Fr. Paul Sullins | The Dr. J Show
Explore the hidden emotional scars of abortion in this compelling episode with Dr. J and sociologist Father Paul Sullins. Discover new research revealing that up to 14 million U.S. women suffer long-term distress post-abortion, often dismissed by mainstream narratives. This episode delves into the mental health risks, societal denial, and the need for compassionate care, drawing comparisons with international approaches. Whether you’re a woman affected, a healthcare provider, or simply curious, this discussion offers vital insights and hope for healing. Join us to understand the profound impact of abortion-related trauma and the path to recovery.
00:00 Understanding Abortion’s Psychological Impact
02:55 The Shift in Societal Perception of Abortion
06:01 Post-Abortion Trauma: A Hidden Reality
08:57 The Study’s Methodology and Findings
11:59 The Need for Care and Support
14:48 The Role of Ideology in Abortion Research
17:57 Comparative Analysis of Abortion and Childbirth
20:55 The Importance of Acknowledging Distress
23:50 The Call for Compassionate Care
27:07 The Challenges in Research Publication
29:57 Conclusion: Acknowledging the Silent Suffering
40:27 The Complexities of Abortion and Mental Health
45:52 Critique of the Turnaway Studies
51:14 Censorship in Scientific Research
57:31 The Impact of the Dobbs Decision
01:02:32 Wanted Child Abortions and Coercion
01:09:44 Theological Perspectives on Abortion and Innocence
Resources & Links:
Father Paul Sullins’s Research Page at the Ruth Institute
https://ruthinstitute.org/sullins-abortion-research/
Rachel’s Vineyard Ministry
https://www.rachelsvineyard.org/
American Psychological Association on Post-Abortion Stress
https://www.apa.org/
Guttmacher Institute
https://www.guttmacher.org/
Father Sullins’ Reports on Clergy Sexual Abuse: https://ruthinstitute.org/resource-centers/father-sullins-research/
Subscribe to our newsletter to get this amazing report: Refuting the Top 5 Gay Myths https://ruthinstitute.org/refute-the-top-five-myths/
Transcript
(Please note the transcript is auto-generated and likely contains errors)
Father Paul Sullins (00:00)
somewhere around seven and a half to eight million women in the United States who are candidates for therapy, for help, for intervention, for prayer support, for care related to their abortion. They’re not non-existent. They’re a real population. And about a fourth of women, specifically 24%, severely disturbed by having an abortion. 25 % frequent thoughts, dreams, or flashbacks. Many women do not know that they’re disturbed by their abortion. It’s a trauma response. And one thing we know about trauma is that people often deny or do not recognize that they’ve been traumatized.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (00:40)
I had had numerous counselors telling me, no, those night dreams, those night terrors, that has nothing to do with it.
Father Paul Sullins (00:46)
These women look back some of them 20 years or more. Abortion is not a light experience for these women. Kind of woke ideological editors and they never went to peer review that screens out research that doesn’t fit the particular story that they want to tell.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (01:05)
of the near of science pasted over a propaganda effort, right? They’re trying to baptize the propaganda with the mantle of science. That’s not science. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not science.
What would you think if I told you there was a very common medical procedure that after people had received it, 20 % of the people who received it were harmed by it and that that harm lasted for 20 years. 20 % of the people suffering for 20 years. And what if I told you further that this very common medical procedure was performed only on women?
What would you think of the healthcare establishment routinely performing a procedure that harmed 20 % of women for a long time? You won’t be surprised to learn when I tell you that I’m talking about procured abortion. Today on the Dr. J Show, I’m going to be talking with my friend and colleague, Father Paul Sullins, a sociologist retired from Catholic University of America where he taught sociology for a number of years. And now since 2018, the Senior Research Associate here at the Ruth Institute. He has some new results in his statistical analyses of the impact of abortion on women’s psychological health. Father Sullins, welcome to the Dr. J Show. It’s a pleasure to talk to you again.
Father Paul Sullins (02:32)
Well, it’s a great pleasure and honor to be with you once again today, Dr. J.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (02:38)
So tell us you have a recent paper that was published in last year, 2025, it’s called Persistent Emotional Distress After Abortion in the United States. What is the significance of this paper? Give us the big, big overview picture. What is this paper about and why is it significant?
Father Paul Sullins (02:55)
Well, maybe 30 years ago, the intellectual elites in the United States saw abortion as a tragic necessity. It was something that when women got into difficult situations, we didn’t want to have too many of them if we could avoid it. But it was something that had to be done at some times. Today, that’s completely changed. Today, abortion is celebrated, an expression of women’s freedom as something that enhances a woman’s
life to have one. It’s called abortion care, a species of health care. It’s something that women sometimes publicly celebrate and give thanks for having had an abortion. And so what’s completely denied in this point of view is the idea that some women suffer from having an abortion, that abortion is not a happy experience for some women.
Now, we have to say that for some women it is. About half of women in the study that I did are not particularly bothered or disturbed by having an abortion, but about half are. And about a fourth of women, specifically 24%, severely disturbed by having an abortion. We asked them a number of questions about how they felt about having an abortion. And 31 % reported frequent feelings of loss.
grief or sadness after their abortion. 25 % frequent thoughts, dreams or flashbacks to the abortion. Many reported that the abortion interfered with their daily life. It was so disturbing. These women look back, some of them 20 years or more to having an abortion. So these problems not only exist, but they persist for a long time in their life. All of
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (04:43)
So, how does this paper, this is a brand new paper, I you just published this in 2025 and you just gave us a minute ago kind of an overview of the, I guess you would say the predominant view in society about abortion. Right. If you were to look in the psychological literature, people who actually study this topic in a serious way.
So I think, you know, our mutual friend Priscilla Coleman is in the psychology department and you’re a sociologist and presumably plenty of the public health people probably look at these kinds of questions. When they analyze this in the way that you are now talking about, because this is much more specific than what you said, what you opened with, you know, kind of the predominant shout your abortion view, you know, we’re now into some statistical nuance here.
What do those type of professionals have to say about the extent of post-abortion trauma?
Father Paul Sullins (05:45)
Well, post-abortion trauma is what you said, extent. It’s a problem for a minority of women. It has been ever since we’ve had an abortion. Yeah, I’m sorry. I’m trying to put my thoughts together here. The surgeon general, whose name I can’t remember. I do, right.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (06:01)
You don’t mean Everett Coop. You do? Okay, so that was like a long time ago. was like- Yeah.
Father Paul Sullins (06:07)
So Everett Koop was the first one who looked into the question of whether women routinely or systematically had distress following an abortion. And he published a paper that’s celebrated by all of the pro-abortion regime that said that the public health problems from abortion, psychological problems, are so rare that they’re not a significant public health problem.
And so that’s often cited as evidence that women do not experience distress following an abortion. But in that same report, Dr. Koop also acknowledged that, and I’m quoting here, abortion can cause long-term psychological problems for some women. He also said there’s no doubt that there are people who have a post-abortion syndrome. So he was recognizing that while women generally, by and large, are not deeply distressed by having an abortion,
that there are some women, a minority of women, who are and who carry that distress. Now, Coop underestimated the extent of the distress following an abortion, mostly because the data were not that good back in those days, but they’ve gotten much better. And even the American Psychological Association, when it published its report on abortion in 2008, it acknowledged that, quote, some women experienced severe distress or psychopathology following abortion. So it’s not a secret. It’s well known that some women experience distress following an abortion, but it’s systematically, ideologically denied today. And I guess we’ll get into those issues later, but what I’m reporting on is a very simple kind of a survey. It was a survey of women age 40 to 45 looking back at their reproductive career as it were. Over age 40, according to the CDC, the age when women enter what they call completed fertility, they’ve had just about as many children as they’re going to have. Now, I think they need to update that age because we have technology now for women to have children at later ages, but that’s still what they have. And so here you have women who are looking back at their life and their
We ask them, you ever been pregnant and how did the pregnant turn out? And if they report that they had an abortion, then we ask them a series of questions about their emotional responses to that abortion. And about 23 % of women reported that they’d ever had an abortion. Well, that is a wonderful confirmation of the strength of these data because if you look at the estimates put out by the Gutmacher Institute and other agencies that go to lots of trouble to try and estimate the percentage of American women that have had an abortion, they come up with 23%. So you have to nail right on the head in these data of the number of women that have very likely had an abortion by that age in their life. so then of those 23%, we ask all these questions about their feelings about the abortion, the conditions of the abortion. About half of them,
don’t report any significant emotional distress following the abortion, but about half do. And of that half, about a half of those, which would be a quarter, only report what I’ve classified as moderate or mild distress. The other half or a quarter of the whole dataset report severe distress, distress that persists, that won’t go away.
that interferes with their daily life. Often, many of them reported that they didn’t feel distress for a long time and then they started to. It was an emergent kind of distress. And so just that fact to publish that is something that rebuts pushes back against the prevailing view that the medical establishment has regarding abortion. It’s unusual.
of in the United, I mean, it’s unique to the United States to have this view. Most other countries in the world, even though they may not oppose abortion as a right or as a possibility for women, they recognize that it can be very disturbing for women to have. In the United States, abortion is, you know, very politicized. There’s a lot of ideology about the abortion issue. And so, We have particularly since the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, a movement to go to an extreme idea, extreme view on abortion that wants to introduce sort of the happy abortion to every woman possible. We have states that are writing the right to an abortion into their state constitution. It’s seen as sort of a natural right or a fundamental right of women. So it’s moving to an extreme pro-abortion position that we haven’t seen before, which I think is kind of a reaction to the success of the pro-life movement to restrict and to limit abortion.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (11:29)
So let’s return to this study. If you may ask, there are a number of studies out and about on this topic. This particular one, tell us about the data set here, because if I understand this correctly, this was a carefully, this was a commissioned data set. Am I correct in how I read the paper, Father? Tell people how these commissioned data sets get done and what safeguards there are to make sure that it’s really representative of the whole of you women in the United States. Yeah.
Father Paul Sullins (11:59)
So this was done by the CENT CINT Marketing Research Firm. And they have a panel of 335 million participants worldwide. They do this by signing people up and aggregating people into online data collection experiences and surveys. And so the…
Charlotte Loeser Institute commissioned them to collect a representative sample of American women. So it’s not exactly a random sample, but it uses a lot of techniques that matches its sample to known characteristics of the population. And then they also have random samples that they validated against.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (12:49)
So the point is, so the point of the Charlotte Lozier Institute, just for people who don’t know, they are a pro-life organization. They are the research arm of the Susan B. Anthony list. I think that’s accurate to say. And so in that sense, they’re sort of like Goodmocker Institute is to Planned Parenthood. So Goodmocker would be the research arm on the pro-abortion side. And so even though a pro-life organization commissioned the survey, they used a company, basically a non-ideological
business establishment that’s out there collecting data for all sorts of things. And as Father Sullins has already indicated earlier, one of the numbers we really care about is, this typical, is this batch of women typical in terms of how many have had an abortion? And the answer is right on the nose. know, 23 % in this sample, 23 % in the U.S. as a whole. The other thing that interested me about it is that this is a sample deliberately of women who have completed fertility.
And so that means they’re looking back over their whole pregnancy career, you could say, right? Is that fair to say, father? Yeah, sure. Yeah. And then you’re, and then you’re asking them, were you ever pregnant? Were you, and then what, if you were pregnant, what happened? You know, what were the categories for if you were pregnant, what happened? You either had the baby. All right. Yeah. You had the baby or you had an abortion or you had a, another time called an
Father Paul Sullins (14:15)
Another kind of pregnancy loss. A miscarriage.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (14:18)
And or an unintentional pregnancy loss. There’s a special name for it, for miscarriages and stillbirths. that what it is? Okay. So one of the arguments or one of the debates in this arena about is abortion harmful or helpful to women is they will ask the question. They’ll sometimes say, yes, there are risks associated with abortion, but the risks are no greater than childbirth, than compared to childbirth. And so this data set does allow you to ask that question.
in some form or fashion, you can compare the people who had abortions with the people who did not, of the people who experienced pregnancies. So with that little bit of background in Mind Father, walk people through what some of the comparisons were. Mind you, these are women who are 40 years old or older. They’re looking back on their lives. Some of them had their abortions a long time ago. Some of them had their abortions the day before yesterday.
Tell us a little bit about that part of the survey. How far back are they looking and how long ago were we generally looking at with the abortion itself?
Father Paul Sullins (15:23)
Right. Well, they’re looking back at their entire life. And so it’s a retrospective survey. so they’re, they, you know, begin to be able to become pregnant at puberty. And so it goes back, pregnancies and the abortions that they had go back to their teenage years. And then there’s a distribution of them over their life to that point. So I think the average time
since having an abortion was something like 13 or 14 years. But the range went back as far as 20, 21 years. And then very few had abortions recently, but some did. yeah, so there’s a wide range of timeframes. Now, what I did was to look at the correlation of the time since an abortion with the level of distress. Because the argument made by the other side is that women can be very distressed for a year or two following the abortion, but after that the distress diminishes. And so if that were true, then there would be a negative correlation of their age with the abortion or positive correlation of the times, no, negative correlation of the time since the abortion. And what I found was that there was no association at all. There was no correlation with how long it had been since they had the abortion with their level of distress about the abortion. So abortions that women had 20 years ago were just as distressing as ones that they had just a couple of years ago to the women that were distressed. So the idea that
Abortion distress is a transient thing that happens just to some women for a year or two, which is the widely believed idea today, is completely contradicted by these findings.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (17:29)
All right, so I think we’ve got that point covered, you know, that this isn’t a longitudinal study, but it is germane to the body of work that’s out there. It supports a particular interpretation of work that’s already out there. I think it would be a good idea to take a look at the specific things that people were asked. And you have them listed here in table three, scaled measures of distress about abortion among ever-aborting women. Okay, and we’re looking at 226 women here out of this original population of a thousand people. here’s what some of the things are. My negative emotions regarding the abortion are either none at all or very high. Is that correct about how that’s?
Father Paul Sullins (18:10)
Yeah, so they were looking at a slider that went from zero to 100 and they could put it wherever they wanted to indicate that a level of distress.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (18:20)
Okay, all right. 22.8 % of the women said that that was very high. That’s correct. ended up with a number that was very high, over 80%. Not to 100, but 81 and above. The next question, I have had frequent feelings of loss, grief, and sadness about the abortion. And not at all true, very true. 15 % of the women were very true.
and another 16 % somewhat true. if you look at 60 % at the 60 level and above, you’re looking at, you know, almost 40 % of the people. The third item is thoughts and feelings about my abortion have negatively interfered with daily life, work or relationships. And not true at all. 40 % said basically 39.3, 40 % said, nah, not a bit. It doesn’t bother me a bit. And then going all the way up to very true, 13 % said it was very true, another 10 % saying it was somewhat true. So in some cases now you’re looking at women who had an abortion could be 10 years ago, could be 13 years ago, and it’s still having a negative impact on their daily life for about a quarter of them. So that’s not chump change here, people. And then finally, a very interesting one.
I have had frequent thoughts, dreams, or flashbacks to the abortion. 43 % said, nah, never happens to me. And then again, at the very high level, you got 13 % saying, rating it at 80 or above, and then another 12 % saying, know, something was somewhere between 60 and 80%. So again, 10, 12, 13 years later, maybe five or six years later,
but somewhere in that distribution of time time past, they’re still having flashbacks. Right. You know, they’re still having flashbacks. So, you’re I’m sorry, go ahead.
Father Paul Sullins (20:26)
at the bottom of that table. Now, what I do as I report, so these are four different questions and we have, you know, percentage of women who report high distress at a score of 60, 61 or higher. And what I do at the bottom is to say, okay, women who said that on one item, did they say it on another item? And if you count that, 11 % of women indicated that high level of distress on all four
of those questions. So these are women who by any concept of measurement are extremely distressed about having that abortion. Now the reason I did that is because these questions are also very similar to the diagnostic questions in the psychological diagnostic manual for post-traumatic stress, which is a stress response to any kind of life experience. Often
to sexual assault or physical assault or some other traumatic event, like men in wartime often have post-traumatic stress. so women who respond positively to four of those items meet the criteria for post-traumatic stress with regard to their abortion. Abortion is not a light experience for these women. It’s a very deep, troubling, heavy experience. And that’s really the…
burden of this study.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (21:55)
Yes. So, and you know, if you, you, if you look at it this way, we have perhaps a million women a year having abortions. I mean, I think that year in and year out, that’s roughly what it is. So let’s say it’s only 10%. Okay. You’re talking about a hundred thousand women every year. That’s right. Who are severely traumatized. We’re having all four of these symptoms and then others who are not. And, and what, what I have to say, what troubles me is what kind of care do these women need and are they getting it?
you know, is anybody talking to them about this? If the whole profession is in denial about, oh, gee, this never happens or they were wacky in the first place or something, you know, that there’s a lot of untreated harm out there. I have heard this from people in the psychological professions who are involved in on the pro-life side, know, but I’ve also heard it from the pregnancy care ladies, father, you know, the women who, who
try to help women have their babies, the women who come to them. Some of them are post-aborted. They don’t want to do that again. That’s why they go to the Pregnancy Care Center. They don’t want that. Now, you’re a sociologist. I’m an economist. We’re not therapists, okay, people? Full disclosure. But Father Solons is a Catholic priest, and he has heard a lot of confessions and done a lot of counseling. What thoughts do you have about this issue of the kind of care people need?
Father Paul Sullins (23:25)
Well, the first thing I think to recognize is that many women do not know that they’re disturbed by their abortion. It’s a trauma response. And one thing we know about trauma is that people often deny or do not recognize that they’ve been traumatized. know, young persons who have been sexually abused often do not report it. They do not even admit it to themselves for a long time. But it comes up.
later in their life when they’re entering into maybe a marriage relationship or they’re experiencing special stress during some other part of their life. And they start saying, why am I reacting the way that I am? And they’ll go into counseling and, it’ll come up. And so often women, just something is off. They just can’t find that peace and joy and happiness in their life that they want. And they don’t know what’s wrong. And they’ll go in for care and help and will often discover that they had an abortion, that they weren’t aware of, or that they suppressed and s-
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (24:26)
Where they knew they had it, but they didn’t assign any importance to it. Exactly. They don’t necessarily black it out or have a repressed memory. Yeah, sorry. Okay.
Father Paul Sullins (24:36)
I’ve met a number of women in that category. And when they come in and or in the confessional or in other kinds of counseling settings, they’ll, you know, it will often come up, excuse me, as something related to the child that they didn’t have. They’ll wonder what, what the child’s name would be or whether it’d be male or female or, you know, how it would fit in with their other children. And there’s a sense of loss.
There’s a hole in their reproductive history and thus in their self. And I think that is one way that I’ve seen this come up and be of disturbing for women. Another thing that I’ve seen is women who feel that they’ve completely ruined their life and their relationship with God and with the faith and that there’s nothing they can do to rectify it.
And that’s something that really needs to be addressed in gentle caring therapy. Having an abortion does not ruin your life. It is something that can be forgiven like anything else, particularly for someone who is experiencing regret and remorse and grief. That’s exactly the kind of thing that God wants to meet with mercy and with care. You can’t undo the past and it’s a terrible thing, but there’s all kinds of terrible things that
the grace and the mercy and the blood of Jesus covers for us. And so no woman should give up hope or be lost in despair because they had an abortion.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (26:09)
Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, our friends at Rachel’s Vineyard are very aware of this phenomenon. I suppose a lot of people are familiar with Rachel’s Vineyard as it’s ministry to women who have been through abortion and to help them process their grief and their trauma and so on. The woman who founded that is a lady named Teresa Burke, she, whose book I happen to have here, she…
became aware of the problem one time when she’s a therapist. Now she is a therapist. I’m not. She is a therapist. She was doing a eating disorders group and over the course of time out of the eight women in that eating disorders group, six of them had had an abortion. she, Teresa said to her supervisor, you know, there’s a common theme here. I think we should address what people are feeling. And her supervisor said, absolutely not.
that has nothing to do with it. You must not talk about it. You must not bring it up. That’ll just cause even more problems. So the Teresa’s going like, that doesn’t sound right to me. She went on to address it with this very wonderful ministry, Rachel’s Vineyard. And I had this experience too. I had an abortion years ago and I left the church in a huff and I knew better and nobody, but I knew the abortion was wrong. I knew right away, I knew it was wrong, but I didn’t know what to do with it or how to deal with it.
And when I finally went back to the church, it was a priest who was the first person who told me, yeah, I get why you’re upset. I mean, he didn’t say it that way, but I mean, I had had numerous counselors telling me, no, those night dreams, those night terrors, that has nothing to do with it. You know, it’s nothing to do with the abortion and everything like that. And it was a priest who said more or less what you said, do you believe God can forgive you? Do you believe God has taken care of your baby to help process that sense of loss that I had?
This is a very real thing for me, that women are getting their issues kicked down the… It’s like a kick in the can down the road, rather than actually dealing with them. I’m grateful for the information that you’ve amassed to your father. This particular paper, as we’ve already mentioned, was based on a study commissioned, a data set commissioned by the Charlotte Lozier Institute. I’m curious…
Father Paul Sullins (28:32)
I believe abortion is particularly able to be healed because I believe that your aborted child is praying for your forgiveness, is beseeching God that his or her mother will find peace and grace from that. And I really believe that when we get to heaven or, you know, after
whatever millions of years I’ll spend in purgatory, I get to heaven. I believe that we’ll meet those people. I think we’ll meet everyone that we’ve ever wronged and it will be made right in some way in God’s mercy and grace. But I think particularly that unborn child who is with God is praying for every mother. And that brings about great grace for healing. You mentioned Rachel’s Vineyard, the current director of Rachel’s Vineyard wrote me a very nice thank you.
email for publishing this study because they have a hard time establishing in lots of forums that there are lots of women who are hurting after abortion. This study was reporting on a population representative sample. And you know, Dr. Morse, that from that kind of a sample, we can estimate the prevalence and the population of in the case that’s discussed. And so I was able to publish the estimate that
In the United States, there are about 14 million women who are suffering distress from having an abortion, half of them severely so. So we’ve got somewhere around seven and a half to eight million women in the United States who are candidates for therapy, for help, for intervention, for prayer support, for care related to their abortion. They’re, they’re not non-existent. There are real population and there are a lot of them. There are millions of them.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (30:26)
Yes, yes. And you know, when I did the research for my book that’s now almost 10 years old, The Sexual State, there’s a whole chapter in here on the propaganda supporting the contraceptive ideology. And we have known since the 1990s, since people listen to me, since the 1990s, we have known that between 10 and 30 % of women suffer severely from abortion and yet nothing, you know, to yet, you know.
You really by now should have established some kind of protocol for talking to women to say, know, look, if you have a history of depression, maybe you’re not a good candidate for this procedure. If it was some other medical procedure, that’s exactly what you would do. You would look at the at-risk population and, you know, talk to them and whatnot. But no, that information, it’s, you know, as Father mentioned earlier, it’s a very ideological topic. And so the…
true science kind of goes to the wayside because the ideological point is no one suffers. If they do suffer, it’s their own fault somehow. know, there’s something wrong with them, but the norm is for nobody to suffer. Well, you don’t think about that about, you know, pretty much any other medical procedure. You know that the drug is going to have bad effect on some people, but on this topic, we don’t want to talk about it.
Father Paul Sullins (31:41)
We have progressive states who are actively lobbying against giving women information about the distress they may suffer from their abortion because they see that as conceding one of the links in the chain of support for the happy abortion in the United States. But that’s not true in many other countries. And I think of the Nordic countries. Now, I had a chance to visit some of the Nordic countries last year.
And one of the things that interested me was to find out what they did for women with abortion. And in almost all the Nordic countries, they’re not restrictive on abortion. And women can have abortion almost on demand, but they ensure that that woman is making a wise choice. For example, in Denmark, if a woman goes to have an abortion, she has to be evaluated by two doctors to certify the rationality of her decision. And one of those doctors has to be a psychiatrist.
So they want to make sure, they don’t want to restrict her right if she wants to exercise it to have an abortion in that very progressive environment, but they want to make sure that she’s not buying into lots of difficulty and distress. Well, we don’t have anything like that in the United States. And consequently, Denmark has had a much lower abortion rate for a long time than in the United States. Unfortunately, all the abortion rates in all the countries are rising rapidly due to the abortion pill, medical abortions.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (33:08)
Right, right, right. And that’s gonna scramble the data for quite a little while until we figure out how to use that, how to measure it, and what the right questions are to ask and stuff like that. Before we leave this kind of nerdy topic, and I hope all of y’all are enjoying this because we, Father Sullins and I, have a good time with the nerdy stuff, but this is a population sample, right, a representative population sample.
But there have been other studies that you have done based on the Ad Health Survey. So I want you to just briefly describe how those data sets are different and some of the results that you’ve found from those other, those.
Father Paul Sullins (33:47)
Sure. Well, the ad health data is a truly random sample of the U.S. population. Well, it’s a complex random sample. It’s a sample of junior high students, which was representative of that age group in 1995, I think it was. And then they followed those same persons now ever since then. So they’re going on 30, 35 years that they followed the exact same individuals. And they re-
interview them at intervals of about seven or eight years. And so in those data, I was able to look at women. There’s about 20,000 persons on the data. So it’s a very large data set. And I was able to look at women who have had an abortion and compare them to women who were in similar problem pregnancies, but decided not to have an abortion and to give birth to the child and to compare those women. did the first comparison when they were age 28.
And by age 28, I found that the women who had chosen to have an abortion had much higher rates of five or six different psychological disorders, including depression, anxiety, suicidality, and various forms of substance abuse. And then did another study finding that by age 37, which was one or two samples later, they…
They still had elevated psychopathology relative to women that had children, although psychological difficulties for both groups of women had to decline because women in their early life through their 20s, they tend to have higher rates of depression and anxiety. And then as they age, it settles down and they moderate. And so that happened, but it moderated more for the women who had had children than for those who had had abortions.
So there’s a lasting effect of abortion for women in the United States.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (35:50)
So there are a number of data points converging on the same thing, you know, that there are number of indicators for us to say that there are no problems, that’s just foolishness, you know, that really needs to stop because it’s way of diminishing the harm that people have experienced. you know, why would you want to do that to people who are really vulnerable and really hurting?
pro-family way to buy or sell a home. Go to realestateforlife.org. You’ll be connected with a Christian realtor. Part of their commission will go to the pro-family charity of your choice, the Ruth Institute, for example. And it costs you nothing at all. It’s the most pro-life, pro-family way to buy or sell a home. Go to realestateforlife.org. Yeah. So what I’d like to do now, Father, is to change the subject just a little bit to talk about the
the politicization of science, because this is something that you’ve been involved in, we at the Ruth Institute have been involved in, we’ve been tracking it, we’ve been impacted by it, shall we say. Tell us some of the problems that you have had getting your abortion research published.
Father Paul Sullins (37:04)
Sure. You know, in preparation for this question, I knew you were going to ask about this. I got about six different rejections on this study from journals that I submitted them to that had kind of woke ideological editors and they never went to peer review. The editor would decide that the study couldn’t possibly be correct. And so I was looking up some of the things that the editors have said. One of them said that my claim
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (37:24)
Mm-hmm.
Father Paul Sullins (37:33)
that some women were distressed following an abortion was not recognized by any scholarly or medical association. Well, I started the study by quoting from a study by the American Psychological Association that acknowledges that some women have deep psychopathology following an abortion. Well, you know, I pointed this out to this editor now. It makes no difference when you get a
a desk rejection like this, there’s no response that you can make. But I make them anyway. I send them back. This is why you should rethink your idea. And every once in a while, the editor will write me back and say, you know, I’m sorry, I’m not going to rethink it or whatever. The editor said causation cannot be established by observational data. Well, you know,
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (38:03)
Right.
Father Paul Sullins (38:23)
I pointed out, well, I’m sorry, this was a submission for one of the ad health studies. Now I should say that my ad health study that follows women to age 38 is still unpublished because I’ve found that everywhere that I submitted, they tell me that it can’t possibly be true. And that’s what this editor is doing here. And so I point out that I’m not using any observational data. I’m using longitudinal panel data, reinterviewing the same women at
different points in time and longitudinal data like that, according to I cite here, both the Cochrane and the grade typologies, this is prospective cohort data. It can establish causal presumption with a high degree of confidence. I quote from those sources. It’s certainly, it’s not a random clinical trial, but it does establish the real world possibilities of
causation. It’s not, of course, it’s impossible to do an experiment with, with regard to abortion. Like most medical interventions, can’t assign women randomly to have an abortion or not, but if you observe them, longitudinally, you get, you get to the next best thing. And then he goes on to say, well, preexisting poor mental health may account for the mental health issues following an abortion. And so I point out to him that I controlled for that in these studies that I reported.
the difference for women with pre-existing mental health and not. These were extensively measured. It makes no difference. He’s just looking for reasons not to accept this study. That’s what we have. have an ideological screen that screens out research that doesn’t fit the particular story that they want to tell.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (40:10)
Yes, yes. And in that particular case, in that particular case, let’s say it’s true that pre-existing conditions account for the distress that people are experiencing. is a case, that open and shut case for why you should have a screening protocol.
that says that where you’re informing people, if you have a family history or a personal history with depression or anxiety or something, we should really look into a different solution to your problem other than abortion because this might aggravate it. it makes me crazy that they bring up a thing like this without realizing what the pretty obvious rejoinder would be. It would not be abortion on demand with no questions asked. You know what I mean? It’s illogical.
in itself. But you’ve probably got some other examples. So that one paper hasn’t been published yet. I’m pretty sure we have multiple papers, just for everybody who’s interested to know. We have a whole page for Father Sullins’s abortion research that you can easily find from the home page of the Ruth Institute. And we do have some that are published and some that have not been published. They’re all there. You can see them for yourself and draw your own conclusions. Anyway, go ahead, Father. What else were you going to tell us about this?
Father Paul Sullins (41:25)
Well, I think that the prime example of persons who have had trouble publishing studies on abortion is not myself, but Priscilla Coleman, who published a rebuttal to the group of studies called the turn away studies. Well, this is maybe a good time to describe what the turn away studies are. so a pro-abortion.
Research Institute at the University of California, San Francisco has collected a sample of women who wanted to have an abortion, but reported to the abortion clinic too late. They were past the gestational age limit in their particular state. And so they were turned away from having an abortion. They take this group of women and they compare them to women who were not too late and who were able to have their abortion.
And they find that the women who were turned away are distressed over that much more than the women who were allowed to proceed with the abortion that they wanted to have. And from that comparison, they say, look, women who have an abortion are not more distressed than any other women, that there’s no negative difference for women who have an abortion. Well, you know, the problem with that
is that there is no comparison with women who considered having an abortion but decided not to, who decided to carry the child to term. And that’s the real comparison that you need to make. And so the turn away study has been going on for a number of years. They interviewed the women after the first year. There were just about a thousand women in the sample and each year they interviewed them and
more and more women dropped out of the sample. By the time they got to five years, over 80 % of the women were unavailable to be interviewed. And so with that rate of fall off in the sample, technically it’s called mortality, they can’t really draw any conclusions about how distressing an abortion may have been for the women. If you think about it, if a woman doesn’t wanna talk about her abortion, doesn’t want to answer questions or be interviewed,
Is it likely that she’s more likely that she is distressed or disturbed by the abortion or that she’s happy and wants to talk about it? So you really can’t draw any particular conclusions from those studies. Nonetheless, those are the studies that are always cited when some news outlet or somebody wants to make the claim that women are not harmed by having an abortion. And so what, what I do in the, in the study that we’re talking about is to cite
all of those reported findings from the turn away study. don’t ever mention the name of the turn away study, but I cite.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (44:23)
noticed that. didn’t mention it, but I was pretty sure that that’s what you were talking about.
Father Paul Sullins (44:29)
Well, you know, I don’t want to I don’t want to prompt any more negative response than I need to. But I cite all of their studies and I say, look, this study said that, you know, you know, so many women are distressed and then it tapers off and it disappears after so many years. Actually, the turn away studies report a lot more distress following an abortion than they admit. If you read the
abstract of the study and the news reports, it makes it sound a lot happier than it does. actually dig down into the meat of the study and look at what they report, they report a lot of distress, but they say that it evaporates after a certain period of time. And so I cite all of that. And then my study basically rebutts that, shows that in fact, there is deep distress.
distress that is as great or greater than they report within the first few weeks or months of the abortion. For many women, that distress persists for years, for decades, the abortion. And so I’m trying to kind of correct the record or push back against those false findings. Now, because I do that, as we’ve been saying, I have had trouble publishing this study. Right. And others have had even more trouble. Now Priscilla Coleman,
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (45:32)
Right. Fine.
Father Paul Sullins (45:52)
who we were just mentioning, had a study published in a major journal, Frontiers in Psychology, that listed all of the problems with the turn-away studies.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (46:03)
Yep.
And we did an interview with her where she spelled all that out for us. So anybody who’s keen on this, all of you data nerds who are hanging in there with us on this bar, got something even better with Priscilla Coleman because she goes through a line, chapter and verse, but go ahead and summarize it because it’s pretty astonishing actually.
Father Paul Sullins (46:26)
Well, so about a year after publication, staff member at the Guttmacher Institute contacted an editor at Frontiers and complained about the fact that all of the peer reviewers for Priscilla’s article were affiliated with pro-life organizations and hadn’t disclosed that. I think there were four peer reviewers. You only need to have two, but she had
twice as many as was necessary. And so the editor investigated and agreed that that was true and retracted the study. Now, in fact, it wasn’t true. At least one of the peer reviewers had no affiliation with any pro-life organization, but he’s a scholar that is known to have pro-life ideas or convictions. So he was somehow not acceptable. And
It wasn’t true that the scholars didn’t disclose their affiliations. It’s published right on the masthead of the study that they’re affiliated with the Charlotte Loeser Institute. Or in one case, the peer reviewer was affiliated with the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists. It has the name Pro-Life right in the organization, right on the masthead of the article. But they said, well, you didn’t disclose it.
And so it was a pretext to retract that study. So what I did in a paper that’s going to be published in a couple of months, this was the one you presented for me at that censorship conference, is I looked at the turn-away studies response to Priscilla Coleman’s article. Now, Priscilla wrote this critical article about the turn-away studies. The turn-away study authors then crafted a response attempting to respond to the things that Priscilla did.
had said, well, they didn’t have a very good response. There wasn’t much that they could say, which is why I think they then subsequently tried to have the article retracted and succeeded in doing that. But I looked at the response. Do you know how many peer reviewers there were for their response? There was one, just one. And did that peer reviewer have any pro-abortion interests? Well, I list them. The answer to that is emphatically.
Yes, she’s a consultant with Cambridge Reproductive Health Consultants, which focuses on increasing access to abortion. She is a participant in an organization that helps pregnant women evade the ban on abortions in states that have banned them and it helps them to travel to other states. She won an award from the National Abortion Federation.
for her work in advocating abortion. Now this was the so-called objective scholar that reviewed the response to the turn away study, which was retracted because the scholars were not objective because they were too pro-life.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (49:21)
Yeah. before we go any further into this, because these problems are rampant and many examples of it could be cited, I just want to say about the turn-away study itself, one of Priscilla’s biggest complaints about it was that you could not figure out how in the world they derived their sample. She did some back of the envelope, well, more than back of the envelope. mean, she did some calculations to figure out how many people they could have included in what they announced was their…
Father Paul Sullins (49:39)
Yes.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (49:50)
intended target audience and she’s like 2 % of the possible people or something like that with no idea whatsoever how those particular people were chosen. Whereas the study that Charlotte Lozier commissioned, they hire somebody who would be objective, would have would stake their professional reputation on being objective and that was absolutely not the case with the turn away study.
Father Paul Sullins (50:14)
It’s even worse than that. Charlotte Loeser did what you’re supposed to do when you publish a study is that they published also the data for the study. They posted the actual data set, which is how I was able to do my study because they did that. And the turn-away authors, after I think it’s more than 10 years, have not published any of the data anywhere so that no scholar is able to look at their raw data to see if it really matches up to the claims that they make.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (50:24)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So people were losing science. I mean, that’s what I want the audience to understand, that we are losing science. I know a lot of people were freaked out during COVID because people got the idea that they weren’t, that the public health establishment was not necessarily telling us the whole story about things. If you’re in that category, I just want you to know that the public health establishment has been problematic for some time on some of these other issues. And we’ve been, we’re still on the receiving end of it.
Father Solons and I were part of a conference on censorship and propaganda. And so maybe you could tell people just a little bit about that conference too, because there’s going to be a book published from that. And people who are interested in this can get really an international view of what some of these problems are with the censorship of science.
Father Paul Sullins (51:32)
Yeah.
Well, this was a conference that looked at the suppression of disfavored ideas in lots of different settings, mostly the suppression of conservative ideas by woke or progressive forces in society. And the part of it that Dr. Morse and I were involved in looked at the suppression of scientific evidence in lots of ways. I talked about not only Coleman’s studies,
but also suppression that I’ve endured in a number of ways. I had an article that was retracted after four years after it was published was retracted because someone complained that we had used the word remission to talk about the reduction of same-sex attraction by persons who were trying to change sexual orientation.
And they said, well, that makes it sound like same sex attraction is a negative thing. Like it’s a remission of your cancer or something like that. So we offered to change the word. We used the word reduction. It didn’t matter. That was the pretext by which the journal said, well, we’re going to retract it. Actually, that was their first pretext. We made, I made maybe the mistake of responding to that and trying to correct that. And I made such a good argument against that.
that they came up with another reason, which a little more plausible sounding reason to retract it. But really, they they never published any of our responses. They never allowed us to actually they don’t want to have a debate or a discussion. They just want to make this unsafe, disfavored idea disappear. And so that we’re facing that in lots of different ways in this in the study of abortion. Certainly people who do research that
pushes back against the kind of regime of the happy abortion, we get canceled and suppressed, but it happens in lots of other settings as well.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (53:32)
Yes, and the whole area around sexual identity and sexual orientation, that is all, that’s a landmine as well. And there are certain, there’s an approved narrative. And if you support the approved narrative, the scrutiny that your work receives is much less and much different than the scrutiny that Father Sullins would receive or Priscilla Coleman would receive. And so what that means is that this is not the scientific method. This is a
hover of science, this is a veneer of science pasted over a propaganda effort, right? Trying to baptize the propaganda with the mantle of science. That’s what they’re trying to do. And if you are not willing to entertain opposing ideas, if you’re not willing to release your data, if you insist that ideas you don’t agree with get taken out of the literature, even though people have been going back and forth and studying the thing for long time and nobody’s ever found any actual problems with it.
That’s not science. don’t know what it is, but it’s not science. so that’s, we here at the Ruth Institute really want the public to be aware that this whole area is fraught with these type of difficulties. Yeah.
Father Paul Sullins (54:43)
Right. One of the worst examples in my mind was a commentary published by 17 scholars, including most of the Turnaway Study authors, who asked the British Medical Journal to retract four studies that were 20 to 25 years old that pointed out problems for women having abortions. These authors complained that the studies misstated the question and that
they should be retracted because they would be harmful and they wanted to quote, correct the scientific record. The problem is that the scientific record is not a record of anyone’s point of view or particular ideas. But as Dr. Morse has just said, the scientific record is really a record of debate, often very intense debate, because the whole premise of science is that no one has a privileged access to the truth.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (55:20)
Mm-hmm
Father Paul Sullins (55:43)
All of them, all of us have the right to question anything that anyone says. And so one of the egregious, almost laughable things in this commentary was that they wanted these studies to be retracted because when they were used in court against the studies that these authors had, the authors were losing the cases in court. The studies that they wanted retracted
presented such strong arguments against their point of view that they were more convincing to judges and juries than their own studies. Well, that gets us exactly backwards. If you’re a scholar and you disagree with what someone else has written, the answer to that is not to try to apply pressure to have that study retracted. It’s to present better arguments and evidence from your own point of view to try to convince people that your point of view is correct and the other person is wrong.
So for the good of everyone, a scientist has to deliberate and give the same careful deliberation to ideas that they personally are sure are wrong, as much as to those ideas that they personally are sure are right, because the premise of science is you can never be sure that you know everything. And so you have to consider every idea from every point of view.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (57:05)
And what you just said highlights the decisive factor, I think, that has changed the intensity around the censorship issue. And that is the Dobbs decision. Yeah. Because for a long time, Supreme Court had, in effect, shut down certain kinds of discussions, at least in courtrooms and in legislatures. And once the Dobbs decision…
took away that protection of a federally guaranteed right to abortion. Now a lot of things are open for debate, open for discussion and so on. And that’s when these people zoomed in to say, we got to get rid of this 2011 study that Priscilla Coleman has written and that people keep citing and they’re all persuaded by it. And so we have to get rid of it. And so I think a lot of your most intense problems with abortion studies have also been post-DOBS, if I’m not mistaken.
Father Paul Sullins (57:57)
Absolutely. Yeah.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (58:00)
So, you know, one other area that you and I have talked about some time before, when it first came out, was you did this study about women who aborted pregnancies that they wanted. It turns out there’s some data set somewhere that asks people this and you went and looked at it and you found something that didn’t surprise me in the slightest. But since you’re the only person on planet earth who would even ask this question, much less get an answer to it. What did you find in that study, Father Solitz?
Father Paul Sullins (58:27)
Well, it was in the ad health data and they ask women about their pregnancies and then they ask how did the pregnancy turn out? And one of the questions they ask is did you want to have a child at the time that you became pregnant? And what surprised me was that about a fifth of women who reported having an abortion at a particular pregnancy reported that they wanted to have that child. And so these were, I eventually called them wanted
child abortions. Now I had to change that to wanted pregnancy abortions because some of the editors thought that was too inflammatory to say we’re aborting a wanted child. But that’s exactly what was happening. Well, it turns out that the woman wanted to have the child, but other important people didn’t. Her partner didn’t or her parents didn’t in most cases, or she felt coerced and pressured. Now the idea of abortion coercion has been around for a long time, but here it was in
black and white as extreme as you could see. And when I looked at these wanted child abortions, I found, as you might expect, that they were much more distressing, over twice as distressing for the women who had to have them as the regular abortions. And so, you know, we have to realize that an abortion decision is never something that’s black and white. I’m sure there’s a lot of ambivalence about it and uncertainty. But in
many cases, a woman feels very, very pressured by having to have an abortion. I remember one person wrote that a woman wants to have an abortion like a trapped animal wants to chew its leg off to get out of the trap. It’s not something that women generally want to do. I’ve never heard a woman say,
I want to get pregnant so I can have an abortion. It’s something that a woman does not want. I won’t say no woman, but…
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (1:00:27)
Right, right. Because we’ve already talked about the fact that a lot of women don’t seem to feel distressed about it afterwards. So we know that’s the case. I’m interested to know that did this study, did it actually ask people, were somebody pressuring you? you know that indirectly or directly or?
Father Paul Sullins (1:00:45)
Now, I looked at some other studies that got at that issue in another way. They asked the woman, did you want to have abortion? And then they asked her partner, did you want to have, I’m sorry, did you want to have a child? Then they asked their partner, did you want to have a child? And so there was incongruence in those answers in many of those cases. So we can infer from that, that there was this other. Now in the study that I just did, the retrospective study, they did ask about
abortion coercion and did you feel pressured in any way to have an abortion and I didn’t look at that because Charlotte Loser has already published a very nice study looking at those questions and talking about the percent of women who feel pressure and the kind of pressure that they feel and of course women who felt pressured to have the abortion are also more likely to feel distressed looking back at the abortion but but there are lots of other issues about
being coerced that have to do with that. Now, the other side, the Turnaway Study people have published a book on abortion coercion, where women are coerced to have a child instead of having an abortion. And they look at the pressure, what they call the pressure for women to go ahead and to have a child, even though they may not want it.
So it works both ways, I guess. You know, getting pregnant is something that changes lives in lots of ways. And it’s a collection of a lot of forces that come together at one point in that. So it’s a very important moment in life, in a woman’s life. The call for a woman is to be generous and to say yes to life. The Blessed Virgin Mary did that with our Lord and changed the world forever as a result.
And I think that if a woman is generous and open to having life, she’s going to change her life and lots of other lives for the good. That’s anyway, that’s part of the confluence of issues that come together when we.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (1:02:45)
Yes, and if a woman doesn’t feel supported in her role as mother, that’s a heavy load. That’s a heavy load because it is intrinsically a communal effort. The creation of the child, the bearing of the child, lifelong responsibility for the child is meant to be.
is unavoidably a group effort in some way, you know? And if the other half of the group or the other part of the group is not on board, it’s miserable. Now, do you know, in the paper where you talked about the wanted pregnancies, one of the rejoinders that you sometimes hear is people say, well, I really wanted the baby, but I found out that the baby was going to be really deformed. And that’s why I boarded the baby. Right.
As far as I could tell though, didn’t see, again, they were assuming that must be the case. You’re kind of assuming that people are pressured while other people are assuming that it’s the fetal abnormality that is making it go from wanted to unwanted. What’s the evidence do we have one way or another about?
Father Paul Sullins (1:04:01)
in these data, in the health study, I was able to exclude so-called therapeutic abortions, abortions that women had for some legitimate medical reason. And so none of these abortions were abortions where there was some alleged defect in the child that would cause the woman to want to
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (1:04:22)
Okay, okay, so that was excluded just by the design of the you had that information you could that’s correct for that and
Father Paul Sullins (1:04:31)
not so much in the US, but in Europe, they make a very clear distinction between therapeutic abortions and elective abortions. And elective abortions are of presumably healthy children, but that there’s no medical reason or issue at all. But the woman for her own reasons chooses to have the abortion. And these are the kinds of abortions that I was looking at in that.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (1:04:50)
Yes, I see, I see. But you and I don’t really recognize the category of therapeutic abortion anyway. Right? mean, that child, that child is a child of You know, the Catholic Church is the most egalitarian organization on the face of the earth. In spite of our hierarchy and our guy at the top with the big crown and everything, you know, we actually believe that the baby in your arms and the baby in your womb are equal.
and the baby who’s deformed is equal to the baby who’s not. And the baby in the freezer, even the baby in the freezer is equal to the baby in your arms, you know.
Father Paul Sullins (1:05:28)
products of the love of God. And his love is not withheld from any of us. People say at the foot of the cross, the ground is level. All of us stand there in the same relationship to Jesus or the same relationship to God. No matter how rich we are, poor we are, sinful we are, old, young, we could be just a few, we could be a zygote of just a few cells.
It doesn’t matter because we all receive the love of God in the same unlimited amount.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (1:06:05)
Hey, thanks for watching. Since you’re a fan of the Ruth Institute, you should really sign up for our free e-newsletter. We’ll send you a free download of our report Refuting the Top 5 Gay Myths. It’s filled with our unique combination of personal stories and nerdy data. You can click on the footnotes and be taken directly to the references. It’s totally free, so sign up at the link below today. And that is when you were talking about the babies being in heaven.
Yeah. You’re making a theological assumption there. Yes. And so I want to put that on the table for people because this is a question. What is the status of an unbaptized baby in Catholic theology? For a long time, the presumption was that the unbaptized baby’s not going to heaven. What’s current thinking on this matter?
Father Paul Sullins (1:06:37)
was
Well, you can’t baptize an unborn child. You can solemnize or dedicate that child in certain ways if you choose to often after the fact. But so you have a human being that was not allowed even to become a candidate for baptism, an utterly completely by definition, innocent human being. I’m not a theologian to parse the details or the fine distinctions of
where exactly in God’s panoply of love that child lives at this time. But I do believe wherever it is. Now I said heaven, or maybe I’m speaking loosely, it might be limbo or some other place.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (1:07:41)
Right, was the medieval answer to that question, that the child doesn’t suffer, but they don’t quite get through the gate.
Father Paul Sullins (1:07:48)
Yeah. And really that was a term. Limbo was a term to say we don’t really know where the child is. It’s a liminal existence. Limbo means a liminal. You’re between different things. And we don’t know quite where that is. It’s on the edge of things. All of these things are way beyond our understanding. We’re warned against speculating too much about them. And so, you know, I don’t do that. But I believe
You don’t have to agree with me, but I believe that those children who are innocent have a special relationship with God in some way and are able to appeal to Him and to express their love and their care. They are human beings. They have something. They have a full life of fulfillment and creativity. I don’t think God is going to somehow keep them frozen or something, like they don’t experience their life just because their mother
chose to have an abortion. So I do believe that your unborn child lives somewhere today and is praying for you and is seeking God for your good because that’s what a creature of love would do. And these are creatures of love. They would have loved their mothers if they had been able to be born in the natural way of life.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (1:09:04)
Mm-hmm.
Father Paul Sullins (1:09:16)
The great tragedy of abortion as an experience in this life is that a woman can never know what opportunities were lost by not having a child. You’ll never know how that life would have changed you, how your life would have been different and enriched. It might have been included more suffering and sacrifice, but that’s what makes us rise up as human beings to our greatest dignity. I’m not a theologian.
delusions can calve about these things. can, if you want to decide that I’m wrong and off the beam, that’s fine.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (1:09:53)
I’ve heard a couple of different interpretations of this because the reason just for all you non-Catholics, know what the concern is the fact of original sin. And the doctrine of original sin is extremely important and is its own kind of egalitarian equalizer, you know, that we’re all equally in trouble, you know, and in need of a savior and all that.
Father Paul Sullins (1:09:57)
My story, I’m sticking to it.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (1:10:22)
That’s why it becomes an issue. You refer to the child as innocent, and they’re innocent of actual sins, but they do still have original sin. And I’ve heard a couple of different things about this that I want to just put out there for people’s consideration. I remember one priest answered by saying, God is, we’re bound by the sacraments, but God’s not bound by the sacraments. God can save anybody he wants, any way he wants.
Now, he told us to do certain things and so therefore we need to baptize our babies and not drag our feet about it. But, you know, he can save people anyway he wants. The other thing I heard, Father, is that you probably know this, probably a lot of people know this, that in the times of persecution in the church, there were, they developed the idea of baptism of desire because sometimes people were, they were catechumens, they hadn’t been baptized yet.
but they intended to be baptized. had the desire to be baptized and they were slaughtered. And so yeah, it’s baptism of blood, but it’s also baptism of desire. So the reason this priest brought it up was the question in that particular case was not the aborted baby, but the baby in the test tube and what’s going to happen to the frozen baby and you know, that kind of thing. And what this priest was recommending is that as soon as you conceive, as soon as you conceive, go to your priest and tell them we intend
to baptize this baby. We desire that this baby be baptized, you know, just to make it 100 % clear, you know, that you who have spiritual authority over the child have every intention of bringing the child to fruition. Now, I suppose people who have abortions are not necessarily thinking in those terms, but people who have frozen embryos, some of them do come around to start thinking in those terms, like, what have I done?
You know, when they go, what have I done? What am I going to do with these 10 frozen embryos? Who are they? What are they? What do I do? You know, I would put that thought out there for y’all to consider something.
Father Paul Sullins (1:12:25)
I, since we’re speculating.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (1:12:28)
Yeah, please.
Father Paul Sullins (1:12:30)
I have a couple of thoughts. What do you do with the holy innocents who were murdered, who were killed by Herod?
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (1:12:36)
Yeah.
Father Paul Sullins (1:12:38)
as he was trying to get to Christ. Now these were not Christians at all. They were Jewish. And they were not baptized. They probably were circumcised. yet the church celebrates them as martyrs and saints.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (1:12:54)
and saints. They have a feast day. They’re on the calendar.
Father Paul Sullins (1:12:59)
How do you do that? What do you do with the thief on the cross who, you know, did not have a chance to be baptized at all, but Jesus said, today you’ll be with me in paradise. So I think that there are some exceptions that God is able to do what he chooses to do. The normal way to that grace is baptism. You’re absolutely right. Killing a child in the womb is not a normal act. And I don’t think that God is going to hold that to normal.
standards. Now, another thought is this, however, having said that, why do we assume that wherever that child goes, that child does not have the opportunity to be baptized? I can certainly imagine an afterlife existence where God makes provision for those children, has caretakers and
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (1:13:54)
One way another. Yeah, one way or another, he’s providing for them. Yeah, I think we’re, I think we’re allowed to think that like, like there’s a waiting room outside. Before you go see St. Peter, there’s a spot that they handle this kind of stuff. You know, we, of course we don’t know. Obviously we don’t know. We don’t know for sure. But, when God created the universe, he factored into it, the evil that we would do in our time. We think our time is uniquely evil.
and unimaginably evil. And yet God knew all that. So somehow he has this figured out.
Father Paul Sullins (1:14:30)
Yeah, well, I think he figured it out long before we even did it and he’s
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (1:14:35)
Indeed. Right, right. And he knows where it’s going to end too, so that’s good to know. Yeah.
Father Paul Sullins (1:14:41)
So I think all of that is in the grace and the mercy of God. You can abort a child and think that somehow you’ve denied it existence and you’ve gotten it out of your life, but I think God has a different idea. Somehow there is a very special place of grace and mercy, maybe even of power and growth and fulfillment for those children. I don’t know. I don’t want to speculate, but someday we’ll find out. We’ll meet those children.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (1:15:11)
Right, right. And I would say that as a consolation to anybody who’s watching and who has suffered with these kind of issues, whether maybe it wasn’t an abortion, maybe you had multiple miscarriages. I can’t even imagine what that would be like. So our Lord’s mercy and grace is there for you.
Father Paul Sullins (1:15:31)
Amen.
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The Ruth Institute is a global non-profit organization, leading an international interfaith coalition to defend the family and build a civilization of love.
Jennifer Roback Morse has a Ph.D. in economics and has taught at Yale and George Mason University. She is the author of The Sexual State and Love and Economics – It Takes a Family to Raise a Village.
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