Nobody made her do it.  But, following in the  footsteps of Ms. Penelope Trunk, who had tweeted the news of her miscarriage during a 2009 business conference, Ms. Angie Jackson (27) recently took self-publicity a step further. She swallowed an RU-486 abortion pill and then created a YouTube video and a series of blow-by-blow messages on Twitter that followed the rapid progress of her subsequent abortion.

Ms. Jackson has a son, aged 4, who has special needs. She lives with her boyfriend in Tampa, Florida, USA.  She cites “very high health risks” as her reason for having the abortion. Her reason for creating the publicity is less clear. She said she was “at peace with my decision” but, apparently, wanted to demonstrate that the effect of taking the pill was similar to and no worse than a spontaneous abortion—a miscarriage.

The ensuing online debate has been heated. From her reported statements, Ms. Jackson suffered a difficult and dangerous pregnancy before delivering her son. No evidence that we know suggests contraception was impossible in her case. We are unaware whether she or her boyfriend have considered sterilization, and whether they could ever find medical insurance coverage, which is a major financial consideration in the United States. Paying for sterilization is expensive, even for men.

WODEN ASKS:  What do the Spirit Masters say about abortion?

The Masters of the Spirit World, our guides, are concerned about clarifying the facts concerning this misunderstood aspect of human life and behavior.

Does abortion take a “human life”? Anti-abortionists, including the Roman Catholic church, assert that human life begins at conception.  The Masters say that for human life to exist, an eternal soul must have attached itself to the fetus. This usually happens shortly before birth, though it does take place sooner on occasion, especially with younger souls.

Miscarriages (spontaneous abortions) usually result from a prior contract made by the mother and father to experience all the emotions such an event triggers. More rarely it results from either the fetus’s physical frailty or from the incoming soul changing its mind about continuing that human incarnation. Each scenario ends progress towards the creation of a human life.

The movement of the fetus in the womb is seen by some as proof that a human child is in existence. The Masters say that the mother’s energy supports the cellular development of the fetus, but it does not provide it with more than a potential for sentient human life. That takes place when the assigned eternal soul unites with the fetus by pouring its energy into every cell of the little body. From then on, until that person’s physical death takes place—whenever it happens—a human being is in existence.

The Masters assert that where an abortion, either induced or spontaneous, is likely to take place, no allocation of a soul for that fetus is made because no contract was agreed between the mother and a soul desiring to be her child.  In the event of a mother changing her mind in favor of having an abortion, or in the event of the unforeseen death in the womb of a frail fetus, any soul that has attached itself to the fetus promptly takes itself out of the way.  They strongly insist that the soul is eternal and cannot ever be killed.

They say that some souls (not conscious human minds but spiritual higher selves) wish to experience the lesson an abortion brings, as “all the emotions of selfishness, guilt, regret, disdain, and much more, come flooding in from their self and from their relatives.”* The woman is caught up in “stormy feelings” that provide the lesson her soul has desired to learn. All of us are here to learn lessons—abortion is one of them.

We may feel either angry or sympathetic in the case of Ms. Jackson’s public abortion.  The spiritual lesson of such an event travels far and wide in human society, and we all have a lesson to learn from it. One thing is quite clear: if a soul is present in the fetus when the decision to abort it is made, it will leave the little body and transition back Home. Without an indwelling soul there is no human life, only the potential for such life.  And you cannot kill the eternal soul. Whatever our emotional feelings about abortion, that fact is a given.

*A fuller version of this spiritual analysis is provided in The Masters’ Reincarnation Handbook, from which this quote is taken, and interesting comments were made in my interviews of the souls of Pope John XXIII and of Mother Teresa. All are available as downloads or as chapters in books from our literature store.