A former abortion nurse shares her responses to students’ questions about abortion

In a recent article in The Torch, nurse Cynthia Isabell, who once assisted in abortions, writes about how she talks to her students about the abortion issue.   Students often ask her what she thinks about abortion. When she tells them she is pro-life, they usually ask her the same few questions.

The first question she says they ask her is, “When does life begin?”

She answers:

It is obvious, then, that the preborn child is alive.

The students then ask, “When can it be considered a human?”

She responds by asking the students:

Obviously, the preborn baby has human DNA. It does not have the DNA of a bird or rat. Isabell says:

Isabell has now established that abortion kills a living human being.

At this point, though, the questions do not end. The students ask her why a woman shouldn’t be allowed to do whatever she wishes with her body.

Isabell’s answer is that it is not just the mother’s body involved in an abortion. The child has his or her own body. She points out that a fetus does not simply grow inside the mother like an internal organ. The placenta and umbilical cord must separate the baby from the mother. The placenta and umbilical cord, she says, are vital because the baby has a different circulatory system than the mother. The baby’s blood and the mother’s blood must never mix. If they do, serious complications can occur.

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 Finally, the students often ask about whether abortion should be legal when a woman is raped.

To answer this common question, Isabell cites some statistics. According to research done by David C. Reardon, Ph.D., 70-80% of rape victims who become pregnant choose to give birth to their babies.

The study Isabell refers to is written about in the book Victims and Victors which collects the testimonies of women who became pregnant through rape or incest. These women either had their babies or aborted them. The book shows that while a substantial number of women who aborted had regrets, none of the women who carried to term wished they had aborted.

Isabell suggests some reasons why rape victims reject abortion:

All of these reasons lead many women who are raped to carry their babies to term and either raise them or place them for adoption. Save the 1 shares stories from women who had their babies who were conceived in rape.

The last question students ask is whether abortion should be legal because it is needed to save the life of the mother. Isabell points out that only 1% of all abortion are done because of health risks to the mother. However, this statistic, she says, is unreliable because it includes ectopic pregnancies. In an ectopic or tubal pregnancy, the fertilized egg implants and begins to develop in one of the Fallopian tubes or elsewhere in the abdomen instead of the womb. When the baby reaches a certain size, the tube ruptures, killing the baby and causing the mother to bleed internally. A woman can die from an ectopic pregnancy as well. While in rare cases, children can survive an ectopic pregnancy depending on their location in the abdomen, most won’t. Many pro-lifers do not consider surgery to remove the baby and treat the ectopic pregnancy as an abortion, as the child was never going to survive and is not actively killed.

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In addition, the 1% statistic includes abortions done because of the mother’s mental health. In these abortions, the mother claims that she would be adversely affected by the stress of having a baby. In reality, abortions done for mental health reasons are not needed to save the life of the mother. Isabell cites the Association of Pro-Life Physicians, saying that the number of abortions that must be performed to save a woman’s life are zero.

Isabell says that even if this was not the case:

Isabell’s article gives answers to the questions most commonly asked by pro-choicers. Her answers make the case that abortion should not be legal.

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Note: A medication abortion (the type using abortion pills) can sometimes be reversed if a mother changes her mind. For more information, see Abortion Pill Reversal.