What Will It Take To Change Minds On Abortion?

The Planned Parenthood director of a Bryan, Texas, clinic, Abby Johnson, had a change of heart after viewing an ultrasound during an abortion. She's since joined a pro-life group and is touring the country and making television appearances explaining the reason for her decision.

Ms. Johnson had been with the clinic for 9 years, but her duties involved family planning and information on abortion programs. Although she'd seen ultrasounds before, she'd never witnessed any performed during an abortion and is unclear as to why she was asked to be in the procedure room that day.

"My job during the procedure was to hold the probe on the woman's abdomen," she said in an ABC News interview. "I could see the whole profile of the baby 13 weeks head to foot. I could see the whole side profile. I could see the probe. I could see the baby try to move away from the probe.

"I just thought, 'What am I doing?'" she said. "And then I thought, 'Never again.'" Ms. Johnson's reaction reminded me of an article I'd read many years ago in Esquire magazine. It was a page long and illustrated with a picture of what appeared to be a procedure room. It was written by a doctor passing by this room where an abortion was taking place. Another doctor had inserted a saline solution into the womb and the passing doctor viewed with interest the needle protruding from the patient. He watched as the needle started moving back and forth and then watched it move violently as the fetus fought for its life as the killing solution filled the womb.

The Esquire article was written not long after the passage of Roe v. Wade and the author of the article did not weigh in on the issue in depth other than to suggest that he was disturbed by the fetus's fight for life.

One has to wonder why there is so much hypocrisy and downright deception about this issue and why the truth is always muted. Many women still fall for the very lies about deadly illegal abortions that allowed Roe v. Wade to be sanctioned as law.

A co-founder of the National Abortion Rights Action League, Bernard Nathanson, wrote a revealing essay in his "Confessions of an Ex-abortionist." He wrote: "Repeating the big lie often enough convinces the public. The number of women dying from illegal abortions was around 200-250 annually. The figure we constantly fed to the media was 10,000. These false figures took root in the consciousness of Americans convincing many that we needed to crack the abortion law."

Ironically, Whoopi Goldberg is always at these pro-choice rallies holding a coat hanger as a warning of what would happen to women if Roe is overturned, yet she admits she survived such a procedure herself. A pro-choice group, Credo Action, is now circulating a petition to send coat hangers to Congress to protest adding the Stupak amendment to the health-care bill.

The original Jane Roe, Norma McCorvey, has admitted another lie that her handlers used: portraying her as a rape victim when she was not. Like Dr. Nathanson, Ms. McCorvey is now pro-life and has tried to get that ruling overturned.

It seems that whenever someone witnesses an actual abortion, deeply held opinions may be affected. Twelve states are now considering legislative restrictions that would require an ultrasound before a woman gets an abortion or would force a doctor to order one.

Naturally, feminists are up in arms over this proposed legislation, which they perceive is a slippery slope to banning abortions. "Cara," on the Web site feministing.com, writes: "It all seems to be about the poor little woman who doesn't understand what it means to be pregnant, or who will surely have a change of heart once she sees a blurry, cloudy image that I've never been able to personally make out. It's about forcing government into the decisions of doctors, trumping science with ideology, and attempting to take away the privacy of women. Indeed, it's about taking the focus off of women and their rights and yet again putting the fetus, this time literally, right in the front and center of the picture."

A love affair with the fetus; pro-lifers don't care about women, etc., are all lame accusations against pro-lifers that expose the ignorance of what being pro-life is all about.

Many of those involved in the movement have lived through the sad experience themselves and are aware of the traumatic and sometimes deadly effects of abortion. There are numerous Web sites that offer counseling to these women but feminist organizations refuse to consider it a widespread problem. They discount the statistics that suggest legal abortion may be even deadlier post Roe v. Wade.

Pro-lifers are more likely to research the connection between abortion and breast cancer because it might hinder support for the heavily taxpayer funded Planned Parenthood.

They refuse to consider that pregnancy causes immediate changes in a woman's breast to prepare her for feeding her child, and terminating the pregnancy may not be able to stop the rapid growth of cells in the breast. So who is more concerned about women and who is more concerned about political power?

Since duplicity rules, it's highly unlikely that what Ms. Johnson witnessed will ever be shown in the mainstream media. Too gruesome, we're told, and yet Oprah Winfrey had no problem unveiling the disfigured face of a woman mauled by an ape. Ms. Winfrey's endorsement of Barack Obama might have been less effective if she'd ever showed a video of the late-term abortions that her candidate consistently supported. In fact, he was among the few legislators who tried to defeat the Born Alive Infant Protection Act.

The harsh truth is that we'll never be able to change the status quo because abortion is riddled with lies and deceptions by the media and the power brokers of this billion-dollar industry.

Until we abandon the euphemistic phrase of "a woman's right to choose" and replace it with the more accurate "a woman's right to kill her baby," Roe v. Wade will remain the law of the land.

Alicia Colon lives in New York City and can be reached at aliciav.colon@gmail.com and at www.aliciacolon.com