This is what no one’s talking about.
The sex trafficking industry means unwanted babies. Sometimes, preventative measures fail. Other times, unprotected sex is forced. And where do pimps take their pregnant girls? The abortion clinics, of course, which are happy to help.
A ground-breaking study conducted by the Beazley Institute concluded that pregnancy, miscarriage, and abortion are all common experiences for trafficked women and girls. Among the 67 survivors surveyed, there were 114 abortions between them (with likely underreporting). One survivor reported seventeen abortions.
Surprisingly, trafficking survivors testify that the majority of these abortions are forced.
They don’t always want to terminate their pregnancies, but they have no choice. To continue making money, traffickers force their victims to abort as quickly as possible, so they can send them back to the streets.
An abortion clinic is a point of direct contact between trafficking victims and the outside world, but the staff are trained to encourage abortions regardless of the situation. Particularly at Planned Parenthood, abortions are given with no questions asked, and the traffickers know this.
One survivor recounts:
I got pregnant six times and had six abortions during this time. Several of them were from a doctor who was a client–he did them ‘back door’… At least one of my abortions was from Planned Parenthood because they didn’t ask any questions… I had so much scar tissue from these abortions because there was no follow-up and in a couple of cases I had bad infections…
Abuse is permitted for the sake of profit.
Abby Johnson, a former manager at Planned Parenthood, says her clinic had to meet a quota of 1,135 abortions per year. She states that one of Planned Parenthood’s mottos is that “every telephone call and every client visit must be turned into a revenue-generating visit. Well, the only way to make a profit off a pregnant woman is to sell her an abortion, because Planned Parenthood doesn’t provide any prenatal care.”
While they are busy selling abortions, they are also conveniently overlooking exploitation. There is too much evidence of Planned Parenthood covering up abuse, failing to report obvious rape, and even sending trafficked girls back to their brothels when the abortion was over.
How can Planned Parenthood claim their motto as “care, no matter what,” when they place profit over people and directly enable the human trafficking industry?
Even beyond the trafficking realm, the pressure to abort is more common than we may realize.
In a U.S. study involving nearly a thousand women with a history of abortion, 58.3% of the women reported aborting to make others happy, 66% said they knew they were making a mistake when they underwent the abortion, and 73.8% said their abortion was not free from outside pressure. Is this “reproductive freedom”?
Whether you fly a pro-life or pro-choice banner, I think we can agree that women are being coerced into choices that harm them both physically and mentally. A no-questions-asked abortion is not offering freedom; it’s enabling abuse.
In borrowed words: “The phenomenon of forced abortion…transcends the political boundaries of the abortion debate, violating both the pro-life belief that abortion takes innocent life, and the pro-choice ideal of women’s freedom to make their own reproductive choices.”
If you live in Michigan, you’ve probably heard about Proposal 3.
Currently, my home state has a proposal on the 2022 ballot that would further aid and abet human trafficking. Among other extreme measures, this proposal would eliminate screenings for women coerced into abortion, allow minor children to receive abortions without parental knowledge or consent, remove health and safety requirements of abortion facilities, and repeal the law that says only doctors can perform abortions.
What’s more, this proposed amendment to Michigan’s constitution would prohibit prosecution of a sex trafficker taking their victim to get an abortion. Permanently.
How is this “pro-woman”? Have we really stooped to making exploitation as easy as possible? On November 8, I hope we as voters of Michigan will say NO. We will protect women and girls. We will value life at all stages. We will not allow our state to become a haven for predators.
Whatever your view on when life begins, I hope in this at least, we can agree: exploitation cannot be tolerated.
