The title of Steph Herold’s post on the pro-abortion website RHrealitycheck.org is, “What Contributes to a Positive Abortion Experience?” As is often the case, once pro-abortionists have unfairly and haughtily dismissed pro-life objections, in making their case they reveal much more than they know.
Let us briefly address the evidence-free pro-life beliefs that abortion clinics and abortions themselves hurt women. Like Herold, they ignore all the contrary evidence that women are not hurt at abortion clinics. We have written about this evidence on numerous occasions.
They swiftly move to assert that “study after study shows abortion is safe, and that the best science of the last several decades proves that abortion does not cause any mental health problems.” However, this assertion is not accurate, as we have previously discussed in detail (see “Major new study from Denmark reveals significantly higher maternal death rates following abortion compared to normal delivery” and “Worldwide Research Conclusively Demonstrates How Abortion Hurts Women”).
It is important to note that the question of what contributes to a positive abortion experience is not straightforward. As always, it is essential to consider the source of any information, in this case a study from the University of California at San Francisco. Dr. Randall K. O’Bannon, the director of education at the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), aptly describes UCSF as “the nation’s abortion training academy.”
Herold’s opening statement is unintentionally revealing about the work of Dr. Diana Taylor et al.
“What they found is pretty astounding: Nearly three-quarters of participants reported that their abortion experience was better than they expected.”
The question arises as to why this is considered to be a remarkable phenomenon. According to Herold,
“This speaks to both the high quality of care at abortion clinics and also to the stigmatization of abortion. Other studies show that patients may believe that abortion clinics are unsafe medical establishments, which may be why they rate their quality of care so highly—they were expecting to receive low-quality care.”
One might inquire of an objective third party whether it is reasonable to conclude that “stigmatization” is the primary factor influencing the anticipated level of care (i.e., “unsafe”) among women. Alternatively, it is possible that the observed phenomenon is more accurately explained by the influence of other women’s experiences and a perceived entitlement to this level of care due to the actions of pregnant women. To better understand the underlying factors, Herold offers the following insights:
“The researchers discovered that the main contributors to women’s rating of their abortion care experience were treatment by the clinician performing the abortion, treatment by clinic staff, timeliness of care, and levels of pain during the abortion procedure.”
As she immediately points out, this is not unique to abortion.
But of course it is. So if this is just documenting the obvious, why bother writing it at all? Because the study and the story are in the service of another agenda that we encounter at the end of Herold’s piece:
“They also found that women’s satisfaction ratings did not change based on the type of clinician providing the abortion. This supports the growing body of evidence that physicians aren’t the only types of clinicians that can and should be performing abortion procedures.”
The “growing body of evidence” is largely produced by institutions such as UCSF to support the argument that an increasing number of categories of non-physicians should be permitted to perform various types of first-trimester abortions. This, in turn, has led to calls for the inclusion of more types of first-trimester abortions and more types of non-physicians.
Dr. O’Bannon has repeatedly challenged this myth, most recently in this article. It is not safer for women to have non-physicians performing abortions. The rationale behind this is to reverse the downward trend in the number of abortions. It is important to note that for abortion advocates, any day that does not increase the number of dead babies is a lost day.
Chelsea Garcia is a political writer with a special interest in international relations and social issues. Events surrounding the war in Ukraine and the war in Israel are a major focus for political journalists. But as a former local reporter, she is also interested in national politics.
Chelsea Garcia studied media, communication and political science in Texas, USA, and learned the journalistic trade during an internship at a daily newspaper. In addition to her political writing, she is pursuing a master's degree in multimedia and writing at Texas.
