The Abortion Addict and the Invisible Unborn: A Horror Story of Choice
by Denise Noe
Irene Vilar recently published Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict, an account of her having 15 abortions in 16 years. She had most of those abortions while married to an older man who did not want children. Vilar wanted to get pregnant – even though she had no intention of carrying to term. She writes, “I would get my period and
be sad, then discover I was pregnant, being afraid, yet also so
excited.”
Then she would abort, enjoy another “high” on getting pregnant again and terminate another pregnancy. Vilar traces much of the psychology behind her actions to a troubled family history.
One of her grandmothers was Puerto Rican nationalist Lolita Lebron who, along with three men, opened fire in the United States Congress in 1954 to protest Puerto Rico’s status as a commonwealth of the U. S. Vilar’s mother had been victimized by a coercive sterilization program, falling into a depression that culminated with her committing suicide by throwing herself in front of a moving car.
That Irene Vilar’s background led to psychological problems, including self-mutilation, is hardly surprising. What is surprising is that she repeatedly got pregnant with the intention of aborting.
Her book is supposed to represent a coming to terms with the psychic tangles that led to her multiple abortions. However, that book, and some of the commentary on it, may obscure the most troubling aspect of this “addiction.” Dr. Lauren Streicher, clinical assistant professor at the Northwestern University School of Medicine, said, “She is unconsciously sabotaging contraception for self-mutilation. It’s a way of escaping feeling empty.” Vilar in her book writes, “I want to explore how when abortion takes on repetitive and self-mutilating qualities it can point to an addiction.”
In the above formulations, the unborn is strangely invisible. An embryo or fetus –or an unborn baby – was expelled from her womb and killed either as a result of that expulsion or in the process of it. Quite early in the pregnancy, the unborn possess heads, arms, and legs – appendages that are torn off in a first-trimester abortion. It was not Vilar but her embryos and fetuses that were “mutilated” – and killed – in her abortions. Vilar does not seem to recognize the possibility that her actions came from a desire to kill.
It is altogether arguable that even if the unborn are human beings, they do not have a legal right to the intimate use of another’s body.
After all, none of us who are born have any legal right to another’s kidney, bone marrow, or even a pint of blood. However, it is important to remember that it at least possible that an embryo or fetus is a human being – and that an abortion kills a human being.
This makes the possibility that females deliberately allow themselves to be impregnated planning to abort especially horrifying. I first encountered this possibility many years ago in a round up done by U.S. News and World Report on women who had abortions. One woman featured said she had aborted eleven pregnancies. She said the first pregnancy was an accident and she kept deliberately getting pregnant again
because the abortion clinic workers had been so nice to her that she wanted to return.
The possibility of women getting pregnant to abort came up again in a conversation with my friend, the late Dan Duchaine, an expert on bodybuilding who was known as the “steroid guru.” He said, “Some Olympic level female athletes will get pregnant planning to abort because the chemical change in their bodies from the pregnancy will give them an edge.” Warren Farrell in
The Myth of Male Power mentions reports of female soldiers getting pregnant so they could get safer assignments and then aborting.
There is no way to know if the above stories are factual. However, what is indisputable is that a woman who gets pregnant with the intention of aborting has done nothing illegal in modern America.
Indeed, females with homicidal impulses could satisfy those impulses through abortion knowing they were safe from legal repercussions.
Did legalizing abortion just replace one set of horror stories with
another?