Highlight: Is abortion the compassionate choice?

Can abortion be the compassionate choice for a child? This is what women in crisis pregnancies are often told by their doctors. Then their guilt is magnified after having a medically-advised abortion.

Theresa Bonopartis talks about the coercion that women experience at the hands of their doctors and the trauma that follows.

“They go to the doctor. They’re made to feel guilty for even considering having the baby. They’re made to feel like the baby’s going to be abused. If anything happens to the mother, it will go into a home. All these terrible things are going to happen, and the compassionate right thing to do is to terminate the life of this baby.”

After being coerced into the guilty decision to have an abortion, women are taught to normalize the death of their child.

“There’s a huge attempt to make the abortion seem like a normal death. George Tiller used to dress the babies up and put them back in their mother’s arms, baptize the baby. So, there is an attempt to make something so evil and sinister appear like it was a normal death.”

“Many of these people…they bury these babies, and a lot of these families treat it like it’s a regular funeral; and what ends up happening is, a lot of these couples, they’re over there thinking they’re the ones that are crazy because they know it’s anything but normal – they’ve just taken the life of their child.”

Faced with such an irrational choice, women are often ill-equipped without the right information to make an informed decision.

“Because the decision is made so quickly, because usually it’s later term…they don’t really take the time to think about it, to do research. Unfortunately, many organizations that are out there that specifically help people that are going through this like Be Not Afraid and Isaiah’s Promise – many people don’t know about those things, and so they’re rushed into the decision.”

“It’s almost like they’re frozen, and it takes a while to thaw out, but when they do thaw out, they find out how they were lied to, they were betrayed maybe by, I know clergy people that have told them it’s okay to do it – they’re betrayed by the doctors.”

“A lot of times they come to the realization that maybe their baby would have died, but at least they wouldn’t have killed them.”

For many women, this aftermath experience may be at the crux of what makes it so difficult to overcome abortion emotionally and spiritually. It often triggers a crisis of faith and causes women to reexamine everything they believed about God.


Theresa Bonopartis is the Director of Lumina, a post-abortion healing ministry. She is active in pro-life campaigns and has been helping people recover from abortion for over two decades.

Is abortion the compassionate choice?