The Abortion Business Is About Making Money

By Lynn Robinson

A recent episode of the television series The Pretender began with the character Ms. Parker talking to a sales clerk in a store in New York. As she was speaking, suddenly two children dashed in between them. Offended, she asked the rhetorical question, "Where is Planned Parenthood when you need them?"

If I were ignorant of the history and mission of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), the statement would have been humorous. However, upon pondering that question, I realized that many women ask that same question after they have had an abortion, as they struggle with the consequences of their decision.

Although counselors at PPFA and other abortion clinics give the appearance of empathizing, these clinics appear to be in the business of making money.

Of course abortion clinics may save money and maximize profits by avoiding all moral dilemmas in the abortion choice and ignoring the biological facts of fetal development. Counselors may focus the woman's attention on the crisis at hand and how to quickly resolve it, or counselors may conveniently neglect to inform their clients that they will have psychological consequences from the abortion. The psychological problem emerges once a woman realizes that "the fetus" was a child and that she could have carried her baby to term, despite her circumstances.

In a recent conversation a woman whom will call Diane, shared that she was misinformed at an abortion clinic. She said that she did not want to raise a child on welfare nor as a single parent. Rather than point out positive solutions, the counselor encouraged her to abort the fetus. Diane allowed herself to be deceived and had the abortion.

Twenty years later, Diane is a very successful businesswoman with an MBA. However, Diane now deeply regrets the decision she made. She wishes she had been better informed so that she could have made the right choice.

Diane is not alone. Many women regret aborting their children, children who would have been grown today had their mothers allowed them to live.

PPFA must pride itself on being responsible for millions of abortions since the Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973. Planned Parenthood's theme for its yearly report was "Responsible Choices."

However, if adequately informed, many more women would make a "responsible choice" by choosing to either parent their child themselves or allow the child to be adopted into a loving family. If abortion clinics allowed their clients to read the Gwendolyn Brooks poem entitled "The Mother," it might make a tremendous difference. The poem begins: "Abortion, you remember the child that you have, that you did not have."

Lynn Robinson is an attorney who lives and works in Virginia.