Is abortion a moral issue? I say yes. The unborn child is a living human being, albeit in the developing stage. Some say no, that the fetus is no more meaningful morally than a tumor. Indeed, a few have called it a parasite.
Those who think abortion is no big deal may still be bothered by this story: A woman has written a memoir in which she tells of intentionally getting pregnant and aborting fifteen times in sixteen years. From the story:
A self-confessed “abortion addict” has told how she had 15 terminations in 16 years. Irene Vilar, 40, who is now married with two young daughters, had the abortions between the ages of 16 and her early thirties. She describes her decisions in a book called Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict and is now anticipating a fierce backlash from the anti-abortion community. Miss Vilar, a literary agent from Denver, Colorado said the terminations took place against a difficult period in her life during which she also tried to kill herself. Her mother had committed suicide when she was eight and two of her brothers were heroin addicts.
She said her first husband, an older man, had believed children killed sexual desire and she had rebelled by not using birth control. Then she would fear losing her husband and opt for a termination. In the brutally frank memoir she writes: “My story is a perversion of both maternal desire and abortion, framed by a lawful procedure that I abused…
“A moment came when not being pregnant was enough motivation for wanting to be pregnant. Getting pregnant began to be simply a habit. If I wasn’t pregnant, something was wrong, more wrong than what was already wrong. I believe this habit formed with abortion number 9 and pregnancy number 10.”
It shouldn’t just be the anti abortion community that is upset. This isn’t a matter of law. It is a matter of morality and willing self restraint, without which, society will eventually implode.
So where do y’all stand? No big deal? It’s her body and she can do whatever she wants, including repeatedly getting pregnant in order to abort? Or is this an awful morality tale of our times? I know this: I hope she doesn’t make a dime off the bodies of her aborted offspring.
October 13th, 2009 | 10:01 pm
[...] More details over at Secondhand Smoke. Comments (0) [...]
October 13th, 2009 | 10:46 pm
(So where do y’all stand?)
You know where I stand Wesley and I’m sure that many out there are probably very tired of listening to me so I will simply say that;
Jesus Cares, Jesus Loves and Jesus Forgives when we seek Him with a sincere heart.
Peace
October 13th, 2009 | 11:18 pm
It seems realy sick to try to make money off of the murders of your children.
October 13th, 2009 | 11:54 pm
Lets leave aside the dead roomful of children for just a second. This woman basically documented her mental illness and how modern medicine facilitated her mutilating herself. I often wonder about the ethics of doctors who enable plastic surgery abusers and cringe worthy sex change operations. Now we know that there is even worse.
October 14th, 2009 | 12:09 am
Victor: You always rock and roll.
October 14th, 2009 | 12:11 am
MargaretMN: You are right. She was mentally ill. I would have more respect if she hadn’t tried to profit off of it. Ugh.
October 14th, 2009 | 12:50 am
NEWSFLASH: People get addicted to all kinds of surgery, and in fact, to all kinds of medical procedures. The name of the mental illness is “Munchausen Syndrome” after Baron Munchausen, a famous fictional teller of tall tales.
The psychiatrists’ slang for surgery-addicts is “scalpel slaves”.
More than self-mutiliation, the most common motivation seems to be craving the experience of being attended to by solicitous professionals, being cared for and waited on 24 hr/day. Some patients use hospitalizations like vacations, to break a stressful life-pattern.
Abortion is not that common an addiction–usually what the patients crave is the experience of being cared for and waited on 24 hours a day. The desire to self-mutilate is another motivation, but not the main one–Munchausen patients also go for non-mutilating treatments like intubations, in-hospital medication-treatments, radiological procedures, and so on.
October 14th, 2009 | 1:06 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Steve, Persia Walker. Persia Walker said: “Abortion Addict” Has 15 Terminations in 16 Years » Secondhand …- Miss Vilar, a literar… http://bit.ly/z5Y91 [...]
October 14th, 2009 | 8:05 am
A serial murder. No difference, except in the strength of the horror her crimes evoke in our society, from all those psychopaths in jail or at large.
October 14th, 2009 | 10:08 am
In response to Mr. Operation Counterstrike, the repeat abortion rate is massive. This is not just a situation where there are several women who are clearly ill and most abortions are a one-time college oops or because of severe medical problems.
In Michigan, of the women who get abortions, 52% have had a previous abortion and 22% have had two or more abortions. National figures mirror that.
I’ve heard a doctor at an abortion clinic admit in his own words he’s seen women come in time and time again, he simply exercised his terminal non-judgementalism (to borrow a phrase) every time. I had a high school friend who admitted his mother has had multiple abortions, using it as birth control.
While I of course do not support elective abortion at all, I thought I would point out this is not just a novel occurrence, it’s indicative of a larger problem that goes deeper than addiction to surgery.
October 14th, 2009 | 10:15 am
Correction, it’s 48% in Michigan, read it wrong.
Here’s the data if anyone is interested:
http://www.mdch.state.mi.us/pha/osr/abortion/abortchar.ASP
October 14th, 2009 | 10:49 am
Rachel’s Vinyard, a post-abortion ministry run by Priests for Life, actually mentions this kind of “addiction” as indicative of past trauma, or, perhaps the need to repeat a prior trauma. Ie, the first abortion was traumatic and the woman is then reliving the trauma by having more abortions.
Although I don’t want anyone making money off something wrong, it is possible that her book could help other women struggling with a similar problem. Perhaps such a woman could realize that she has a problem and go for help before she repeats the procedure again.
October 14th, 2009 | 11:13 am
The woman is obviously a mental case, and you respond by calling the matter one of “morality and willing self restraint, without which, society will eventually implode.” Are you suggesting that morality and self-restraint are a remedy for her psychosis? That would be about as effective as having a voodoo practitioner shake a rattle over her.
October 14th, 2009 | 11:49 am
I’m fairly certain the woman is mentally ill, HW. But what about the medical establishment that performed fifteen abortions on her? They are presumably of sound mind, yet they performed the abortions time and time again. I think Wesley’s call for morality and self-restraint was aimed at them. At some point, shouldn’t they have tried to get this woman help or refused to participate in her self-destructive behavior?
October 14th, 2009 | 12:04 pm
History Writer: I was making a broader point and you know it.
October 14th, 2009 | 1:06 pm
Not having read the book (and it would be fairly far down my list of things to read) I can’t say whether the book would be helpful with others with this or a similar psychosis and whether anybody should “make money” off of it. From the review, it sounds like it gets a kind of postmodernist academic spin about the woman’s twisted relationship to her own body and to the concept of motherhood that somehow all women are supposed to relate to. If what she did gets some kind of exercise in abstraction rather than a concrete discussion of her actions and their repercussions then it’s just one more step in the desensitization of the public to these types of stories. We’ll know if it becomes assigned reading in feminism courses on college campuses everywhere.
I agree with others that the focus of the ethics discussion should be on the doctors, not on one mentally ill woman. The same as in the “octomom” case, which provides a kind of weird parallel.
October 14th, 2009 | 1:12 pm
She’s likely to get plenty of material for the sequel under Obama Care.
October 14th, 2009 | 3:26 pm
This woman is also lucky that she was able to bear children at all, after having so many repeat abortions.
October 14th, 2009 | 10:37 pm
I picked up this book at Borders the other day and put it back down. It’s not that I couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t shocked; thus defeating the purpose of the title. I wasn’t intrigued; thus refuting the point of publishing it. There is a more prosaic explanation for its appearance: there isn’t anything a publisher large or small will not publish today. Another example: recently the daughter of John Phillips (“Mammas and the Pappas”) marketed her “memoirs” on claims of incest. A former publisher at Putnam once said during an editorial meeting that she would not publish the memoirs of Yassir Arafat or even a book about him. She was a Jewish woman who was still in possession of the idea of self-respect and self-preservation. Mr. Smith is right about personal and civic restraint. The commercial media has neither; not even its fumes — taste.
October 15th, 2009 | 5:19 am
This news has reached Aussie shores. I found her comments chilling!
As for abortion – the unspoken mega-holocaust of our time!
October 15th, 2009 | 5:21 am
I meant to write ‘unseen mega holocaust of our time.’
Sorry.
October 15th, 2009 | 1:14 pm
“I was making a broader point and you know it.”
Do I? I generally take what you say at face value.
October 16th, 2009 | 2:40 pm
I can guarantee that if abortion were illegal, no woman would return for seconds after her first encounter with the wire hanger. This does seem to cut against the argument that women are going to do it either way. Instead, we are enabling wickedness and self-destruction.
October 26th, 2009 | 3:58 pm
I bookmarked this to elaborate further on my blog. What I found really interesting (and just wrote about in my last post here: http://wp.me/pjCQr-1C ) was how the abortion system was abused by someone who was in desperate need of help from her addictive behavior. Major problems arise when even pro-abortionists are willing to stand on the sideline when a woman is abusing herself, regardless of the form that it manifests from.
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