Men, Violence and Forced Abortion

 

Violence and forced abortion here at home

 

By Dave Andrusko

If the topic weren’t so deadly, the online headline for an op-ed by Gary Bauer and Daniel Allott would almost be amusing: “Men influence abortion decisions, too.”
The headline in USA Today’s print edition was better–“Men can impose will in abortions”–but it’s not until you get to the subheadline that you grasp what Bauer and Allott are writing about: husbands and boyfriends “sometimes resort to violence.”

The op-ed piece uses the very stories we have written about in NRL News Today. A man who tricked his girlfriend into taking an abortifacient, two women who were brutally murdered by their boyfriends, and the hideous case of Ariel Castro who allegedly kept three girls captive for a decade. Timothy McGinty, the lead prosecutor in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, has said he wants a grand jury to indict Castro for aggravated murder for each of the five unborn babies who died when their mother was allegedly starved and beaten by Castro.

Unfortunately, we know of these, and similar atrocities, against pregnant girls and women. What Bauer and Allott add that is particularly helpful is research from the Guttmacher Institute, the ex-officio think tank for the abortion movement, that illustrates how widespread intimidation and violence to force women to abort against their will.
For example a 2012 Guttmacher study

“found that 7% of women who had abortions experienced sexual or physical abuse by the child’s father in the year before her abortion. This compares with about 1% of women who suffer similar abuse in the general population. Seven percent might not sound like much. But a small percentage of a huge number is still a large number. That 7% represents 84,000 aborting women a year.

“The study concluded, ‘Women with abusive partners are substantially over-represented among abortion patients.’

“A 2010 Guttmacher study found that more men than is commonly acknowledged exert ‘reproductive control’ over their girlfriends and wives. Among women with abusive partners, more than 70% reported that their partners used verbal threats, physical aggression or birth control sabotage to force her to become pregnant, to abort or, in a surprising number of cases, both.

“In a 2005 Guttmacher report examining the reasons why women abort, 14% said their ‘husband or partner wants me to have an abortion,’ and 14% said they received insufficient ‘support from husband or partner.’ Two percent said their ‘husband or partner is abusive to me or my children.’”

Op-eds have strict word limits, but had there been more room they could have taken the theme of women coerced into having abortions in another direction: those many, many young girls who are the victims of statutory rape, some of whom will be driven by those men out of states with parental notification laws into states that don’t.

The op-ed begins with this provocative but entirely accurate first paragraph: “Forced abortion is not isolated to China and a few other countries where reproduction and state violence go hand in hand. It is widespread in America, too.”
The point needs to be made, and often. If all the categories mentioned above (and still others) were combined, the average reader would be stunned how many women have abortions involuntarily.

Source: NRLC News