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Guest Opinion: Tonia Vogel Scarred for life by painful, illegal abortion

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I am writing to thank Tonia Vogel for sharing her moving story ("Scarred for life by painful, illegal abortion," March 26) detailing her pregnancy in 1969, her illegal abortion and the painful aftermath.

I will discuss Vogel's article with my children when they are old enough to understand. It perfectly illustrates one principle I am teaching my children: While feelings are powerful and can inform our decisions, we must not be led by them, but instead must exercise sound judgment and act according to our knowledge of what is factual, true and right.

Having sex is a profound decision young people face. Because feelings can be so powerful and can seem so "true," young people must learn how to make difficult decisions based on careful consideration of the facts. Far too often, feelings prevail over clear thinking, and the facts are discarded.

Contraception is not foolproof. Engaging in casual sexual intercourse puts you at risk for a host of medical, emotional and relational problems that can sometimes last your entire life.

The prospective mother's immaturity and inability to care for a child are often used to rationalize an abortion. Truthfully, someone too immature to raise a child is also too immature to have sex, because sex makes babies.

Faced with a pregnancy, this young woman's feelings of apprehension about the future overwhelmed the fact that whatever upbringing she could have offered her child would have been immeasurably better for him than death.

Adoption was ruled out, also due to the supremacy of feelings. Yes, giving up a baby is heart-wrenching, but avoiding that pain by choosing an abortion is pure folly. I know many women who regret immature sex, who regret unplanned pregnancy, and who regret abortions, but none who express regret at giving birth to a child who was given a secure home through adoption.

The truth is that abortions are still risky undertakings, medically speaking. Abortions (both surgical and pharmaceutical) are still botched today in our era of "safe and legal." Even in normal procedures, abortion patients risk infection, bleeding, infertility and other post-abortive complications like depression, increased risk of various kinds of cancer and difficulty in forming strong attachments with subsequent children.

Furthermore, the statistics measuring these complications are without a doubt incomplete, due to underreporting by abortion doctors and the patients themselves — the unfortunate women who choose abortions.

The female body is designed for carrying, bearing and nurturing a child, and while we may have the "right" under the law to have an abortion, actually doing this thing which is so violently opposite the natural process of life displays ignorance and arrogance. We cannot treat the womb like a suitcase to be packed and unpacked based on our feelings and expect that there are not going to be unpleasant or even tragic consequences.

Of course, anyone who read Vogel's article ought to be moved to anger, tears, even disgust at the nightmarish experience she had. But let us be intelligent about how we react to her story. Yes, we should feel empathy, but it was still a transgression of common morality and common sense, a decision based on feelings and not facts.

We cannot get so caught up in empathy that we label what was wrong as something right. Vogel apparently has experienced healing from her abortion, but it is confused thinking to call it a good thing.