The abortion lobby should be worried about the Make America Healthy Again movement and its leader, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
They should be worried because I believe that as he seeks an answer to the question of why so many Americans are unhealthy, he will be even-handed and objective, no matter where the search leads.
One of the things I am confident he will discover is that abortion is making Americans sick.
After 50 years of legal abortion, why is it that such a conclusion isn’t already common knowledge? It’s not that we don’t already have the evidence. Instead, it’s because of what we in the pro-life movement call the “abortion distortion,” the phenomenon that when it comes to this hot-button topic, all the normal rules across the professions are bent and broken to hide the truth. The Dobbs decision even references the phenomenon.
Here’s an early example of the abortion distortion. My Priests for Life associate, Dr. Theresa Burke, is the founder of Rachel’s Vineyard, the world’s largest ministry for healing after abortion. As a graduate student in psychology, she led a support group for women with eating disorders. During their gatherings, she discovered six of the eight women in the group had an abortion in their past. Recognizing this was a significant find and wanting to investigate it further, Dr. Burke reported it to her adviser, a psychiatrist.
Incredibly, he told her that the subject of the women’s past abortions was off limits. She was forbidden from researching any connections or even from mentioning it again.
We likewise see the abortion distortion in how mifepristone has been handled. The FDA relaxed multiple safety regulations and even stopped keeping track of the number of women who suffered adverse events from abortion pills. Many women find themselves in emergency rooms following a chemical abortion, but our government acts as if it does not care about what’s happening to them.
The abortion distortion also shows up in the way abortion is treated in academic circles. Pro-life researchers produce methodologically rigorous, peer-reviewed studies, and then find that they can’t get them published, because the gatekeepers don’t want to say a bad word against abortion.
On other occasions, their papers were retracted. The Charlotte Lozier Institute, a pro-life think tank, published three studies in the Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology, a journal published by Sage Publications. One found that chemical abortion leads to many more emergency room visits than surgical abortion, and another reported that many of these visits were being miscoded as miscarriages, rather than abortion complications.
When the articles began to be cited in court cases concerning chemical abortion, Sage Publications received complaints from abortion advocates. The papers were retracted. This is a clear case of pro-abortion bias, otherwise known as the abortion distortion. Charlotte Lozier is fighting back.
To understand other ways abortion is making Americans sicker, spend some time reading the bibliographies of studies about the physiological, psychological, relational, and transgenerational harm abortion does. See, for instance, Complications by the deVeber Institute, or Thomas Strahan’s bibliography, “Detrimental Effects of Abortion,” or websites like the International Institute for Reproductive Loss (www.iirl.net).
Read also the testimonies of women who are part of Silent No More (AbortionTestimonies.com).
This collection of research and testimony reveals undeniable connections between abortion and increased substance abuse, depression, suicide, preterm birth, breast cancer, and PTSD.
They tell of ruptured uteruses, lacerated cervixes, bladder injuries, future infertility, and difficulty bonding with subsequent children.
Far from being essential healthcare. abortion is making Americans sicker, physically and emotionally. Neither RFK, Jr. nor President Trump is going to give the abortion industry a free pass. We don’t need them to be anti-abortion activists. All we need is some long-overdue objectivity that submits abortion to the same scrutiny as everything else. I believe that a new era has now begun.
The abortion industry is likely more afraid of the MAHA movement than of “abortion bans,” and they should be. Once the search for why America is so unhealthy leads right to their doorstep, bans on abortion will be the least of their problems.
Frank Pavone is national director of Priests for Life and the national pastoral director of Rachel’s Vineyard Ministries and the Silent No More Awareness Campaign.
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