[Federalist] “I didn’t know, I didn’t know," sobbed a mother, crying in anguish as she rocked back and forth, as only one who has carried the burden of regret for 20 years can.A nurse at a prolife pregnancy center was conducting an ultrasound for that mother’s 18-year-old daughter, who was pregnant. The mother and her pregnant daughter told the nurse that they had already decided on an abortion, but came in for an ultrasound, just to know how far along she was.
Seeing the flickering black-and-white image, the pregnant daughter’s mother broke down. The small figure on the screen was nine weeks old — the same age as the child she had aborted 20 years earlier. Back then, she had believed it was just a clump of tissue. Now, witnessing for the first time what an unborn child at that gestational age looked like, she saw on that ultrasound a baby — her grandchild — and the weight of that realization crashed down on her.
The nurse paused the scan to console the daughter’s mother and tell her about the resources that her center offers for post-abortive parents. "The mother, at the end of that visit, she went up to her daughter and told her that she would help her, that they were going to keep the baby," the nurse, Pasha Bohlen of Pregnancy Aid South Suburbs, testified during trial in Schroeder v. Treto, Jr.
That moment reaffirmed Bohlen’s belief, one that is shared by hundreds of pro-life doctors and pregnancy resource centers across Illinois, that abortion offers no medical benefits — only harm. Yet, for the better part of the last decade, the state of Illinois has battled in court to force pro-life doctors and pregnancy centers, like Bohlen’s, to share so-called "benefits of abortion" with the pregnant mothers in her care.