to years of further and deeper difficulty. “I felt such agonizing pain in my heart that I tried to cover it by becoming involved in drugs, alcohol, partying, and a promiscuous lifestyle,”

Pressure to Abort

.... In some countries, insurance companies have refused to cover a child who has health problems that the parents knew about before the birth of the child. From the perspective of some insurance companies and doctors, a child with a physical imperfection is a financial liability. In a society where abortion is both perfectly legal and often viewed as a first resort, physicians fear legal liability if they do not forcefully tell a pregnant women she may deliver a less than perfect child.

But some women of various political, religious, and cultural traditions are fighting the trend. Rather than blindly accepting the counsel of the medical profession, these women are choosing to refuse to abort their children. Tankard Reist relates the stories of 19 women who chose to continue their pregnancies despite intense pressure from the medical community and even their families and friends to abort their unborn children.