Roe Anniversary About 'untold Story' Of Abortion's Victims, Says Smith
WASHINGTON (CNS) -- U.S. Rep. Chris Smith Jan. 22 struck a solemn note with an allusion to the song "Empty Tables, Empty Chairs" from "Les Miserables" during a Capitol Hill news conference to mark the 40th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision.
"There's a grief that can't be spoken," the song goes. "There's a pain goes on and on, empty chairs at empty tables," to which Smith added, "Empty cribs." "Now my friends are dead and gone," ends the refrain.
"Forty years of victims -- dead babies, wounded women, shattered families," Smith said. "Today is about the untold story of the victims (of abortion)."
Smith, a Republican and a Catholic from New Jersey, Reps. Diane Black, R-Tenn., and Dan Lipinski, D-Ill., who is also Catholic, gathered with five women who shared their experience of abortion with reporters at the Rayburn House Office Building.
One of the witnesses was Irene Beltran, a mother of seven who is regional coordinator for Silent No More, an organization that according to its website "seeks to expose and heal the secrecy and silence surrounding the emotional and physical pain of abortion."
"At the clinic, I was treated like livestock being herded from one step to the next. I felt like I had a number on my back and a dollar sign on my face," she said.
"Women deserve better than abortion," she explained.
"Abortion is always a death in the family. It leaves (behind) many victims," said Olivia Gans Turner, director of American Victims of Abortion and president of the Virginia Society for Human Life.
Although Marcia Carroll did not have an abortion, her daughter was taken across state lines by the parents of her boyfriend so she could get an abortion without parental consent.
As a result, her "daughter suffered years of depression, intense grief, post-traumatic stress disorder, nightmares ... and even attempts of suicide," she said. Many of the women described similar side effects from their abortion procedures.
In a statement on its website, the Planned Parenthood Association of Utah claims that "there is no scientific proof" for pro-life claims about a "post-abortion syndrome." However, a study released in BioMed Central's Journal of Psychiatry concludes that "high rates of PTSD characterize women who have undergone voluntary pregnancy termination."
For Kellie Stauffer, who was just 14 years old when she had her abortion, her life "was never the same" afterward.
Her stress disorder landed her in a cycle of addictions, which almost ruined her life. She reached out to a local Rachel's Vineyard retreat, and allowed herself "to feel the forgiveness God had been showing all along," she said, adding that with God's help, she found a husband and is now happily married.
To combat the adverse effects of abortion on women, Black has re-introduced a piece of legislation called the Title X Abortion Provider Prohibition Act, or H.R. 217, which will stop taxpayer funds from reaching abortion providers such as Planned Parenthood.
"Abortion is not health care," she said. "Every taxpayer dollar that Planned Parenthood misuses to subsidize abortions, is a dollar that is not going to women in need of (health care)."
Smith also was hopeful about overturning Roe v. Wade, but for that to happen, President Barack Obama "has to hear the stories of women who have been hurt," he noted.
Linda Shrewsbury, who also was at the Rayburn news conference, summed it up in a prepared statement: "I dreamed of the volcano of abortion truth that could erupt one day from the grass roots -- women and men and their relatives witnessing to their suppressed emotion, unspoken trauma and lived pain."
