A few weeks ago I submitted a pro-life letter to the editor similar to the post that I wrote on 1/19. Surprisingly it was published. A few weeks later someone from planned parenthood responded. I decided to post some of the woman's views so that we can better understand what the pro-abortion groups are saying and talk about ways that we can respond to their claims. I'm going to refer to the woman as Carol - not her real name.
Carol's first argument was that before abortion was legal women died from illegal, unsafe abortions. The assumption is that now that abortion is legal woman are safer. But are they? The facts don't agree with Carol. There are many dangers associated with legal abortion such as uterine injury, life threatening infections, an increased risk of breast and cerfical cancer, infertility, alchohol abuse, depression and an increased risk of suicide. If a woman who has had an abortion decides to carry a child her risk of premature birth is increased - because of the abortion.
Carol then asked how many women have died because of illegal abortions. I found it interesting that she did not cite a number. Does she know that the numbers that the abortion groups cited in 70's were false? During the abortion debate in the 70's, Dr. Bernard Nathanson (founder of NARAL) claimed that thousands of women died every year to illegal abortions. Here's what he has to say about it today:
"We claimed that between five and ten thousand women a year died of botched abortions," he said. "The actual figure was closer to 200 to 300 and we also claimed that there were a million illegal abortions a year in the United States and the actual figure was close to 200,000. So, we were guilty of massive deception."
"I mean as a founding member and chairman of the medical committee, I accepted the figures which came from a biostatistician named Christopher Tietze and he and his wife passed along these figures to us at NARAL. We were in no position to validate them or not, so we accepted them in the interests of higher standards, or at least higher objectives," he explained.
Nathanson's conversion to the pro-life movement was sparked by the advent of the ultrasound machine in the early 1970s. He related how his heart was moved to realize that a fetus is in fact a human being after he watched an unborn baby recoil from a vacuum abortion device before being sucked from its mother's womb.
I'm not asking you to take my word for it. Go on the interenet and do a search on Dr. Nathonson. One thing you will discover is that he is now pro-life. I will add one more thing. Dr. Nathonson said that one of the tactics of the abortion supporters was to villify the Catholic Church. They wanted to make the Catholic Church look like the bad guys in the abortion debate. Dr. Nathanson, a former athiest, has become a pro-life Catholic. His story can be found in his autobiography "the hand of God."
OK, lets get back to Carol and her claims. Her next comments were stories of friends who had abortions before they became legal and how they suffered because of it. The assumption here is that those of us who are pro-life don't really know what things are like for women who are struggling with an uplanned pregnancy. If I could talk to Carol face to face I would tell her about my friends who had legal abortions in the United States in the 80's and 90's. From these women I heard about the pain and suffering that they went through as a result of their abortions. Through them I learned that legalized abortion is not just a simple procedure that you can just forget about. Abortion can have a profound negative affect - physically, mentally and spiritually - on women. Listeing to their stories, and hearing the stories of other women (and men) who have suffered because of abortion has helped me become strongly pro-life. If you want to hear more real life stories from both men and women go to the Silent No More Awareness campaign: http://www.silentnomoreawareness.org/
This post is getting too long and I have to get to work. I'll write more about Carol's views and my responses tomorrow.
Effie
Comments