Help, Healing, Research, Education and Advocacy
By David Reardon Lorena Bobbitt’s abortion was unwanted. It violated her moral beliefs and signified the destruction of her dream to have a family just like the one in which she had grown up. It was an attack on her self-identity and her maternal self. By understanding how her abortion traumatized Lorena, we can understand […]
Life has been particularly hectic since the publication of Making Abortion Rare in January of this year. I have done more than fifty radio interviews, plus a television interview on NET, a leading cable station for conservative political views. The biggest public relations plum, so far, was a feature article in Newsweek, March 25, page […]
By David C. Reardon, Ph.D. There is an important connection between violence in the womb and violence in the home. Certainly not every abortion leads to domestic violence, nor is every case of domestic violence rooted in the trauma of a prior abortion. But it is not a coincidence that the rates of abortion and […]
It was the trial of the decade. But the media frenzy over Lorena Bobbitt’s midnight mutilation of her husband John barely gave mention to a core piece of her testimony. She was a victim of forced abortion. Psychiatric experts for both the prosecution and defense agreed: her forced abortion contributed to post-traumatic stress disorder.
By David C. Reardon, Ph.D. On December 12, 1993, I read a report stating that John Bobbitt had pressured Lorena into undergoing an unwanted abortion. Given the substantial number of cases in our files where women and men reported the onset of domestic violence post-abortion, I did not find this news at all surprising. The […]