In the abortion debate you have people like me, vociferously advocating for life, and you have people on the other side, who advocate so vociferously for a free choice on abortion that it amounts to advocating for abortion.
Otherwise you have a mushy middle.
That mushy middle should pay attention to where pro-choice advocates come out on sex selection abortion. Because generally this is where the soulless nature of abortion advocacy comes out: it’s in the “we couldn’t possible condemn any woman’s choice at any time” moments.
An article about this, here.
___________________________
Brigitte adds: Indeed. I’m against sex-selection abortion because I’m against abortion in general, and extremely against frivolous abortions (if your life is on the line, and you’re having to choose between your life and that of your unborn baby, then things are quite different – at least in my book). Aborting a baby because it’s not the right time right now to become a parent, to me, is at least as wrong as aborting a baby because it’s a girl and not a boy.
by 
Though I think I can recognize the varying degrees of atrocity amongst all the reasonings behind an abortion. I’m growing into the vociferous variety, and I like this article for pointing out one thing. The article states “In order to support ‘a woman’s right to choose,’ you have to believe that a fetus is not human in the moral sense.” Well, technically, this belief only applies when the child is ‘unwanted’ (because of its sex or because you really don’t want to lose your girlish figure or otherwise). If the mother intends to have the child, then it not only gains some legal rights, but moral rights as well. These same people upholding abortion rights would be quick to condemn would-be mothers for hitting the bottle or smoking while pregnant. So ultimately, the debate is not whether a fetus has a soul or is alive (because it simply is and there’s no way around that), but the debate is whether or not a woman is a pregnant woman, or a woman with an unwanted baby. The fetus’ rights are determined solely by the mother’s intent.
With the focus on gendercide growing in the media, can we expect abortion rights groups to come out with graphs soon? “It’s less okay to have an abortion for X Y and Z, but we’ll still support it because we have to.”?
Great comment, Jennifer.
“It’s less okay to have an abortion for X Y and Z, but we’ll still support it because we have to.”
I don’t think that will be their public relations campaign though. 🙂
I am curious to know how many actual life threatening pregnancies there are in which the life of the mother is at risk enough to warrant the option of abortion. It keeps coming up as a justification from time to time. I believe it to be possible, but I have never really heard of one or met anyone who suffered such a circumstance.
I don’t have numbers, but I take it they’re quite low. Which is just as well (and yes, I have met people who had to make that choice – happily in the cases I know of the babies made it through). But to me the numbers matter less than the principle. And remember: In many of those cases things happen quite fast and doctors don’t have perfect knowledge of everything – they make recommendations and decisions in very difficult circumstances.
Everett Koop, who was surgeon general of the US during Reagan’s presidency, stated that he had not encountered one single case where the mother’s life was threatened by the pregnancy. And a recent video in the US congress had a doctor who stated exactly the same thing – nada. I am sure there are some, but they really are negligible, especially in the western hemisphere. In the third world, certainly there are more because some women do not have access to Caesarean sections.
I think that some of these cases involve ectopic pregnancies and the risk of hemorrhage (although I don’t think that ectopic pregnancies are generally viable anyway) or situations where the mother cannot get treatment for a life-threatening condition while pregnant (like chemotherapy). So it’s not technically the pregnancy that is threatening the mother but the underlying illness. That being said, somebody with a real medical background may prove me wrong. Anybody?
Libertarian candidate in the USA, Ron Paul, also an Ob-gyn, has said he has never seen a case where a mother’s life would be in danger either.
The extreme circumstances that are very rare are used to enforce an abortion choice culture, meanwhile, abortion is being used as birth control and most everyone knows it.
No less than Henry Morgenthaler said that maybe 1 of the 100,000 + yearly abortions in Canada are truly to save the mother’s life (or so my memory tells me I read a number of years ago).
From my experience, the issues highlighted by the nurses during my two pregnancies were the ectopic pregnancy issue (which I never encountered but was aware of) and then being told of my ‘options’ if my child was to have some sort of deformity or disease, or I otherwise didn’t want the pregnancy (this I was told as the nurses were legally obliged to inform me). We ourselves chose not to even test for these illnesses, but I was bothered that I wasn’t told of other options for care or support for disabled children if that issue had come up for us. But that’s another blog post…
I become more vociferous every day. Those liberal pro-choice folks are in line to adopt girls from China because it’s so terrible that they abandon the girls in favor of the boys. We’ll one up them, we’ll just kill them. Oh, Lord help us!
I know this is an old article, but since I read it, maybe someone else is too. I am one of those that believes abortion should be legal only if the mother’s life is at risk. Unfortunately there are several cases where that is true.
Ectopic pregnancies have been mentioned, early pre-eclampsia is another, and breast-cancer is highly malignant during pregnancy, where the pregnancy-sustaining estrogen hormones themselves causes extreme tumor growth. However, after the point of viability, there are no reasons for abortion, as inducing premature labor and treating the child will alleviate any risk to the mother