Last Friday State Senators in the Nebraska State Legislature voted to pull LB 933 out of the Judiciary Committee and up to the floor for debate. LB 933 is the Nebraska Human Life Protection Act, which prohibits abortions in the event that the U.S. Supreme Court overturns its 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Congress passes enabling legislation, or the U.S. Constitution gets amended to let states decide for themselves whether or not to ban or put restrictions on abortions.

Although I have written on the subject of abortion in the past, I have yet to address some of the specific ways that abortion harms women. Contrary to the very confused opinion of Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson who last week could not define what a woman is, women are the ones to whom God has blessed with the ability to bear children, and when we interfere with that ability there are consequences which can do great harm to women. Therefore, today I am going to highlight three ways that abortion harms women.

First, abortion provides cover for those who want to sexually abuse and exploit women. Whether we are talking about incest or sex trafficking, those who want to sexually abuse women and get away with it often use abortion as a means for covering their tracks. Once the baby is removed from the womb, the primary evidence for their illicit crime has been effectively destroyed. In this way, abortion tampers with evidence and actually enables the recurrence of incest and sex trafficking. Alice Paul, who wrote the very first Equal Rights Amendment once said that abortion is “the ultimate exploitation of women,” and she was right.

Second, abortion does not empower women. Abortion activists like to claim that giving women the right to choose an abortion somehow empowers them. For example, when the actress Michelle Williams accepted her 2020 Golden Globe award, she declared that she would not have been able to win without “employing a woman’s right to choose.” But we should ask, “Does abortion really empower women?”

Abortion actually weakens women. When a woman’s success depends upon her aborting the child within her womb, that is not an example of empowerment; it is an example of weakness. Empowerment is better represented by those women who chose to keep their babies, raise their children, and also climb the ladder of success. Such was the case with Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, who once credited her success as a legislator to the 20 years she spent raising her children. In an article published by the Washington Post, Nancy Pelosi encouraged young mothers to know their own power. Moreover, the late Supreme Court justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, once confessed that she was a more focused student at Harvard Law School precisely because she had a baby.

Third, abortion wreaks havoc on the mental health of many women who choose to get an abortion. Many women have confessed to abortion counselors how they were coerced into getting an abortion. Many have testified that they were afraid that their husbands or boyfriends would leave them unless they got an abortion. So, they got the abortion, not because they wanted to, but out of fear of losing their loved one or shame that they had somehow done something wrong.

The truth which seldom ever gets reported is that abortions often leave women with post abortive trauma and depression. Women do not forget about the baby they aborted. Guilt and deep regret often follow an abortion. Women often wonder about what kind of person their baby would have grown up to be had they not followed through on getting an abortion. Sadness and despondency often accompany them on the anniversary date of their abortion, and many women have been known to acknowledge their aborted baby at Christmas time by wrapping up gifts for them or hanging ornaments on the Christmas tree. These women have had to learn the hard way that terminating a pregnancy does not extinguish the memory of their child or remove the wonderment about the child that could have been.

For these reasons and more, I am pro-life and I will continue to support LB 933. Although it has taken Americans 50 years to figure out why abortion is wrong, the culture of America has turned solidly pro-life. A Marist poll conducted in January of this year found that 71% of Americans favor putting restrictions on abortions and a clear majority want to return these decisions back to the states. Therefore, Nebraska needs to ready itself for the day when these decisions will be returned to the states, and that is precisely what the Nebraska Human Life Protection Act aims to do.