No woman who has gone through an abortion can ever completely heal from the trauma of the procedure, says Lyn Varty, counsellor and manager of Hope Alive Australia.
“That's how damaging abortion is,” she told The Epoch Times. “Because how do you live with the fact that you've actually contributed to the death of your son or your daughter?”
Every mother Ms. Varty has treated during counselling was able to pinpoint the exact moment that abortion destroyed their lives.
“They can just, they can tell you that defining moment—‘I was never the same, something changed that day that I had that abortion, it's broken,’” she said.
About one-quarter to one-third of Australian women will get an abortion in their lifetime, according to the Public Health Association of Australia, and it is not uncommon for one woman to get multiple abortions.
Ms. Varty has been providing counselling for over 31 years in areas such as childhood neglect, abuse, and grief from all forms of pregnancy loss.
During her work, she began seeing the grief and brokenness in the lives of women who had undergone the procedure.
“I realised this is more complex than normal grief. So from there, I thought, I need to understand what the impact abortion has on women because, at that point, I had no idea,” she said.
What she learned was that behind the choice to have an abortion was a history of childhood abuse and neglect, which had “dehumanised” the mother from a young age.
“I have never treated anyone that's had an abortion or been impacted by abortion who has not had childhood neglect and abuse,” she said.
“So childhood neglect and abuse starts the dehumanising process.”
The Dehumanising Process Makes Abortion Easier
To make abortion easier to accept, proponents often use specific language and descriptions, referring to the baby as “it,” a clump of cells, tissue, or even a parasite.“That’s life inside of the mother's womb,” Ms. Varty said. “But when abortion enters the womb, it becomes a death chamber.”
While neglect and abuse during childhood start this dehumanising process, Ms. Varty said abortion completes it.
“It's easy to hurt somebody when you have been dehumanised,” she said.
American obstetrician-gynecologist Dr. Kathi Aultman said she was able to perform abortions for years because she did not see the fetus as a living human being.
Then one day, she saw an article that compared the Holocaust to abortion, which highlighted the idea that the Nazis didn’t consider Jews as human.
“But when I read that article, I realised that I was just as bad as they were, and the reason that I could do what I did with no feeling or moral compunction was because I didn’t see the fetus as a human being. That was when I actually became pro-life.”
Dr. Ben Carson, one of America’s top pediatric surgeons, commented on how modern American culture places little value on life.
He also said rather than laws to ban abortions, the United States needed to change its “me-first” mentality to help save unborn lives.
Damaging Ripple Effect
After having an abortion, Ms. Varty observed that the women’s lives crumble, through a breakdown of their relationship with their partner, difficulty in holding down their job, experiencing depression, and even turning to drugs.“It's not uncommon for me to do timelines with my clients and identify patterns in their lives of when they've actually gone off the rails,” Ms. Varty said.
“Quite often, that will correlate with the anniversary dates of the abortion, conception, and due birth dates.”
But the women themselves are not aware of these behavioural patterns, and neither do they realise it is linked to their abortion.
Further, abortion affects more than just the women who undergo the procedure; it also affects the aborted baby’s future siblings, abortion survivors, and spouses.
Ms. Varty said it was not surprising because, in the scenario where the man is against getting an abortion, he feels powerless and angry for failing to protect his unborn child.
“The rage that kind of goes on for those men is phenomenal ... and they will turn to drugs, alcohol,” she said.
Having an abortion also breaks the fundamental trust a mother has in herself to protect and nurture her children, which impacts the bonding that the mother will have with her subsequent children.
“Quite often, there'll be neglect and abuse [with the siblings],” Ms. Varty said. “So you get this cycle of neglect and abuse, abortion again unless they have the treatment.”
With around one-third of women getting an abortion, the ripple effect it is having on their families and, in turn, on society is immense she says.
“Economically, psychologically, physically—it's having a huge impact on our society, beyond what I can even comprehend, and I'm in the frontline working with these women and men,” Ms. Varty said.
“Our society is being impacted at every level, in every area that we can't even conceive, potentially.
There Is Hope
But Ms. Varty wants to spread hope and let people know that healing is possible.“There is hope. You don't have to live in that chaos,” she said in a message to both women and men impacted by abortion.
She said she wants to let the women and men know that they are not 100 percent responsible for the abortion of their child.
“They contributed to the death of their child, but so did the abortionist, so did the doctor, so did the nurses, and so did the politicians, so did perhaps the churches, so did the passivity of human mankind to allow this atrocity to happen,” she said.
Ms. Varty has seen women successfully leave toxic relationships, begin engaging in authentic, healthy relationships, improve their relationship with their children, improve their mental and physical health, and lower the amount of prescription medicine they rely on.
“It takes a lot of courage for these men and women to do this journey, and to see where some of them are at today is phenomenal,” she said.
“They know that they can never be completely healed, but they've learned to accept that.
“They accept their scars ... they know their talents by the time they're finished [treatment], and they go out, and they contribute back to life again.”
