Christina Dunigan: The Psychology of Pregnancy and Abortion

I just thought this was really good (from the comments):

Too many people don't understand the normal psychology of pregnancy, and how abortion mills use it as a sales tool.

The first normal psychological task of pregnancy is to accept the reality of the pregnancy. That this -- a new human being is growing inside me and will be born in a few months -- is really happening to me. Abortion sales people can cash in on this by reinforcing the popular "prochoice" idea that it's your CONSENT to the pregnancy that makes it real, and that all abortion does is restore you to your previous, unpregnant state. The sense that this isn't really happening clouds the woman's judgment about what she's really doing -- ending the life of her newly conceived child.

Once the reality of the pregnancy sinks in, the next task is to bond with the unborn child. This typically happens when something -- feeling the baby move, seeing him on an ultrasound, hearing her heartbeat on the Doppler -- breaks through the sense of unreality. Abortion facilities will try to reinforce the popular "prochoice" mantra that there is no baby to bond with, that there is just the potential for a baby to form, etc. If the woman hasn't yet internalized that the baby is there and real, she can easily internalize the idea that abortion is just preventing a baby from becoming real. Then when she expels a mangled, dead, or living baby, she's suddenly confronted with the reality. What she'd been able to convince herself wasn't real, because she didn't want it to be real (due to fears, whatever), that the "experts" were reassuring her wasn't real -- suddenly she can't deny that it's real.

The next task is developing a reality based perception of what the baby is going to be like, and of the mothering role. Here, again, abortion salespeople are good at picking up on normal and natural fears and getting the woman to believe that the fears themselves are evidence -- nay, proof -- that she is totally incapable of properly mothering the child. Play this card when she is on the cusp -- nearly bonded with the baby, but not quite, and trying to imagine motherhood -- they can convince her that she loves her baby so much that the only merciful thing to do is spare it (for it's not real yet to her, only hypothetical!) a wretched life with an unfit mother.

ANY salesperson knows how to play on human hopes and fears, on the normal psychology of stress or of life transitions. That's why insurance salesmen swoop in on newlyweds and new parents. And nobody -- not the truly proCHOICE, not the prolifers -- teaches about how to spot and resist these sales techniques.

Once the baby is dead, the illogical "logic" used to sell her the abortion makes as much real sense as it does to you in your calm, untroubled current state. She then has two choices: Admit that she's been had, sold a bill of goods that cost her child's life (with the attendant guilt and pain), or go into overdrive convincing herself that she did the right thing, that the nonsensical idea that there was no baby, or that her fears were an accurate measure of the child's prospects, whatever, so she can cope.

This is why the new Barack Obama ad drives the abortion lobby totally batsh*t crazy -- it calls into question the entire "If the circumstances are less than ideal, best to abort because the baby's life will be wretched." If their hero can have started as a fetus that just about all of them would have consigned to the biohazard waste receptacle, then maybe the fetus they themselves consigned to the biohazard waste receptacle wasn't as doomed as they'd originally believed.