April: Siblings

Dr. Philip Ney is a child psychiatrist and has done extensive work in the area of child abuse and pregnancy loss. Dr. Ney also has focused on another phenomenon that impacts millions of people…they are siblings of aborted children.

Sibling survivors constitute one of ten distinct groups of "abortion survivors." We focus in this month specifically on the siblings because of all the dynamics that arise in that relationship with a brother or sister who was aborted. That relationship brings a profound sense of emptiness, anxiety, and guilt to the surviving sibling, and also complicates his or her relationship to his or her parents. One specific category within the sibling survivors are the twin survivors.

Sibling survivors struggle to understand their value as a human being in light of their siblings' lives discarded through abortion. This is an extremely important and rarely discussed example of the collateral damage from the abortion blast. In this month we will rely heavily on the expert testimony and research from Dr. Ney to draw attention to this issue.

Dr. Ney reflects on his experience with his patients who have experienced voluntary pregnancy loss:

Observations of psychiatric patients led me [PGN] to believe that some people were deeply affected by surviving when someone near and dear to them, usually a sibling, died from a pregnancy loss. The symptoms appeared to be most pronounced if the loss was as a result of abortion. Statistically analyzed data showed the most frequent and intense symptom was a feeling they did not deserve to be alive. That was closely correlated to: a sense of impending doom, guilt about surviving, pessimism about the future, not trusting caregivers and other existential symptoms all of which form a fairly closely circumscribed syndrome. These were significantly associated with: recurrent depression, intense obsessions, suicidal risk taking, and frequent hospitalizations. – Dr Philip Ney, MD