Abortions give you cancer?

This week pro-choice group, Choice Ireland, called for regulations to outlaw so-called rogue pregnancy agencies which despite purporting to be unbiased bully and intimidate women into steering clear of abortions. An undercover investigation into the counselling services in Dublin, Cork and Limerick found that women were being shown graphic images of foetal remains, told that ending a pregnancy could quadruple their chance of getting cancer and make them more likely to abuse children. Here psychologist, Sinead Ahern, 25, exposes the scare tactics being inflicted on vulnerable women in one centre in Dublin centre.

The ad in the Golden pages was almost a whole page. Under the name British Alternative Pregnancy Service, it had a picture of a woman with her hand on her stomach and a list of services: Crisis pregnancy advice, family planning and post abortion counseling. It looked the same as the other crisis pregnancy agencies . There was no indication that it would offer services that were any different. At the bottom it said it had offices in Dublin, Manchester and London and a 1890 number.

I called. . A woman with a Northern voice spoke to me and introduced herself as Kate. She asked me how she could help. I told her that I thought I was pregnant. She asked me how far along I was and I told her six weeks. She asked me what was I thinking of doing and I told her I was considering an abortion.

That was on a Thursday afternoon. She offered me an appointment to come to visit them on Saturday in their Dublin clinic, and gave me an address on Dorset Street. Just before midday on Saturday I arrived to find a shabby building with a shop window with closed curtains and a sign WRC (Womens Resource Centre) above the door. There was no indication that its counsellors would give me anything other than frank and impartial compassionate advice. The radio was playing and there were general medical leaflets scattered on a table it could have been any down at heel local GPs.

After waiting for around 15 minutes girl with an English accent came running out of one of the rooms in floods of tears. Stay away from them she told me
She was about twenty-seven or twenty-eight, well dressed and she looked like the kind of girl that could handle herself. It was horrible to see. I wanted to run after her and explain what kind of business this was but I couldnt . I was under cover and needed to keep up my role as a scared young girl with a crisis pregnancy. Minutes later I was ushered in by a counsellor who smiled at the girls distress. Some people she shrugged implying that the girl was unbalanced.

In a small basement room with a low light and low ceilings I got a taste of the treatment that had left this girl so upset. I was shown distressing pictures of aborted foetuss, told horror stories of people needing colostomy bags after and abortion and advised that if I didnt keep my baby I could get cancer and would be more likely to become a child abuser. If I didnt have the whole session recorded on tape I would hardly believe it.

My counsellor, a woman in her thirties with long dark hair began by taking my medical history and asking about my relationship status. I told her I had a boyfriend but that I hadnt told him because I thought hed want me to keep it. I wanted to make the decision myself. She asked me for his telephone number, obviously with a view to persuading him and I gave a number for one of my friends.
She asked me what contraception I was on and I told her I was on the
pill and that we used condoms too. I explained that I was on antibiotics, that obviously affected the pill and the condom had broken.

Well, you know the pill is harmful anyway, she said. We dont recommend that you take it. She asked me if all the messing with the hormones seemed healthy to me and then she told me that condoms were not effective and could be carcinogenic. I was so stunned I was at a loss for words. I didnt know that, I replied.
She asked me to take a pregnancy test then and there. Tucked into my socks, under baggy jeans were a little pot of urine that a pregnant friend had donated to me just before the appointment, in case this would happen, but I managed to persuade her I didnt need the test. She asked me when my last period was so that she could work out how pregnant I was. I told her that my last period was six weeks before and she said that meant I was seven or eight weeks pregnant. I couldnt understand how she had worked that out but I didnt get a chance to question her. She explained that at that gestation, my baby had a heartbeat before asking me what I wanted to do.

I said I was considering abortion. Well, she said, We look after mind, body and soul here. To make sure you make the right decision it was important to have all the facts. She asked me if I thought abortion was fair to the baby and wondered how I would explain pregnancy to a child and how would I explain
an abortion. Then she asked me if I felt I could live with myself  after taking a life, and I told her I didnt think I was in a position to raise a child. I explained that I was a trainee barrister, working very long hours for low pay. I said I was worried Id lose my job if I had a baby. She told me that she thought after an abortion Id lose my job and my relationship anyway because of how depressed I would become. Then she sat me down in front of a DVD and put on a film of a woman demonstrating the tools that are used during an abortion, while explaining that the baby would be sucked through a tube and scraped from the womb. After fifteen minutes? Although some women are left to watch as long as forty-five minutes of film – she handed me a picture of an aborted foetus, with arms, fingers and nails. Thats the size of your baby she said thought it was obviously of a foetus that was four or five months old.

Then by contrast she showed me pictures of pregnant women looking happy, pictures o babies in the womb, sucking their thumb. Then she gave me a ceramic model of a foetus, the size of my fist, with little hairs sketched on and sucking its thumb. She told me this was the size of my foetus, which was very hard to believe. She told me to hold the model while she left the room to get some information. She asked me to think about what name Id give my baby. When she returned she was holding sheets of paper. She asked me if I ever
wanted to be a mother and I said yes. She told me that if I did have an abortion, I was more likely to abuse children. She seemed to imply it was something to do with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and started to talk about men in the trenches. When soldiers buddies got blown up in the trenches, they were so shocked and upset they went on to do cruel things, she explained. A lot of alcoholic mothers who abuse their children have had abortions, she added. She handed me three or four pages of paper which listed the risks of an abortion as being: Perforating organs, infection, sterility
depressive, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, nightmares, seizures, tremors, frigidity. The fact sheet said women who had abortions were four times as likely to be at risk of breast and ovarian cancer a claim denied by the Irish Cancer Society, the American Medical Association and the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. She told me how incredibly painful cancer is and that after a full hysterectomy and mastectomy women dont feel like women anymore. God always forgives, man sometimes forgives and nature never forgives she warned.

She asked me what I thought about the actual procedure and I said it sounded scary but OK. I told her I thought I could have a medical abortion where you take a pill in the early stages and it would be like having a period. She told me that medical abortions dont exist -an outright lie. She told me it was impossible to get an abortion before two months, because it was too small to move and that it would leave bits of the foetus behind, which would cause infection and sterility. Again, a blatent lie.

She told me the surgery was dangerous and could lead to all sorts of complications that would need other surgery. One girl was left with a colostomy bag after an abortion, she explained. Her bowel had become
perforated. Could you be a lawyer with a colostomy bag? she demanded.
Throughout all of this, I sat in stunned silence. Part of me could hardly believe my ears, the other was fighting to suppress the rage I felt with every lie that come out of her mouth. Have you decided? she asked. When I told her that I still thought abortion was for me, she became very short. She told me that if that was what I really wanted then I would have to wait for another four weeks before I did anything. Then she passed me the name of a GP and
told  me that in four weeks and I was to go the GP and ask to be referred to ultrasound, which would cost around E200 at a private clinic. She was engaging in delaying tactics, with the idea that the longer I left it the harder it would be to abort. Then she said shed call me next week to see how I was.
I left in stunned silence. Shaken, angry, upset, disbelieving. I knew
what I was getting into but even still I felt bullied and intimidated.
I can only imagine how women who have no idea of the kind of counselling service they were accessing would feel.

I contacted a colleague who had visited a similar clinic in Cork. Our experiences were almost identical except she had two counsellors in the room.

She told them she got pregnant because she got raped and was told that it wasnt physically possible to get pregnant from rape because the cervix doesnt open if the sex is not consensual. She was told that if she had an abortion, she would be aborting her boyfriends child. She was in tears.

A week later the counsellor did call me back and asked me to come back in again. I said no. She asked what I was doing and I said that I was going to London. She responded by giving me the names and addresses of their counterparts there. Even now months later I find it hard to believe how bad this situation is. I have to keep listening back to the tape to convince myself what I heard was real. And we have no way of knowing how many women go to these clinics. We know that there are three main rogue clinics in Dublin, Cork and Limerick as well as a number of outreach centres. These clinics change their names every six months to avoid bad publicity but their approach, as recorded on our tapes, is always the same. In a study by the Crisis Pregnancy agency the umbrella organisation for genuine counsellors four of 46 women interviewed, 8.6% had come in contact with a rogue agency. This is not surprising. Although they operate out of a few clinics, they advertise widely under different names and phone numbers which all direct callers to the same place. Their lack of transparency means that we do not know who funds them or what drives their agenda. Essentially they operate with impunity.
I was talking to a GP at the weekend, a mother of a patient of his phoned him in a panic that her daughter had attended one of the clinics and had been told that she was at risk of dying from the surgery or getting an infection that meant she would never have kids again. She had decided to go through with the abortion anyway, but her mother was now terrified that her daughter was going to die. Her GP had to refer her to get the real facts.

It is shocking that at the moment what these clinics do is perfectly legal.

Anyone can set up a clinic and push any agenda they want with no respect for the facts. Until we introduce legislation to regulate their operation, so that any centre behaving unethically using bullying tactics and inaccurate information is shut down vulnerable women are being abused.
When confronted the Dublin clinic were unrepentant. If your child was walking into a fire, would it be right to slap your child away? they asked. They believe that abortion is wrong. Everyone has a right to their own beliefs. What they do not have is the right to bully, manipulate deceive and victimise young women who are already in crisis.

Many thanks to Choice Ireland for allowing us to blog this piece.