By Dave Andrusko
Earlier today we posted a critique of the latest aren’t-chemical-abortions-wonderful study ground out by the same litany of pro-abortion academics. But, as we’ve reported over the years, chemical abortions can be dangerous to the mother and are invariably bloody and hugely painful, sometimes almost unbearably so.
I will never forget the abortion accounts of 26 women that appeared in New York magazine. The intent, obviously, was by “telling my abortion story,” to “destigmatize” abortion.
In fact, to the disinterested third party, most of these women’s accounts were depressing beyond words and saturated in pain, physical, psychology, and (dare I say?) spiritual.
One woman talked about how “On a scale of one to ten, the pain was an eight.” Another spoke of how “When I took off my jeans, blood covered my thighs. I couldn’t let the sheets get bloody, so I wrapped towels around me and stayed in bed, with incredibly painful cramping.”
Which brings us to a post that ran this week written by Rose Stokes under the headline, “What Happens When an Abortion Doesn’t Fully Work: I had an incomplete abortion last year. This is what I wish I’d known about them.”
Stokes tells us she wanted an abortion and that “my reasons for doing so are deeply personal reasons painful, and nobody’s business but mine.” When a woman from the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) told her about chemical [“medical”] abortions, once she was heard, “Well, one you take a pill and the other is more invasive,” Stokes was in.
“I didn’t have much time to go into greater detail—and to be honest didn’t want to—so I went for the medical abortion, assuming it would be simpler.”
And then the ordeal began. After taking the second of the two drugs, Stokes tells us, “It felt like an act of self-violence. I remember walking back out into the waiting room and folding into my mom’s arms—crying with a ferocity I hadn’t experienced since childhood.”
The BPAS woman consoles her and tells Stokes the “miscarriage” could happen any time up until two weeks. But…
Around four hours later once we’d returned to the apartment, I felt an unfamiliar pain stir deep inside me, somewhere in between my lower spine and belly button. Within an hour, I had gone into full labor—I’ll spare you a long description, but: contractions, vomiting, bleeding, crying, shi–ing. It went on for hours. My mom was incredible; I was traumatized. Somehow it made us closer.”
Within 12 hours, the contractions were fewer, and Stokes thought the worst was over. A week later, however, she goes to a doctor who tells Stokes her blood pressure “is dangerously low” and she’s off to the hospital where she learns she has an “incomplete abortion”—the baby’s dead body has not been expelled.
“Surgery was scheduled for three days later to remove the ‘remaining products,’ and I was signed off work for another week,” Stokes writes. “The whole ordeal left me physically and emotionally wrung out.”
Stokes gives us other examples of chemical abortions “gone wrong,” but of course comes to the correct conclusion: no regrets, only a desire that she could have been “fully informed and prepared for what could happen to my body, rather than finding out during the process.”
Really? That’s the only “lesson” she took away? That her chemical abortion, which was supposed to resemble a “heavy period,” was painful, dragged out, and potentially very dangerous to her?
There evidently was never any hesitation, so that after taking the first abortifacient pill (mifepristone), Stokes would never have rethought her decision and chose not to take the second pill (misoprostol).
That is a real tragedy, for not only could she have spared herself from an awful ordeal, Stokes might have saved the life of her defenseless unborn baby.