... the more you invest (income, job, home, time, effort, etc.) the stronger your need to justify your position. If we invest $5.00 in a raffle ticket, we justify losing with “I’ll get them next time”. If you invest everything you have, it requires an almost unreasoning belief and unusual attitude to support and justify that investment.
Studies tell us we are more loyal and committed to something that is difficult, uncomfortable, and even humiliating.
How far does this go to explain the otherwise inexplicable phenomenon of procohice women, totally traumatized by their own abortions, who nonetheless insist that it was "the right choice", and who remain totally committed to the idea of abortion as palliative even though they were traumatized, often to the brink of suicide?
The article looks further at investments that keep abused partners in bad relationships. They can also explain why traumatized prochoice women remain devoted to the cause of abortion even when their own abortions left them devastated. I'll list the types of investments and relate them to remaining loyal to a soul-crushing abortion decision, along with loyalty to the prochoice cause that supported the abortion decision:
Emotional Investment
The woman has invested so many emotions, cried so much, and worried so much that she feels she must remain committed to the cause.
Social Investment
To avoid social embarrassment and uncomfortable social situations, she remains committed to the cause.
Financial Investment
I'll just refer to "buyer's remorse" -- the more you spend on something, the more likely you are to convince yourself that it was a good investment. I wonder if anybody's ever done a study linking the cost of the abortion with how vociferously the woman insists that it was the right choice, even if she's still crying about it years later.
Lifestyle Investment
Since people tend to associate with like-minded people, rejecting her social network's embrace of abortion would mean leaving herself totally abandoned and with no social support. And since lack of social support is often a contributing cause of abortion, many of these women understandably cling to what friends they still have.
Any reflections from post-abortion women who went through an "I'm Still a True Believe" stage?
18 comments:
Christina:
I think that you gave a lot of correct reasons. The social support reasons are the most important of all. Many women are closet pro-lifers, I think. The hard core pro-abort feminists work very hard to cultivate an evil stereotype of pro-lifers as horrible, violent, sadistic monsters whose main goal in life is to make women suffer and die as horribly as possible.
We know that's a lie, but it's the "truth" that the hard core pro-aborts try to peddle. If your friends all believe this about pro-life people, is it going to be easy to admit that you're having second thoughts about the rightness of abortion?
They also tell their people not to speak to, or interact with, pro-life people, ever! If you find out someone isn't pro-choice, they say you should cut them off and refuse to have anything to do with them. They don't want their people to find out what pro-lifers are really like, or to hear the pro-life arguments. They want to do all the talking and all the labeling and all the interpreting. They want to dictate what will be considered true and what will be considered a lie. They know if they ever lose control of these things, they will lose even more support than they already have.
Its the same with traumatised adopted children and birthmothers. And in fact anyone traumatised is compelled to repeat the trauma because 1. They hope for a different outcome this time and 2. Its their uncomfortable comfort zone.
The adopted children I know weren't traumatized; they were very bonded with their adoptive parents. I can't speak much of the birth parents, though, since I only knew three birth parents who made adoption plans, and I was only really close to one of them, a birth father. He had agreed to the adoption plan because the woman insisted on it as a precondition to marriage. They ended up divorced. He often said he wished he'd have kept the kid and ditched the mother, and I can't say I can blame him.
I've never heard of serial birth moms getting pregnant again and again and making adoption plans the way it's common for women to have one abortion after another, but I admit it's not an area I've researched much. Probably because I've only ever personally witnessed happy outcomes.
Actually serial aborters are not very common. Most women prefer contraception.
One thing you look for in a case of serial abortion is domestic violence. Maybe her husband or boyfriend is forcing her to have sex without contraception.
It can also be something like Munchausen syndrome--women who are addicted to the experience of receiving medical care.
In any case it's pretty uncommon.
OC, I think there may be a lot of dynamics, but you can hardly deny the existence of serial aborters. CDC statistics indicate that only about half of women undergoing abortions are doing so for the first time, and of repeat aborters, only about half of them have had only one previous abortion. The rest have had two or more.
AGI data indicate that half of aborters weren't contracepting when they got pregnant. (And, you'll recall, Christopher Tietze indicated that once abortion is legal, even contracepting women tend to get sloppy in practice because of the availability of abortion as a back-up means of preventing birth.)
AGI tends to assume that if a woman reports using contraceptives, she was "trying hard to avoid pregnancy" -- but remember, this is self-reporting, and the study doesn't include information about how diligently the women were using their contraceptives. Obviously they weren't using them very effectively, to have such a high failure rate.
I think AGI's "Well, we just need better contraceptives" conclusion is a bit simplistic. Prolife researchers seem to be the only ones asking if there's something else going on.
In the mean time, really all we have is anecdotal data, which indicate a variety of contributing factors. Until we address these contributing factors, instead of simply assuming that more browbeating about using contraceptives properly will do the trick, the repeat abortion rate will remain high.
I've only known two repeat aborters well enough to know about their abortions. The first was bullied by her mother into aborting two intended pregnancies. The second never discussed with me how she got pregnant or the circumstances of her three abortions, but given the totality of her life, I doubt that they were simple birth control failures. She was a serial wedding planner as well, canceling repeated weddings at the last minute. She had, as we say, issues.
Is it really bullying if parents encourage their young daughters to abort as they don't want to support their children with having children? Isn't it a sign of maturity to say - "no I don't want to have an abortion although I recognise the fact that you don't want me and my baby here so I will go and make it on my own or with my baby father" or to say " yes while I'm in your house I have to do as you want and if you don't want me to have the baby then I won't"
I don't see how forcing grandparents to rear their grandchildren is all that fair?
It's not fair for grandparents to raise children, so we should just kill the grandchildren. Makes all the sense in the world Lilliput...
Lilliput, is it a sign of maturity to have sex when you're unable to handle having a baby as a result of it? Is it a sign of maturity on the part of the (grand)parents to want to kill their grandchildren, and even to force their daughters to have abortions rather than allow their grandchildren to live? Will girls just humbly and maturely do whatever their parents say, up to and including kill their unborn children, although they likely are thumbing their noses at their parents who want them to keep their legs together? Does that make sense that they'd say, "Yes, Father, I'll have an abortion just to be obedient," but say, "Screw you, Dad, I'm not gonna stop having sex"?
Maybe some parents are just fine with their girls having indiscriminate sex as long as they're willing to undergo an abortion to avoid having a baby as a nearly inevitable result of their actions; but most if not all of the people I know want for their children (both boys and girls) to abstain from having sex until they are older and more able to handle it, so their children are already rebelling against them and refusing to listen to parental advice to start with. It just makes no sense that they will suddenly become all meek and obedient, and kill their babies as a sign of "maturity."
Yes I agree Kathy, but rebelling against ones parents by having drinks drugs and unprotected sex doesn't necessarily cost parents anything - unless they steal from their purse - so parents can't stop children. But forcing parents to financially physically and emotionally raise another baby - that costs - and in this way parents have the power to stop their children.
Lil, it's still wrong to bail out of problems by killing an innocent human being. If your son's girlfriend left a baby on your doorstep then shot herself, leaving your teenage son responsible for his child, there'd be no excuse for just stomping the baby's head in so that you don't have to bother with it.
Solving your own personal problems by just killing the person whose presence you find troubling isn't a decent thing to do, and it's a blot on this nation that we endorse the practice via abortion.
Kathy I'm confused, are you saying that the girls are not coerced by their parents to have an abortion?
Christina, let's look at that situation carefully, baby found on doorstep - you would have to call the police who would call social workers who would have to do a DNA test to prove the baby is your son's. Then, because he is underage, an assessment needs to be done to see where they deem is best for the child- maybe with you if you want and are capable or maybe adoption or foster care. Then baby grows up wondering why they live with grandma or strangers and why their mum would rather kill herself then look after her/him. Sounds wonderful - doesn't it!
How can that be better then an early termination. And in fact its the only time abortion is and should be allowed - when there is a risk to mother's life. Mother's life always takes precedence.
And here you have two children that need protection - the teens and the baby - and I have seen first hand that sometimes they are conflicting.
Lil, sounds like you're arguing for stomping in the doorstep baby's head, since its life will be so wretched, living with grandparents or strangers.
CAROL BURNETT was raised by her grandmother after her parents moved away and left her. I guess you think Carol should have been aborted, that her life just wasn't worth the pain of the childhood abandonment.
Show me a life with no suffering, if the only life worth living is one where the person never suffers. The question is what you MAKE of yourself.
Girls are coerced into having abortions quite frequently. What I was highlighting was that you act as if someone who is very likely rebelling against their parents in many ways is suddenly going to be all compliant and have an abortion simply out of obeying their parents. They may be coerced into an abortion unwillingly, but this is different from acquiescing to an abortion simply out of "obedience."
Kathy, why is it then that rebellious teenagers who don't listen to their parents then listen when being coerced into having abortions? I just don't know what you are trying to say?
Christina, I don't know who Carol Burnett is - I will look her up- but I'm sure she is the exception to the rule. I don't for one second suggest stomping on any baby's head - cause that's illegal but just saying that it shouldn't have landed their at all.
As for suffering being a part of life - why don't we then just leave all the children of drug and alcohol addicts, paedophiles and abusers with them and see what they make of their life. I can't see how you're ok with babies being born into pain full lives and then judging them when they spread the pain. I know of course that there are many that come out patron saints - but percentage wise its more the 80/20 rule
I know you work in this field of seeing women who shouldn't have had children and the suffering goes down the generations - if suffering is part of life - why are u there trying to help them? And more importantly - does it even work?
"... cause that's illegal..."
Is that the only reason why it'd be wrong to stomp that baby's head?
Lil, to point out that everybody suffers isn't to say that we don't do anything to prevent and/or alleviate suffering. It's just pointing out that the only way to totally avoid suffering is to just die.
You alleviate suffering by *addressing the causes of specific suffering*, not by pre-emptively killing people because you think that the suffering they *might* face is distasteful to you personally.
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