Some opponents of reproductive choice, unable to deter women from electing to terminate unwanted pregnancies through moral suasion, have increasingly attempted to scare women away from abortion with specious claims that the procedure is unsafe. In Texas, the Orwellian-named "Woman's Right to Know Act" requires abortion providers to give patients a misleading booklet that suggests a connection between abortion and breast cancer, although the American Cancer Society strongly denies such a link. West Virginia's "informed consent" statute requires that women be told that abortions may lead to an increased risk of eating disorders, suicidal ideation, sexual dysfunction and drug abuse, claims not recognized by the American Psychiatric Association or any leading authorities in the field. Even if these assertions were true -- and years of study have established categorically that they are not -- this data would obscure the larger truth regarding abortion and women's health. What abortion opponents do not want people to know is that decades of evidence prove that abortion is convincingly far safer for maternal health than bringing a fetus to term. Often exponentially so. In fact, if the roughly fifty million abortions that have occurred in the United States since Roe v. Wade had all ended in full-term deliveries, approximately five hundred additional women would have died during childbirth.
The safety disparity between childbearing and abortion is quite staggering. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the likelihood of an American woman dying in childbirth is approximately 1 in 7,500. In contrast, a 2004 study published in Obstetrics and Gynecology found the risk of dying during an abortion in the first eight weeks of pregnancy, when the majority of terminations take place, to be roughly 1 in 1,000,000. That's safer than a round-trip flight on a commercial aircraft. Even abortions performed at greater than 21 weeks (1.1% of all abortions) have a mortality of 1 in 11,000 -- far lower than live delivery. If one measures only immediate morbidity and mortality, there is no way to spin these numbers to suggest that abortion is less safe than giving birth.
Abortion opponents have attempted to link the procedure with long-term health risks, but here again the scientific evidence undermines their claims. For example, numerous, well-constructed studies have demonstrated no independent link between breast cancer and induced abortions. Most notably, a Harvard University analysis of the Nurses' Health Study looked at 105,716 women over ten years and concluded that abortions did not correlate with future cancer diagnoses. To believe otherwise is no more grounded in evidence that to believe that breast cancer is caused by power lines, or that the polio vaccine impedes virility, or that fluorinated drinking water triggers autism. These are factual questions, not values judgments. Whether or not abortion causes cancer is not a subject for philosophical debate, it is an empirical phenomenon with a correct answer. Rejecting that answer without hard data is no more reasonable than rejecting the heliocentric model of the universe. As the late Senator Pat Moynihan warned us: "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own fact."
So why does this myth persist? The reality is that nulliparity may be related to an increase in breast cancer, so women who abort and never have another child may lose the protective effect that pregnancy has on estrogen levels and breast tissue. However, the overwhelming majority of women who terminate pregnancies eventually to go on to become biological mothers, recovering much if not all of this protective effect. Even the most zealous advocates of the abortion-breast cancer hypothesis, such as born-again-Christian endocrinologist Joel Brind, have been able to show only a minimal correlation between breast cancer and abortion -- even with an agenda that has likely compromised the power of their research. What is most remarkable in this entire debate, of course, is that some abortion opponents seem to want abortion to cause breast cancer or other life threatening illnesses. Data that shows no such risk apparently disappoints them. How devastating for them must be the larger reality that terminating pregnancies actually reduces female mortality rates.
A recent Turkish study, which may gain media traction in coming days, does claim to have found a statistical link between induced abortion and cancer. In their conclusion, the authors posit that the difference between their data and that of other researchers is a yet-unknown characteristic distinctive to Turkish females. A far simpler explanation may suffice. Statistical noise. If you conduct most studies often enough, eventually you will produce a statistical outlier whose results, taking alone, seem to prove your case. In a billion small-scale studies of tobacco smokers, for example, a few might actually demonstrate that smoking is beneficial to the lungs. This does not prove that we should all take up smoking, but that investigators should quit asking the same question over and over again in an effort to muddy the results.
Needless to say, I have read all of the major studies on abortion and women's health. I sincerely wonder if the anti-abortion activists at Operation Rescue have done so. The glory of modern science is that every one of these papers is available at any major research library, and most are accessible on line, so those who sincerely care about the question can judge the scientific evidence for themselves.
The shell game perpetrated by abortions opponents is quite clever. They focus public attention on a comparison between abortion and baseline health, rather than between abortion and pregnancy. Even if some women do suffer post-abortion depression, which anecdotally may be the case, this does not mean that the phenomenon is nearly as widespread or as severe as the well-documented misery of postpartum depression. Postpartum psychosis destroys women's lives and tears apart families; post-abortion psychosis is largely undocumented. Even the risk of multiple terminations to long-term reproductive abilities may be over-hyped. Memoirist Irene Villar's brilliant account of her fifteen abortions, Impossible Motherhood, which concludes with the birth of her two healthy children, should dispel the canard that a few elective abortions will render women barren. That is simply not the case.
Challengers to so-called "informed consent" statues do not need to rest their claims of unconstitutionality on the grounds that these laws interfere with the free speech rights of physicians and the privacy rights of patients. The laws fail the far more rudimentary "rational basis" standard of the Fourteen Amendment because they provide women with information so selective that it leaves any reasonable layperson with a false impression of the relative safety of abortion and childbirth. I oppose such compulsory pre-abortion counseling, no matter what its content. Obstetricians don't need ideologues telling them how to practice medicine or what to tell their patients. However, if state legislatures sincerely want women to have all the facts, then these same mandatory "informational" pamphlets should inform women that, by not choosing an abortion, they are placing their lives at greater risk.
Courts have been reluctant to recognize the significance of this data. If the risk of childbirth is exponentially higher than that of abortion, then all elective abortions are necessary for maternal life and health. From a purely medical standpoint, who wouldn't choose a death rate of 1 in 1,000,000 over 1 in 7,500? Moreover, even if a long-term health risk from abortion ever were established, one would be comparing sudden death in one's childbearing years to affliction with a treatable (and even curable) illness many years later. I suspect that, all other factors being equal, most people would choose the latter. (I am also hopeful that we will eradicate breast cancer entirely, sooner rather than later.) Women are often given the false impression that carrying an unwanted fetus to term, and placing the baby up for adoption, is a relatively safe choice. That depends upon one's understanding of safety. If one is willing to accept the 1 in 11,000 of dying in childbirth to bring happiness to a total stranger, why not donate a kidney, a procedure with a mortality risk of 1 in 3,000, and save a stranger's life?
The significant risks of childbirth may well be worth enduring for the rich joys of motherhood. I am grateful to my own mother for making such a tradeoff. We should all be proud of the brave women who choose to put their lives on the line in our maternity wards. What is harder for me to understand is why anyone would take such risks in order to deliver a baby that they do not want. That should be a woman's choice too, of course. But if you're going to put your own well-being at risk, you should certainly know all the risks.
Cristina Page: Pro-Life Pretense
Obama's still-to-be released common ground agenda in the abortion conflict is already having a profound and largely overlooked effect: it has exposed deep fault lines in the pro-life movement.
Stop calling the unborn fetuses and zygotes "a baby" or "a child"
They're not Babies and they're not Children, just getting yourselves emotionally worked up.
Also there are very very few late term abortions and those are not done for frivolous reasons at the drop of a hat, there is only clinic in the entire US for these.
First remember this point: If you are against abortion, GREAT! You don't ever have to get one.
Second point: Whether or not anyone else gets one is NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS.
All Americans ARE NOT Christian. We don't share your "morals" we don't believe in morality the same way you do.
To those of us who are NOT DELUDED by bronze-age religious dogma we see morality as those things that we don't want done to us. I don't care if ANYONE else gets an abortion and its not my business. Its also not the role of gov't to be involved either.
I'd much rather that the gov't spend its time REGULATING Banks and Wall Street so those bozos don't steal from me.
The religious right claims to care because they want political influence, nothing more.
Have you never known any pregnant women ever or something? I don't understand how anyone can honestly think only conservatives refer to fetuses as babies.
If that's your argument, well, I think it's a silly one, but at least not hypocritical. It is ridiculous to say that we can refer to them as babies, but conservatives can't for no other reason than we have differing ideology.
But to extrapolate that and say therefore abortion is the preferable medical choice based on risk completely trivializes the significance of the choice, and the significance of the right to make that choice.
This article is just badly written overall.
reductionist perspective and the title is just so wrong on so many levels. If we are talking
about risk, then why not factor in one of the biggest risks most of us casually take every day --
with ourselves, with our pregnant or nonpregnant bellies, with our kids or our friends or our
friends' kids -- why not discuss driving which is a much higher risk activity than pregnancy ?
The stunningly contemptible aspect of this is that this medical information has been known for over a decade:
Statement of the court (majority decision), Hope Clinic v. Ryan, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois (Eastern Division), 995 F. Supp. 847; 1998 U.S. Dist.
"Abortion is one of the safest surgical procedures in terms of mortality and morbidity, and it is much safer than continuing the pregnancy through childbirth. In the first trimester of pregnancy, when most abortions are performed, a woman is twenty times more likely to die from continuing the pregnancy through childbirth than from a first-trimester abortion. At any stage of pregnancy, a woman is ten times more likely to die from continuing the pregnancy through childbirth than from an abortion."
So, I think it is safe to assume that 'information' is NOT what the anti-choice want to peddle but rather fear, through distortions and out-right lies...again, in the attempt to nullifying a woman's right to truly make an informed decision and exercise sovereignty over her own body. Abortion is here to stay ( 8 yrs. of the Bush theocracy was unable to reverse it) and the anti-choicers tactics have now turned into a criminal enterprise that begs for DOJ intervention.
*This article is written to expose and offer proof that the anti-choicers are lying to women and trying (and in some cases, succeeding) to get their bogus medical claims written into laws. This article puts the focus where it lawfully should be .. with the facts about women's health. Pregnancy is first and foremost a medical condition and thus abortion is protected under the privacy clause of the constitution.
*And while you may want to inflame the issue with the word 'babies' .. you are mistaken, babies are issued birth certificates. Obviously, the laws and many (if not the majority) know the science of potential vs actualized.
I suppose that if nobody had children at all, the rate of death in childbirth would be zero.
In my hospital the deaths from labor related complications, placenta previa or abruptio or cardiac sudden death are rarely seen (in the past 5 years 2 deaths). The deaths associated with out patient visits from only one so-called woman's health-care facility out number all annual labor related deaths statewide at just under 37 to 1. That is annually more women die from "safe and rare" abortions than from child birth.
IMHO, a society that ceases to care about its children - health care, pollution, nutrition, education, putting them to death, or sending them off to die - isn't far behind terminating its frail and elderly. Don't forget that the conservatives were dead set against Medicare.
A few years back, a βiβle-thumping acquaintance told me that she did not believe aβorτion should be legal even to save the woman's life because, and I quote, "those women just don't got the Fαith to let G0d heal them! It's their own fault!"
This is what we're up against.
The great distraction and favorite "Wedge Issue" of the GOP.
Well, Abo.rtion is legal and it should remain that way because morality can not be legislated.
Any Woman should have the rights to her own reproductive system and no one can say that bringing a poor innocent child into the world is good for the baby or the mother. Because very often it is NOT good for either.
It is the agenda of those on the right to pursue this issue solely as a way of riling up the Bible thumping crowd, when oddly enough the Bible doesn't even mention abo.r.tion.
This riling up of the Bible thumpers is to get them on the side of GOP who really only cares about deregulation and lowering taxes for the wealthy. And what better a way to do that then to encumber millions of women with unwanted children, whom they will have to put into low-cost Church sponsored Day Care where that child will be indoctrinated with Chr.istian dogma.
Pro-choicers love to talk about the debate in terms of the generalities but you guys rarely like to get into the logistics of abortion. Yes, abortion in the 1st trimester should be unequivacably allowed for anyone age 18 and older but what about under 18? Are you then against parental consent? Would you like your 13 year old to have an abortion, potentially psychologically devastating and with possible physical side effects without you knowing? What about abortions done for women with no health problems with healthy babies after 24 weeks when a baby can possibly live outside the womb with assistance? Would you kill a baby that could live on its own and be adopted at that time? It isn't a matter of choice anymore, that is decided. It is to what realm of degradation of humanity we will accept in the details of the abortion debate.
Even the most rabid pro-abortionist (if such a person actually exists), draws the line when a fetus is viable except to protect the life and health of the mother.
I am not a parent so I cannot answer your question about a 13-year old daughter from my gut only my head. If I am such a failure as a parent that my child would not confide in me, I would hope she would consult someone she trusts or her doctor begins the process to get her a Guardian ad Litem to watch out for her best interests.
You right-wing Ch.ristians can't seem to distinguish between MORALITY and SECURITY.
Murder is a basic SECURITY issue, without security a society cannot function.
Also, Murder is basically contrary to our survival as a species, we all do better when we stick TOGETHER as a society. Ape troupes in the wild don't allow MURDER among themselves.
What YOU call Morality (ie. belief in Je.sus) is just a mental construct of little practical value.
Not true, all sorts of legislation exists to prevent immoral behaviour. However, abortion is not in that category; abortion is not a question of morals. Abortion is legal, whether some people like it or not.
Morality is just a complex psychologocal construct that we use to explain things that are offensive to our inherent sense of personal and societal survival.
In bronze-age religions like Jud.aism morality takes on a new attribute that it comes from god, Chris.tianity continues this trend.
But this doesn't mean that Morality exists. "Morality" in some lost Amazonian tribe would be very different from ours but it would serve the same instinctual purpose which is to keep the tribe from becoming extinct.
See, for humans to survive requires a team, a tribe. We do better when we look out for each other.
Cleverly disguised as a caring movement, they know that the more children wimmin have, the less chance she will #1- be able to escape her husband #2 - do anything meaningful with her life.
She will always remain poor, esp if the father abandons her and her children, love them or not, and she is left having to depend on Social Services which barely exist anymore.
Here we are with a world grossly overpopulated by human beings; the planet is groaning under our weight and men just want to force wimmin to have more and more of "their" babies they won't take care of. PAH!
It's all about control of wimmin's bodies and minds, never believe anything else.
You are correct!
Second, what if the person killed by the State is an innocent person like the child?
Third, what if the innocent child is the product of rabidly anti-social parents who will "probably" grow up to be a killer? Just as likely as doing something great.
Fourth, some convicted felons have examined their lives and become a force for "good".
So, unless you are totally opposed to all wars, always, you are a hypocrite.
In either case, the state has and retains the right to make a judegment call about who lives or dies. Our United States, along with all other countries, makes life/death decisions over and over.
The "right to abortion" really amounts to the state delegating some level of choice to the individual. Nevertheless, the state really retains the right to make that decision (it can always revoke the individual right, as it sees fit).
So, unlees you are a total pacifist, you are a hypocrite. Many more innocent humans have been killed by 'just' wars than will ever be killed through abortion. So, why aren't you in the streets screaming about unjust war?
I say this because these women aren't people we don't know. They are ME. I believe that WE have the right to control our own bodies. WE have the understanding of our lives necessary to determine whether continuing a pregnancy is possible or not. WE are the ones who live with the consequences of our choices.
Don't get me wrong. I don't think abortion should be outlawed but I do think that if one considers it a "healthy option", psychological health should be considered along with physical health. Giving birth to a baby doesn't obligate a woman to become a "mom". As a pediatrician, I know that women will literally go to the ends of the earth to adopt a child. Each woman who contemplates abortion should ask herself the question, "Is a few months of my life worth someone else's whole life?"
We know that if we make abortion illegal it will go underground--we will be where we were at in the 50's, with back alley abortions or with those with money being able to find sources in or out of the country...
and the children who are born?...we hope they will be adopted...but some women will be pushed into keeping a child they do not want or can't afford to keep.
You had a choice--your upbringing, your relgious background obviously did not sway you enough to change your mind or make you look at the moral or psychological ramifications of what you did or were about to do--they failed you...or you failed yourself.
As a country we just need to make sure that women have access to a doctor and a safe clean procedure...nothing more.
I don't think abortion should be outlawed but I do think women should consider all their options and most importantly choose their relationships wisely and use contraception.