A year after my son's abortion, I spent three weeks on the locked unit of our local mental hospital. Just last year, I spent another week there. Both times, I was suicidal.

The most transparently obvious way of displaying liberal bias is to take an issue like an abortion, and suggest the conservative side is extreme, while describing the liberal, abortion-on-demand side without a label, as reasonable, almost non-ideological. Newsweek's that obvious in this week's issue.

Charlotte's oxygen is down to 53 %. Surely this can now be called an "uphill trend"?

The garment, which resembles the bottom half of a wetsuit, restores blood flow to vital organs in women in shock and suffering from obstetrical haemorrhaging, or bleeding, during the birth.

"To adopt a child is a great work of love. When it is done, much is given, but much is also received. It is a true exchange of gifts," said Pope John Paul II in 2000.

"Adopting children, regarding and treating them as one's own children, means recognizing that the relationship between parents and children is not measured only by genetic standards," he added. "Procreative love is first and foremost a gift of self. There is a form of 'procreation' that occurs through acceptance, concern and devotion. The resulting relationship is so intimate and enduring that it is in no way inferior to one based on a biological connection."

Major pharmaceutical companies have informally advised their peak industry group, Medicines Australia, they have no intention of importing the drug.

They have decided the move would be too costly and controversial.

Well-placed sources said the decision not to import RU486 was based on two factors.

The first is that the market is limited and the elaborate approval process would not make commercial sense. But the second reason is more important. Pharmaceutical companies understand that their industry is not particularly well regarded by the community and they believe it is not worth stirring up a high-profile campaign against them by the pro-life movement".

A little improvement-- Charlotte's oxygen is now at 60%, 5% down from yesturday. Her situation is still very critical, so please keep praying!

God recognized the official beginning of human life as being at birth. Genesis 2:7, "God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul."

While the process God used to create Adam and Eve and a baby born today are very different - and with good reason - Adam and Eve being created as the mother and father of all mankind - Adam and Eve and a baby born today do share a common bond in the culmination of their creative processes.

They breathe the breath of life through the nostrils. By God's own desire and design human beings born today don't breathe the breath of life through their nostrils until they're born. [..]

Does God condemn Roe vs. Wade?
No - God does not condemn Roe vs. Wade.

"Abortion is a needless act of violence that kills babies and hurts women," Ms Smyth said.

Amnesty claim to support the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. This is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in the world. This convention clearly states: "The child ...deserves special care and safeguards, including appropriate legal protection, BEFORE as well as after birth." It would be utter hypocrisy for Amnesty to continue supporting this convention while supporting the killing of a child before birth.

If they adopt a pro-abortion policy, Amnesty will be turning its back on human rights, the very thing they have campaigned to protect for over forty years. This will seriously undermine Amnesty's vital work in the field of human rights.

Abraham Lincoln recognized that we could not survive as a free land when some men could decide that others were not fit to be free and should therefore be slaves. Likewise, we cannot survive as a free nation when some men decide that others are not fit to live and should be abandoned to abortion or infanticide. My Administration is dedicated to the preservation of America as a free land, there is no cause more important for preserving that freedom than affirming the transcendent right to life of all human beings, the right without which no other rights have any meaning.

"How many of you have sat down and really talked to a young woman who's gone through with an abortion, and what she's living with today?" Landwehr asked, before pausing. "You live with a lot. I'm one of those women. I live with that pain every single day. Because I killed a baby.... It's more than just a surgical procedure, having a knee repaired or a hip replaced."

The ban has become so politically central to the abortion debate that it's easy to forget how medically marginal it is. At most, it would affect fewer than one in 250 U.S. abortions. Of these 2,000 to 5,000 unborn babies-if that's what you believe they are-it would save none. It doesn't ban abortions beyond a stage of pregnancy; it just regulates the methods by which they're done.

Despite this empty result-or maybe because of it-many pro-choice politicians are willing to accept the ban. If you can end a pregnancy safely by other means, it seems gratuitously revolting to partially extract the fetus during the procedure. But that's a big if. What pro-choicers demand, and pro-lifers reject, is an exception to allow this method in situations where it's ostensibly necessary to protect the woman's health. According to the National Right to Life Committee, "the vast majority of partial-birth abortions do not involve any acute medical circumstances." So in theory, the dispute is confined to a fraction of a fraction of all abortions.

Republican Sen. Bill Napoli of Rapid City said, "This bill is as straight forward and as honest as it can be. It just says no more abortions unless the life of the mother is threatened."

Republican Sen. Tom Dempster of Sioux Falls said, "This bill ends up being cold, indifferent and as hostile as any great prairie blizzard that this state has ever seen."

Democrat Sen. Julie Bartling of Burke said the time is right for the ban on abortion.

"In my opinion, it is the time for this South Dakota Legislature to deal with this issue and protect the rights and lives of unborn children," she said during the Senate's debate. "There is a movement across this country of the wishes to save and protect the lives of unborn children."

The pressure was intense for Nick and Samantha. The social sanctions on being unmarried and pregnant are hard enough in everyday society, but at a conservative Christian college it's a secret that can eat people alive. Nick felt alone. "I had no idea who to talk to," Nick says. "It's not like there's a 'Miss Manners' book on the subject."

Nick was sure about one thing: he would accept full responsibility for the pregnancy and provide for his child. He would love the baby, take care of it, and even raise it if he had to. He would support Samantha through the pregnancy, too "The way I was brought up, you always accept the consequences of your actions," Nick says. "You mess around and get pregnant, you don't just do away with the consequences." Meanwhile, Samantha wanted an abortion. "I was dead set against it, I always was," Nick says. "I said, 'I can't support you in that.' I said that countless times." [..]

At the end of the school year, Samantha told Nick she didn't want to see him anymore and ended the relationship. But not before asking him to pay for the abortion. "I'm not going to pay for something I don't believe in," Nick told her. "I'd rather pay for raising the child." Samantha called Nick within weeks to give him the news-- she had aborted their child. She didn't come back to school the next fall and Nick never saw her again.

What it boils down to, Page aptly argues, is that anti-choice extremists are not merely anti-abortion. "[A]bortion isn't the keystone issue anymore," she writes. "It's birth control, and more to the point, Americans' sex lives. Abortion has been the attention-getting focus, the easy divider, a convenient way to rally troops"- but at their core, the pro-choice and anti-choice movements "are about competing ways of life."

According to Page, the Puritan impulse to bully and shame Americans out of non-procreative sex is what drives this powerful minority of anti-choice extremists to fight tooth-and-nail against birth control - the very thing that reduces the rate of abortion.

The anti-choice movement promotes abstinence until marriage, in part because it believes that sex should be reserved for procreation. "Sex-as-a-baby-making tool may be what [anti-choice forces] long for, but it clearly doesn't correspond to how we live," Page writes. Most Americans do not believe that sex is meant only for procreation. Sex is also a means to intimacy and pleasure - a positive force in people's lives.

Springfield, IL (Feb. 15, 2005) -- According to a spokesperson for the American Psychological Association, the APA's pro-choice position, first adopted in 1969, is based on a civil rights view, not on scientific proof of any mental health benefits arising from abortion.

The admission that ideology, not science, governs the APA's support for abortion came in response to a request by a Washington Times columnist for the organization's reaction to a new study linking abortion to mental illness. The study tracked 25 years of worth of data on women born in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The researchers had expected that their data, drawn from one of the largest and most comprehensive longitudinal studies in the world, would definitively refute a recent series of studies linking abortion to higher rates of mental health problems. The Christchurch team, led by a self-professed "pro-choice atheist," Prof. David M. Fergusson, expected to find that any mental health problems occurring after abortion would be fully explainable by prior mental health problems, which some believe are more common among women who have abortions. Instead, the New Zealand research team found the opposite. Even after the researchers controlled for this and numerous other alternative explanations, abortion was clearly linked to elevated rates of depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and suicidal behavior.

The findings so surprised Fergusson's research team that they began reviewing the studies cited by the APA in its claims that abortion is beneficial, or at least non-harmful, to women's mental health. The researchers concluded (1) that the APA's publications defending abortion are based on a small number of studies that had major methodological shortcomings (a view that echoes former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop's complaint in 1987 that the research on abortion was too inadequate to draw any definitive conclusions), and (2) that the APA appeared to be consistently ignoring a body of studies published in the last seven years that have shown negative effects from abortion.

The Christchurch team's criticism of the APA's selective and strong assurances of the mental health benefits of abortion prompted Warren Throckmorton, a psychologist and newspaper columnist, to call the APA for comment on Fergusson's criticisms. He was referred to an APA expert and spokesperson on abortion and women's issues, Dr. Nancy Felipe Russo. Russo was among the leaders within the APA who, in 1969, led the organization to adopt an official position in favor of abortion as a civil right. She has subsequently been active in research and advocacy efforts opposing parental notification and mandatory informed consent statutes related to abortion.


APA Is Not Neutral On Abortion Science

When asked to comment on the New Zealand study and the pro-choice authors' criticisms of the APA, Russo told Throckmorton that the APA's position on abortion was established on the view that abortion is a civil right. As quoted in Throckmorton's Washington Times column, Russo explained that the Christchurch study would have no effect on the APA's position because "to pro-choice advocates, mental health effects are not relevant to the legal context of arguments to restrict access to abortion."

In the first draft of Throckmorton's column, which he sent for comment to another expert on abortion research, Dr. David Reardon of the Springfield, IL-based Elliot Institute, Russo was quoted more bluntly, saying, "it doesn't matter what the evidence says." Throckmorton and Russo subsequently agreed to the clarification of her statement as it appeared in the Washington Times.

According to Reardon, an author of several of the studies on abortion that have been ignored by the APA, Russo's statements "confirm the complaint of critics that the APA's briefs to the Supreme Court and state legislatures are really about promoting a view about civil rights, not science. Toward this end, the APA has set up task forces and divisions that include only psychologists who share the same bias in favor of abortion."

Reardon believes the APA's task forces on abortion have actually served to stifle rather than encourage research. "When researchers like Fergusson or myself publish data showing abortion is linked to mental health problems, members of the APA's abortion policy police rush forward to tell the public to ignore our findings because they are completely out of line with their own 'consensus' statements which are positioned as the APA's official interpretation of the meaningful research on abortion," he said.


When is Relief Not Relief?

Reardon is especially disturbed by what he decries as the "one note" optimism found in position papers by the APA, Planned Parenthood, and other organizations supporting abortion.

Among the studies most frequently cited by abortion supporters are those that have asked women to check off a list of feelings they have after their abortions, often within just a few hours, a week, or a month of the procedure. The list may include words like "relief," "regret," "guilt," and "happiness." These studies have found that the most commonly reported reaction after abortion is relief. Indeed, the phrase, "the most commonly reported reaction is relief," frequently shows up in information and consent forms for abortion.

"All the emphasis on women experiencing relief is misleading because most women reporting relief also report negative reactions," Reardon said. "Indeed, when you add up the number of women reporting negative reactions, it regularly exceeds the number of women reporting relief."

The problem, Reardon says, is that while statistics on "relief" may have value in marketing or lobbying for abortion, they have little or no value as a scientific measure.

"Women are simply presented with this single word," he said. "So women who feel relief that they survived an unpleasant surgery, relief that they will no longer face their boyfriend's badgering to have an abortion, relief that they are no longer having morning sickness, or relief from any number of other stresses, are all lumped into the same category, even though their experiences are different. Lumping all forms of relief together helps to makes it sound like most women are reporting that abortion has fundamentally improved their lives, but it's a sloppy and misleading data variable. In fact, when you really look at the data, most of the very same women who are reporting 'relief' are also reporting grief, shame, traumatic reactions, or other negative feelings."

"Thirty-five years ago, when the APA joined in the effort to legalize abortion, they were promising more than just 'relief,'" he added. "They were insisting that abortion would fundamentally improve women's mental and physical health by sparing them the burden of unwanted children. But 38 million abortions later, there is still not a single statistically-validated study that has shown that abortion has actually improved the lives of women who abort compared to those who carry to term.

"Instead, if you look at the data instead of consensus opinions, depression rates are up, not down, among women who have had abortions. Suicide and substance abuse are up, not down. Premature deliveries are up, not down. But instead of including this data in their statements on abortion, the APA's self-selected panels of abortion advocates continue to distract the media from the all hard evidence linking abortion to higher rates of suicide, substance abuse, depression and anxiety by promoting meaningless statistics about relief."

Reardon says he is thankful that Russo has finally helped to call attention to the fact that the APA's position on abortion is principally based on a commitment to defend abortion as a civil right.

But this admission, he says, "should be weighed in light of criticisms against the trend toward 'consensus science' as a means of influencing politics. As one critic, best-selling author Dr. Michael Crichton, creator of Jurassic Park and ER, has succinctly observed: 'The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics.'"


******************************

CONSENSUS SCIENCE IS NOT SCIENCE

Outside the context of the abortion debate, best selling author Michael Crichton, M.D., a 1969 graduate of the Harvard Medical School, described the disturbing trend of "consensus science" at a Caltech lecture in 2004, a brief portion of which is excerpted below:


I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.

Excerpted from Michael Crichton, Aliens Cause Global Warming," Caltech Michelin Lecture, Jan. 17, 2003. (available online)


Sources:

David M. Fergusson, L. John Horwood, and Elizabeth M. Ridder, "Abortion in young women and
subsequent mental health," Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 47(1): 16-24, 2006.

Warren Throckmorton, "Abortion and mental health," Washington Times, January 21, 2005.

David, H., "Retrospectives" From APA Task Force to Division 34," Population & Environmental Psychology Bulletin 1999, 25(3):2-3.

In the latest revelation, Liberal MP Andrew Laming admitted he performed up to 10 abortions every day while working at an abortion business in London. He says he regrets his involvement.

During the debate Laming described the "awful" experience of performing abortions for six months at the abortion facility. He said he performed abortions in the morning and counseled women about infertility issues in the afternoon.

In Roe, Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun identified the critical issue that stood in the way of declaring abortion a constitutional right. He wrote, "If this suggestion of personhood (fetus) is established, the appellant's case, of course, collapses, for the fetus' right to life would then be guaranteed by the [14th] Amendment."

Determined to reach a predetermined outcome, the Court erected a house of cards. Seven justices said that although they weren't smart enough to guess when life begins, it wasn't going to stand in their way of deciding when it can be ended. Here's what they said:

"We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in position to speculate as to the answer."

Eight years prior to Roe, the April 1965 cover of Life magazine displayed a photo described by Life as: "Living 18-week-old inside its amniotic sac. Unprecedented photographic feat in color: the drama of life before birth." The inside article stated: "The birth of human life really occurs at the moment the mother's egg cell is fertilized by one of the father's sperm cells."

What struck me was the permanence of my decision. The abortion was irreversible. Why hadn't I talked to someone who knew anything about alternatives to abortion? I started to think God would never forgive me, that I had ruined my life and any hope of a relationship with Him. Then it dawned on me. I hadn't just killed a baby, I had deeply hurt my girlfriend, perhaps destroyed her. Years later, she would tell me the only reason she went through with it was that I pressured her to have it. She wanted to have the baby, to raise it as our child. But I only wanted to get rid of it, so she agreed. Later I discovered the number one reason a woman has an abortion is because there is no support from the man to bring the baby to full term, or there is a man pressuring and manipulating her to get rid of the baby. I did what thousands of other men do, just to get it out of the way so I could get on with my life - but I never really got it out of the way.[..]

I was in emotional turmoil because I had lost something very valuable and couldn't get it back. I couldn't even mourn its loss. There was no coffin or grave to visit. My little baby had just been thrown away without ever having a chance to enter the world. The depression and pain was so intense that I considered suicide many times, but I was too much of a coward to do it.

The reaction to the publication of the Christchurch study is heating up the political debate in the United States. The study was introduced into the official record at the senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. Also, a U.S. congressional subcommittee chaired by Representative Mark Souder (R-IN) has asked the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to report on what efforts the NIH is undertaking to confirm or refute Fergusson's findings.

The impact of the study in other countries may be even more profound. According to The New Zealand Herald, the Christchurch study may require doctors in New Zealand to certify far fewer abortions. Approximately 98% of abortions in New Zealand are done under a provision in the law that only allows abortion when "the continuance of the pregnancy would result in serious danger (not being danger normally attendant upon childbirth) to the life, or to the physical or mental health, of the woman or girl."

Doctors performing abortions in Great Britain face a similar legal problem. Indeed, the requirement to justify an abortion is even higher in British law. Doctors there are only supposed to perform abortions when the risks of physical or psychological injury from allowing the pregnancy to continue are "greater than if the pregnancy was terminated."

For years, proponents of abortion have been hiding behind the old wives' tale that abortion is good for women's health. Yet, the Elliot Institute, an organization which researches the after-effects of abortion, has found that abortion can be quite harmful for a woman's overall well-being. Abortions can cause sterility, hemorrhaging, and death. They can wreak havoc on a woman's psychological health, causing her to succumb to severe depression. Women who have had abortions are far more likely to abuse alcohol and drugs and may actually die as a result of such actions. In addition, post-abortive women are far more likely to commit suicide because they are often unable to live with the guilt that comes when an unborn child is deliberately killed.

The charade that surrounds abortion has got to end. Pro-abortion advocates do a disservice to women when they try to promote abortion as some kind of safe alternative to childbirth. Whether the abortion is surgical or chemical in nature, it is still dangerous - for both mother and child. In addition, the news media need to start asking some serious questions about the damaging effect of abortion on women's health.

America's rejection of a revealed morality set the stage for this cultural revolution. Once God no longer dominated the moral horizon, personal autonomy and individual choice became the twin pillars of a debased moral worldview. Once human life and human dignity rested on nothing more than our secular consensus, the culture of death was inevitable. Human beings display a readiness to discard human dignity for something so small as convenience. If we can decide the relative value or non-value of a human life, we will eventually grow comfortable making these decisions to our own convenience.

The abruptness of the Roe v. Wade decision is a graphic illustration of moral confusion. One day, abortion was illegal in most jurisdictions--the next day it was legal. An entire structure of moral reasoning, legal precedent, and cultural conscience was discarded by a court that rested its judicial decision on a legal contrivance. How can an act be criminal murder one day and a woman's "right" the next?

I did the only thing I could think to do: plunge on, and tell my truth. I said that this is the most intimate decision a woman makes, and she makes it all alone, in her deepest heart of hearts, sometimes with the man by whom she is pregnant, with her dearest friends or with her doctor - but without the personal opinion of say, Tom DeLay or Karl Rove.

I said I could not believe that men committed to equality and civil rights were still challenging the basic rights of women. I thought about all the photo-ops at which President Bush had signed legislation limiting abortion rights, surrounded by 10 or so white, self-righteous married men, who have forced God knows how many girlfriends into doing God knows what. I thought of the time Bush appeared on stage with children born from frozen embryos, children he calls "snowflake babies," and of the embryos themselves, which he calls the youngest and most vulnerable Americans.

And somehow, as I was answering, I got louder and maybe even more emphatic than I actually felt, and said it was not a morally ambiguous issue for me at all . I said that fetuses are not babies yet; that there was actually a real difference between pro-abortion people, like me, and Klaus Barbie.

Then I said that a woman's right to choose was nobody else's goddamn business. This got their attention.

A cloud of misery fell over the room, and the stage. Finally, Jim said something unifying enough for us to proceed - that liberals must not treat people with opposing opinions on abortion with contempt and exclusion, partly because it's tough material, and partly because it is so critical that we win these next big elections.

It was not until the reception that I finally realized part of the problem - no one had told me that the crowd was made up largely of Catholics.

I had flown in at dawn on a red-eye, and, in my exhaustion, had somehow missed this one tiny bit of information. I was mortified: I had to eat my body weight in chocolate just to calm myself.

But then I asked myself: Would I, should I, have given a calmer answer? Wouldn't it have been more useful and harder to dismiss me if I had sounded more reasonable, less - what is the word - spewy?

Susan died after giving birth to their second child, Susan Anne Catherine, who was born premature after Susan had been declared to be "brain dead", and who also died five weeks later. Still, their lives were an inspiration and Susan and Jason's marriage became a vital and living testimony of selfless love.

As Susan's story became known, we began hearing from the families of other women who were suffering through their own pregnancy related health crises. There were mothers carrying their children who were diagnosed with cancer, and if they received treatment, their unborn babies' lives would be threatened. Other women were being told that, unless they terminated their pregnancies, their own health might be threatened, or that of their child's.

Their personal pain and suffering - the agony of being confronted with a life and death health crisis during the time when they anticipated the gift of life, was deeply moving, not only to us, but countless others who wanted to help.

After completing the first objectives of the fund - to absorb the enormous costs of caring for Susan and her unborn child, establishing an educational fund for their surviving child, and supporting maternal cancer research - Faith and Action determined to continue the work of the fund with a renewed mandate: to provide information and education to women experiencing pregnancy related health crises.

Faith and Action and the National Pro-Life Action Center became full partners with researchers and medical practitioners working in the field of pregnancy and abortion related cancers, prenatal diagnoses and women's reproductive health issues.

Gianna's Fund, in memory of the Italian physician St. Gianna Beretta Molla, who chose to give her unborn baby life and decline cancer treatment for herself, will continue the work begun with the Susan Torres Fund. A national educational campaign is being conducted helping women to learn about maternal health, avoidable risks to their and their unborn children's' health, and the correlation between reproductive health and cancer.

if one is looking for a post-abortion support group, one should be advised to make sure the group is pro-choice. There are more anti-choice "support" groups around in my experience, and their goals tend to be more towards the "make everyone feel guilty and then trot them out to the clinics as protesters" idea.

I hoped to provide an honest, unblinking account of what went on in that clinic on that day -- without spin from pro-choice or pro-life activists.

Of course thanks in part to that spin, few readers will ever consider a story on abortion honest, much less fair. Most readers approach the subject with intense biases, as do most writers. The only antidote I could offer was to try to absorb and record every detail of my day in that clinic. Some scenes might be offensive; some might play into stereotypes; some might seem too intimate to be exposed to a million readers. But I wanted readers to feel as though they were standing alongside me, learning what I learned.

The great challenge facing America now is that abortions are still expensive, and since so many black women are lazy and unemployable in addition to being fat and physically unattractive, they often do not have the money to pay for these operations, which are so vital to the progressive vision of utopian America. But we cannot permit mere dollars to stand in the way of progress!

Ironically, there is a source of wealthy black individuals whose personal financial interests lie very much in common with this vision. Every NBA player is well aware of the personal risks presented to him on a daily basis by the honeys, whose life's goal is to entrap an innocent young man whose only crime is to possess unusual height, athletic ability and tremendous financial upside, so it is in their interest that I propose an NBA-wide Gestational Tax Pool, from which funds will be directed to abortion clinics located in every city which possesses a Martin Luther King Boulevard within its limits.

This Gestational Tax Pool will thus spare young black men from having unwanted financial burdens imposed on them, while allowing young black women who might otherwise be robbed of choice to exercise the only constitutional right that is really important for them.

My 14-year-old was told she was going to the best abortion clinic in Virginia. Her boyfriend and a so-called adult friend, who transported her 45 miles from our home, did not know her as her parents did.

She suffered emotional and physical consequences from a so-called safe, legal abortion.

To add insult to injury, my husband and I were responsible for more than $27,000 in medical costs to repair the damage done by the abortionist.

Tissue? I now know that my baby was 14 weeks, and had fingers and toes, had a brain and could feel pain. He just needed to grow. I also know that miraculously I survived an abortion that should not have been performed in the way it was performed because of how far along I was.

However, surviving that abortion has not left mewithout physical scars. Physically I was never the same, and my next two pregnancies were difficult births. As a matter of fact, I almost died when Igave birth to my third son.

As I have stated, I have forgiven myself and others, butno one or nothing can take away the memory of that abortion. I will forever live with the knowledge that I never got to know or hold that child, and he never got to know his three brothers that would have loved him dearly.

Skydancer admitted in court.. to performing a suction abortion, which she called menstrual extraction, on a 25-year-old Greenfield woman who was 10½ weeks pregnant at the time.

The woman later had to be hospitalized for a uterine infection caused by the procedure. The hospital reported the case to law enforcement.