Letter: Promoting killing through abortion not the answer

Talk about it

Wednesday’s article entitled “Unsafe abortions kill 70,000 annually” should have read “140,000.”

Abortion is always lethal to the unborn girl or boy who has their own unique DNA and often a different blood type than the mother. The article states that “legal restrictions do not stop abortion.” However, legalizing abortion here and around the world has led to over 1 billion abortions. (United Nations statistic)

The restrictive laws we had before 1973 did prevent abortions. According to NARAL, about 200,000 illegal abortions took place annually in the United States just before the Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade. After legalization, the number of annual abortions shot up to 1 million by 1975. The study that the article cites promotes contraception as a means to prevent abortions. However, the Family Research Council reports that increases in the use of contraceptives often parallels increases in the number of abortions. Though the article credits contraception with abortion decline it makes no account of abortions due to “emergency contraceptives” now available without prescription and thus reported differently than abortions through a doctor. And as the Guttmacher Institute says on its Web site: “Fifty four percent of women who have abortions... used a contraceptive method... during the month they became pregnant.”

Also consider that legal abortions are not necessarily safe here in the USA. According to emedicinehealth.com, 20 percent of pregnancy complications in New York and California stemmed from previous abortions. According to the American Association of pro-life OB/GYN’s, the list of possible health consequences from abortion include: depression, substance abuse, suicide, other pregnancy associated mortality, subsequent preterm birth, and placenta previa. (Those experiencing emotional suffering because of an abortion, women or men, may contact Rachel’s Vineyard, rachelsvineyard.org, for confidential help and healing).

Finally, blaming African “religious conservatives’” abhorrence of abortion for the plight of sub-Saharan women is simply a sweeping, biased, generality in this anonymously penned Associated Press article. Sub-Saharan Africa includes dozens of countries, hundreds of languages and cultures, and over 800 million people with some areas thriving and others in great need. The 38,000 (of the 70,000 world-wide) maternal deaths due to illegal abortions which occurred in sub-Saharan Africa are a tragedy. But promoting more killing of children through abortion is not the answer to a situation which has its roots in very diverse, complex social problems.

Mike Little, Dickinson

Tags: opinion, letters, abortion