Recently leaked videos from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) have become an alarming window into the business model and culture of the military. Troubling many pro-life Americans, it seems that pushing abortion is a part of the plan — because of a toxic environment leading to the videos meant to frighten and even bully female members into killing their children. Here’s what you need to know: 

Just last month, five hours’ worth of instructional videos for VA healthcare providers were leaked to the Post Millennial, prompting a firestorm over their contents. While the VA is only legally allowed to pay for abortions which are the result of rape/incest or considered dangerous for women’s physical or mental health, these videos suggest that the agency is abusing the mental health qualification. Additionally, the internal statistics on why military women have such mental health problems will leave you reeling. 

Material from the videos revealed:

• One-third of reproductive-age female VA patients have experienced “military sexual trauma” 
• More than 40% of all reproductive-age female VA patients have at least one mental health diagnosis 
• Almost 20% of the more than 900,000 females in the VA health system have sought at least one abortion

According to statistics from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, sexual trauma inflicted on females is much higher in the military than the national average (around a quarter of American women experience sexual violence compared to one-third in the military). 

What kind of environment has the military leadership allegedly allowed in the military to see such disturbing data?

But it gets worse.  

Instructors in the videos make seemingly make the claim that abortion will fix such mental health problems (despite research showing the exact opposite as abortion causes such problems) and that preborn children of mothers with mental issues like PTSD will suffer because of it and therefore should be killed instead. Additionally, the videos suggest that women in the armed forces are being discouraged from motherhood by superiors and military culture. 

In the material, both veterans and active-duty female service members reported aborting their children due to “fear of reprimand” for becoming pregnant, pregnancy potentially “adversely affecting a career,” “disruption of deployment,” fear of the “myth that people get pregnant in order to avoid deployment,” and an “inability to do certain jobs.” 

After watching the instructional videos aimed at VA physicians, pro-life physicians spoke up in horror, condemning false facts and clear leadership faults seemingly intended to coerce women into abortion. 

In a statement to the Washington Examiner, the chairwoman of the mental health subsection of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists Dr. Robin Atkins labelled the videos as “villainizing pregnancy.” She stated, 

“What I do see overwhelmingly [in the training videos] I have watched is the repeated idea that abortion is the answer to mental health complications … and that somehow if a woman has PTSD, she requires an abortion.” 

Dr. Ingrid Skop, the director of medical affairs for the Charlotte Lozier Institute who comes from a military family herself, added, “Abortion has never, in any context, been proven to improve … mental health outcomes for a woman. To say we need to abort a baby because he’s likely to be damaged from the stress that his mother is enduring is very dishonest. There’s no evidence to support that.” 

Skop continued, “[The military] would like their female workers to work like men. There is a motivation behind corporations, and clearly in the military as well, to steer women toward abortion, to steer them away from having a family because it makes it easier for the company or for the military.”

(Click HERE to read another Students for Life of America blog entitled “Corporate Attacks on Motherhood: Erasing Moms & Discouraging Future Families.”) 

While the abortion lobby and their friends in Congress continue to push for more abortion in the military and persecute pro-lifers for protecting military preborn children, it’s clear we have an entirely different and very real problem on our hands. Our female service members are being sexually harassed and hurt at a horrific rate — and then when it’s all said and done, the agency in charge of caring for them is prescribing the violence of abortion on top of it.

The patriots defending our country deserve more than this; they deserve a pro-life approach. Life should be respected throughout its entire existence…sadly, our military obviously needs to be reminded of this. 

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