AFTER Queensland MPs vote to legalise abortion, a respected Catholic trauma counsellor has used her regular newsletter to warn of the grief and long-term psychological impacts of the life-ending practice.
“What has happened to all of us that we have allowed this to happen?” post-abortion grief and sexual abuse counsellor Anne Lastman wrote in her newsletter Broken Branches.
Mrs Lastman was reflecting on a recent report that 766 babies were born alive in Canada after failed abortions and were left to die.
She went to the extraordinary length of posting a graphic image of one of the babies in her newsletter.
“I usually don’t like to show images like this,” she wrote.
“I like images of happy babies we have helped to save but this image shook me to the core of my being … a baby which if helped could live.
“The tears and sense of shame and failure is strong.”
In the past 17 years, Mrs Lastman, a Melbourne-based counsellor, has assisted more than 1500 women who have suffered post-abortion grief in Victoria, where abortions are legal.
In the lead up to this months historic vote by Queensland MPs to legalise abortion, she told The Catholic Leader of the likely long-term implications of the state’s new laws that allow abortions up to birth with doctors consent.
She warned that a woman’s grief of aborting an unborn baby coupled with the pressures from boyfriends or partners, family and in the workplace, could lead to traumatic experiences that were clinically described as Post-Abortion Syndrome and are a variant of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
“… I am left to ask have we been abandoned. Are we children of a Father who has abandoned His children?” she wrote in her newsletter.
“What has happened to all of us as a society that images like this (of an aborted child) do not bring a roar of rage?”
“How much have we emotionally declined so that seeing an infant struggling to breathe we have no compassion?
“How is this possible that the men and women have become so robotic that we have no humanity empathy left?
“How have we become so remote from humanity that we cannot see the innocence, pure dignity, and pure design of such an infant and not be moved to horror and outrage…”
After Queensland MPs vote to legalise abortion this month, politicians in New South Wales are now under mounting pressure to follow suit.
NSW Opposition Leader Luke Foley said his party would refer the issue to the NSW Law Reform Commission if Labor wins the next state election, scheduled next March.
A bill to decriminalise abortion was voted down in the NSW parliament last year.
