Reclaiming Our Children: A Blog About Healing After Abortion

Here is my testimony to be read before the NYC Council today. Please keep us in pray….I will let you all know how it goes….

Testimony before New York City Council

File: Int 0371-2010 Limited Services Pregnancy Centers

My name is Theresa Bonopartis; I am a post abortive woman and the director of a post abortion ministry here in New York where we get approximately two hundred new people each year looking for help because of the suffering they’ve experienced following abortion. By the Guttmacher Institutes own admission at least 10% of women suffer after abortion that is over 5 million people.  Hardly insignificant.

 After reading both the City Council’s legislative text and NARAL’s report on “The Lies, Manipulations, and Privacy Violations of Crisis Pregnancy Centers in New York City”, of which the legislation is based, it appears that the aim of this legislation is completely misdirected.

 Both the report and the legislation focus on what is seen as the manipulation and coercion of the crisis pregnancy centers. Council member Jessica Lappin, the bill’s primary sponsor, says this legislation is imperative to protect women who go to CPC’s. I would hope the Ms Lappin and the rest of the Council, as well as NARAL, were as concerned with the manipulation and coercion of countless women who are pressured to abort by boyfriends, husbands, and parents, or those who feel they need to abort so they can continue college, where abortion is free and accessible, but child care is not.

 Over the years I have heard accounts of the manipulation and deception of countless abortion clinics: women seeking help to have their babies who are encouraged to abort for “mental health” reasons, women who did not know or were not told the development of their unborn baby, or the details and dangers of the abortion procedure they were about to undergo. I myself am one of those women. Women deserve to know the entire truth about abortion whether they are in a CPC or an abortion clinic. Why is there no legislation being passed to ensure this? You continue to deny women the whole truth of the dangers of abortion yet you appease the powerful political abortion lobby. If we agree that abortion should be “rare”, well then, CPCs help to achieve that goal.

 NARAL would claim that the post abortion stress we feel does not exist and even backs it up by the report from the American Psychological Association verifying, in their opinion, that “fact”.  But, I have sited 35 studies on attachment #1, saying the opposite, and I know thousands of post abortive women who disagree with the APA. They cannot tell us that what we experienced did not happen.

 I wonder if the council is planning to show the same concern towards abortion clinics that they seem to have with CPC’s, where there is no life threatening acts. Will they be implementing standards in abortion clinics, so that they align with the regulations of other health care facilities? ON PP’s site they say abortion is “safe” and legal , I am sure the women I have sited on attachment #2 who have been injured from abortion here in NY, would disagree. Will they be required to post a sign that says abortion lead to injury..

 Also, perhaps those women who have died from supposed “safe, legal” abortion here in New York, like: Dawn Ravenelle, Guadalupe Negron, Sophie McCoy, Dawn Mack, Christina Goesswein, Tamika Dowdy, Nicey Washington, and Alexandra Nunze, as well as the others listed on attachment #3 would have not chosen abortion if they had been told all the dangers. As we all know, women continue to die from abortion no matter how “safe & legal” it’s claimed to be. Will they have to post a sign that says abortion can lead to feath? The Council seems more concerned with signs in CPC’s and limiting their 1^st amendments rights then actually offering women alternatives and regulating abortion clinics that are responsible for injuries and deaths. Where are the signs at the abortion clinics warning women of these?

 One has to wonder why there is such an affront on the CPC’s. According to NARALs own report the CPC’s use the wording, “Abortion Alternatives”. Where is the deception in that wording? “Abortion Alternatives”? There isn’t any. CPC’s offer services free of charge and do not advertise themselves as a source of birth control or a medical facility so why would they have to state what they do not offer?  Do abortion clinics have to state they do not offer services they do not propose to offer? And what proof is there that private information has not been confidential?

 It seems that both the City council and NARAL have become more concerned with abortion itself then the women they propose to be helping. In a quest to keep abortion legal at any time for any reason, they have discarded the welfare of countless women.

 We have been told over and over again that women are capable of making their own choices. It has been one of the main arguments in the pro abortion debate. Why then don’t the council and NARAL trust women enough to be able to make this choice? If they do not want to be in CPC they can leave. How can you say a woman can handle making a potentially life changing decision such as abortion, yet not trust her enough to handle going into a CPC? Either she is capable of making decisions or she is not. Perhaps you are the ones using the fear often felt by women to limit alternatives that would give her the resources she needs to allow her to have her baby. I know countless women who wish they had known of such resources.

 Truth be told, abortion always takes the life of an unborn baby, and can cause great suffering to the mother, emotionally and physically, and even death. If CPC’s save some women from that by the help and support they provide, I say more power to them. As a society that claims to want lower the abortion rate, so should you.

Enclosures: 3