“The world tells me that it was only a blob of tissue, but my heart tells me otherwise”
Cath Elliott
Posted on May 1, 2009
No, that’s not me talking about Freddie the Bastard again, it’s someone called Lisa Musil, referring (surprise surprise) to her two aborted foetuses.
Here’s Fox News:
“Musil, now 45, had her first abortion at 19 because she was too frightened to admit her pregnancy to anyone — including her then live-in boyfriend, the Assist News Service reported.
But terminating the pregnancy caused her so much pain that she tried to cover it with “drugs, alcohol, partying and a promiscuous lifestyle,” she told radio host Rich Buhler in an interview with KBRT AM-740.
That lifestyle led to her second pregnancy — and subsequent abortion — just before she was due to serve a jail sentence for a drunken driving conviction, ANS reported.
“The world tells me that it was only a blob of tissue, but my heart tells me otherwise,” Musil told FOXNews.com by e-mail. “The grief often times was more than I could bear.”
To try to cope with that pain, Lisa Musil turned her efforts to honoring those who have gone through abortions.
“It’s been a desire of mine to establish a memorial where post-abortive women can go to have the names of their aborted children engraved to honor their remembrance,” she said. “As this is coming to fruition, I was wondering what last name I would put on this memorial, and my sweet husband asked if we could find some way he could legally adopt my babies and then they could take his name.”
Yep, you read it right. So rather than her sweet husband telling her it’s a sick idea and offering to get her the help she so obviously needs, he’s decided instead to adopt the aborted foetuses, and pander to her ridiculous delusions.
“Upon hearing about Stan’s idea, Buhler put the Musil’s in contact with adoption law expert and NightLite Christian Adoptions Executive Director Rod Stoddart.
“I explained that it’s not possible from a legal standpoint, because there’s no birth certificate and no child living now to be adopted,” Stoddart told FOXNews.com. “But from an emotional standpoint, there’s no reason why we could not do an agreement between them where he would adopt those children and give them his name.”
Stoddart drafted paperwork that reflected the Musils’ desire for the adoption before each other, God and witnesses, which the couple signed on Buhler’s radio show.”
I’m relieved to hear there’s no legal basis for this bizarre adoption, but I have to say, if the pro-life brigade get their way, it’s probably only a matter of time. And what does he mean “no child living now”? There never was a fucking child!
Although I find this story intensely annoying, and the Fox coverage even more so with its emphasis on murdered children and long-term post-abortion grief, I do actually feel quite sorry for Lisa Musil. Because while there’s no evidence that so-called post-abortion syndrome even exists, I do think that for some women, especially those who are surrounded by evangelical wingnuts or those who didn’t really want an abortion in the first place, there can be long-term consequences to having one, such as the guilt and regret that Musil talks about.
For example I lost my best friend when I had my abortion in 1997, simply because H was too screwed up over the abortion her family had forced her to have when she was 18. She couldn’t understand that there’s a world of difference between choosing to have an abortion because that’s the right thing for you, and being forced or coerced into having one by other people and then spending the rest of your life wallowing in misery about it. She also couldn’t understand that her reaction wasn’t necessarily a direct result of having the abortion, but in more likelihood a response to the treatment/abuse she’d been subjected to by her family: but then I suppose it was probably easier for her to blame the abortion. Anyway, her traumatic experience had, quite understandably, made her completely anti-choice, and so once she found out I’d gone ahead and had one she then couldn’t bring herself to have anything more to do with me.
This is precisely why I’m pro-choice. Because I firmly believe that abortion should always be a woman’s choice, not something that’s forced on her either by other people directly as in H’s case, or out of fear of how they’ll react to a pregnancy, which is what happened to Musil when she got pregnant at 19.
And if women do go on to regret what they’ve done, or spend their time mourning something that never even existed in the first place, the answer is obviously not to encourage them to build mawkish memorials, or to offer to adopt their aborted foetuses, but to help them come to terms with what’s happened to them, and to get them whatever support they need to help them move on with their lives.
Thanks for this. I think it’s brilliant.
You took the words right out of my mouth. There is a world of difference between having an abortion because you don’t want to go ahead with a pregnancy, and being pressurised to have one by other people, or having to terminate a wanted pregnancy for medical reasons. Which is the bit that never gets mentioned by the ‘pro life’ lobby.
It completely drives me round the bend though when women who’ve say, had repeated miscarriages (like one of my family members) are then anti abortion. What does the fact that you couldn’t have a child you wanted to have to do with forcing another woman to have a child you don’t want. I’ve also heard people say that if there were less abortions there’d be more babies to adopt and they want to adopt one!
I do hope the lawyer didn’t have the nerve to charge them for this bit of delusional nonsense by the way. What are the odds?
The religious right are truly scary. This would be an example of their media stories used for their campaign to control women’s fertility.
“Stan and Lisa Musil are friends of Dr. David Hocking and have been for many years. May God be praised for this wonderful report”, hftm.org/blog/?p=637
Thanks for the link Stephen, and you’re absolutely right, these people are scary:
http://hftm.org/blog/?p=637
Blimey, I hadn’t realised men could have abortions too!
I wonder whether Lisa will ever wake up to the fact that she’s not healed, and that these oh so christian men are manipulating her story in order to control other women’s lives…..
These crazy anti-choice women take their personal experiences and form a religion out of them. If they could only see past the end of their nose, that we aren’t all alike. I had an abortion many years ago. I cried during it and the next day. Then I went on with my life, and never looked back, because it was the right thing to do.
Hi Cath
Thanks for yet another brilliant piece. I am so sorry you lost a friend over your abortion, though if she didnt accept you and your right to choose she wasnt really a true friend.
I have to say I really have never understood the grief and sense of loss women are said to feel over terminations. From the moment that a woman is pregnant there really is no guarantee that you are going to end up with a baby at the end of 40 weeks, miscarriages happen frequently, so an aborted foetus could also have ended up as a miscarriage anyway. If you dont want it growing in your body, best to get it excised. If you get it removed there really is no point in bleating on about it for years after. I dont hear people eulogising over other lumps and growths that are surgically removed, so why these few cells should create so much trauma I dont understand. Prolife propaganda thats all it is.
Fer cryin’ out loud, posthumously adopting a bunch of cells? *slappy forehead*
These people really need to listen to Monty Python’s Every Sperm is Sacred if they are that worried about cells. Do they also mourn periods when unfertilised ova are flushed out of the system?
Also, where is the logic with the religious nutter brigade: miscarriages (called spontaneous abortions) happen all the time, but aparently that is the Big Sky Fairy’s Will. Well, obviously the BSF doesn’t have a problem with taking out blobs of cells, so why should the human gawd-fearers have a problem with it just because it has ‘a machine that goes bing’ involved in the procedure?
And how come the sperm donor involved in resulting abortions doesn’t have to carry all this ‘guilt’ eh?
You all are a bunch of uneducated fools!
Come on! A bunch of cells? Do you ever get away from your little computer god? What planet are you from? Looks like the proper spelling of God (gawd) scares you too.
Question … does it not make you uncomfortable to call it Pro-Life? Why anti-choice? Hmmm maybe because it has meaning attached to it.
“That lifestyle led to her second pregnancy ”
erm – in my experience a lifestlye never got anyone pregnant. what a completely odd thing to say. it takes two people to get pregnant.