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Since when does anyone’s right to live depend uponsomeone else wanting them?

Prior to the legalization of abortion in most developed countries, it was widely claimed that unwanted pregnancies resulted in a significant number of unwanted children, some of whom were subjects of child abuse. Legalization of abortion was held up as a panacea for this. It would reduce unwanted pregnancies and lower the incidence of child abuse. Planned Parenthood was a leader here, coining the familiar slogan, "every child a wanted child."

Shouldn’t every child be wanted?

At first glance, yes! "Every Child a Wanted Child" is a great slogan. Who can argue? That isn’t the disagreement. It is how to achieve such a goal. We agree that every child should be wanted. A world with only wanted children would be an idyllic place in which to live. No one could quarrel with that as an idealistic goal. Wouldn’t it also be a wonderful world if there were no unwanted wives by husbands, no aging parents unwanted by their children, no unwanted Jews, blacks, Catholics, Chicanos, or ever again a person who, at one time or place, finds himself or herself unwanted or persecuted. Let’s all try to achieve this, but also remember that people have clay feet and, sadly, the unwanted will probably always be with us.

A second thought: Women resent that the value of a woman is sometimes determined by whether a man wants her. Yet radical feminists insist that the value of an unborn boy or girl is to be determined by whether a woman wants him or her.

To use being wanted by someone as a measure of whether a human life is allowed to live is a frightening concept. Its converse logically awaits us — that the unwanted can be eliminated. Don’t forget, Hitler’s Germany was ideal for wanted Aryans.

Since when does anyone’s right to live depend upon someone else wanting them?

"Every Child a Wanted Child" should be completed with "and if not wanted, kill!" for that is exactly what that Planned Parenthood slogan means. To thus complete the sentence removes the mask from this misleading slogan and reveals it for the monstrous evil that it is. That certainly makes it sound different!

Yes, and it is of crucial importance that every time we hear that phrase, we should add Planned Parenthood’s solution, "and if not wanted, kill!"

Do parents kill teenagers when they are not wanted, or Uncle Joe after his stroke, or Mom, now that she is such a burden? You say no?

Do we give the mother the legal right to kill the two-year- old daughter who is a burden to her? No! Then why and how can we give her the legal right to kill the two-month-old daughter living inside her who is a burden to her?

The U.S. Supreme Court and the governments in many other nations have, for the first time in modern history, granted to one citizen (the mother) the absolute legal right to kill another, if that first person does not want them!

Think of the logic of the inevitable extension of such a freedom to kill. We could solve poverty by killing unwanted poor people, or religious or political groups, or those too old, too burdensome, and on and on . . .

OK, the ethic is horrible, but unwanted pregnancies do result in unwanted children, don’t they?

No, not in any greater percentage than wanted pregnancies.

Think of your own pregnancies. Was each planned, or was this or that one a surprise? Were you really happy each time, in the first month or two? Be honest.

In the first few weeks or months, were all of your pregnancies really "wanted"?

But now look at your children. Are you glad you have them? Would you give any back — have any of them killed?

You’ve changed your mind, haven’t you? For almost all of you, a pregnancy that was truly unwanted has resulted in a dearly loved and wanted son or daughter.

If we permit abortion for an unwanted pregnancy, we will be destroying vast numbers of children who, by the time of their birth and through their childhood, would have been very dearly wanted and deeply loved children indeed. If the judgment of being wanted at an early stage of pregnancy were a final judgment, and abortions were permitted freely, a high percentage of everyone reading this book would never have been born.

How many unwanted pregnancies are there?

In that year there were 4 million births, about 1.6 million abortions, plus about 400,000 miscarriages. According to TIME’s claim, every pregnancy that year was unwanted.

Are there any scientific studies?

Not many recent ones because now abortion is legal in most developed nations which are the ones that do such studies.

Back in the ’50s and ’60s, there were a good dozen well done studies which were reported in detail in your author’s editions of Handbook on Abortion in the ’70s.

All of these presumed the negative effects claimed above. They matched groups of pregnant women . . . (1) who wanted abortions, couldn’t get them and went on to deliver . . . and (2) women pleased with wanted pregnancies. These investigators studied the resultant children and compared them. Without exception, they found little difference in love, care and wantedness and of neglect and lack of care in the groups that were compared.

Give a few examples.

"It is clear that mothers who initially believed their pregnancy to be ‘the worst thing that ever happened to them’ came to feel about the same degree of affection for their children as the mothers who were initially ‘ecstatic’ about the pregnancy.

What of other countries?

- In England the Working Party of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists stated that the vast majority of unplanned pregnancies become wanted children.

Don’t some studies prove the opposite?

No! In the entire world literature on this subject, there are only two studies that attempt to show that there is a negative effect on the children who had been "unwanted pregnancies." Both have been conclusively shown to be invalid. The first study, from Sweden, concluded that such a child "runs a risk of having to surmount greater mental and social handicaps than its peers . . ." Forssman & Thuwe, "One Hundred and Twenty Children Born after Application for Therapeutic Abortion Refused," Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, vol. 42, 1966, pp. 71-88

Professor Paul Cameron has clearly shown that an evaluation of the mothers in this study showed sufficient differences with the control group so that the authors’ conclusions were a mis-analysis," invalid, and could have been predicted from these differences alone, whether the pregnancy was wanted or not. There were, incidentally, little differences anyway between the children in the study and the control. P. Cameron, "The Swedish ‘Children Born to Women Denied Abortion’ Study: A Radical Criticism," Psychological Reports, vol. 39, 1976, pp. 391-394

Professor Samuel Nigro, child psychiatrist at Case Western Reserve University, has published a scathing commentary on this study. He points to the fact that the data found and published in the article "renders the conclusions untenable." He details the "striking differences in the families of the two groups of children," (the study group having more unstable mothers and fathers than the control group), as the obvious cause for the differences in the children.

"The conclusions appear to be contrived by an abuse of scientific method deplorable to the point of discrediting the researchers, of discrediting the

In another critique, Dr. Nigro has written a devastating critique of David’s study. He cites "flawed, tendentious, sorry science. It is advocacy." Unwanted pregnancy is held up as a reason to kill before birth. Dr. Nigro then details the "preselection bias," among other problems in the study. Finally he notes that even if one accepts everything

But don’t many unwanted pregnancies become battered children?

There is much that we still do not know about the sick psychology that leads to child abuse. One thing does stand out, however: Prenatally, these were not unwanted pregnancies, they were super-wanted pregnancies.

What if a mother really doesn’t want the baby?

There are millions of outstretched arms aching to adopt and love a baby. Her answer is to place the baby in a secure, loving, adoptive home.

I’ve been told that aborting unwanted babies would leave more wanted ones and, therefore, there would be less child abuse.

Exactly the opposite has happened. In New York City during the ’60s, the number of abused children had averaged about 5,000 cases a year. Abortion was legalized in 1970. By 1975, over 25,000 cases were reported. The figures for the entire U.S. are:

Canada’s statistics show the same:

Ohio reported 27,248 cases in 1981 and 65,965 in 1985, a 142% increase according to a survey by the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Children, Families and Youth for the largest state increase. The same survey reported over a 55% increase nationwide from 1981 to 1985. Assoc. Press, March 3, 1987.

D r. Phillip Ney, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Christ Church, New Zealand, while still at the University of British Columbia, published a widely read study of this. His analysis clearly pointed to the fact that abortion (and its acceptance of the violence of killing the unborn) lowered a parent’s psychic resistance to violence and abuse of the born. P. Ney, "Relationship Between Abortion & Child Abuse," Canada Jour. Psychiatry, vol. 24, 1979, pp. 610-620