How Abortion Saves Lives

One life that could have been saved by abortion, and another that may still be.

First, a Louisville teen so denied the facts about sexuality, contraception and abortion that she gave birth in a toilet and was so terrified someone would find out that she killed the infant.

Matthew Glowicki at the Courier:

The teenage mother who police say killed her newborn girl last summer told police in an interview she gave birth to the child unexpectedly and then smothered her.

Visiting her grandmother who was ill at Jewish Hospital on July 22, then-15-year-old Jasmine Wade felt something in her stomach. She went to the bathroom, sat on the toilet and gave a slight push, she said.

“Something just came out, and I had looked down and … it was a baby,” she tells them and begins to cry.

She picked her up and held the child in her hands.

“I didn’t believe it was happening,” she told the two Louisville Metro Police detectives interviewing her from her hospital bed later that day, as detailed in police evidence recently filed in Jefferson Circuit Court by prosecutors.

SNIP

 

“Why did u kill her” the friend asked.

“I had to. i had no choice.”

Precisely.  Governor Lying Coward closed the only place in Kentucky that offered education, contraception and early abortion to low-income teenage girls. Planned Parenthood would have saved her by helping her avoid pregnancy or by ending it by removing a microscopic clump of cells.

Instead, we have a dead infant and and might-as-well-be-dead-teenager, who will be spending the rest of her life in prison.

Meanwhile, a Kentucky woman with a much-wanted and cherished pregnancy is faced with the likelihood of giving birth to a microcephalic "infant," which has no chance at a remotely human life.

From the Herald:

The Kentucky Department of Health says it has confirmed the state's third case of the Zika virus in a pregnant woman.

A statement from the agency on Friday said the woman, who is from the Louisville area, tested positive for the disease after traveling to Central America in recent months. She has recovered from the illness.

The mosquito-borne virus, which is spreading in Latin America and the Caribbean, normally causes only mild symptoms.

Health officials are investigating whether there is a link between Zika infections in pregnant women and a rare birth defect called microcephaly, in which babies are born with abnormally small heads.

That means profound permanent retardation rendering them unable to ever feed, clothe or clean themselves, much less communicate.

Unless that woman has private insurance and a rational, non-freakazoid doctor, she's in for a lifetime nightmare.

The kind that Indiana Governor Steve Pence is forcing on the doomed women of his state.

Republican Gov. Mike Pence has signed a bill making Indiana the second state to ban abortions because of fetal genetic abnormalities such as Down syndrome.

Yes, there is an alternative to these horrors.  Encourage more new doctors like this one, who is determined to fulfill her Hippocratic Oath by providing abortions.

We live in a country where roughly half of all pregnancies are unplanned, so there are, unsurprisingly, many women who become pregnant and choose not to give birth. We know that about one in three women will have an abortion by age 45. Is this number, as some have argued, too high? In the 1990s, the Clinton administration popularized the notion that abortion ought to be "safe, legal, and rare." I understand this sentiment, but I think this misses the point. There are a great number of ways to reduce abortion rates. Some of which, as I would argue we have seen in the past couple of decades, do not promote the health and reproductive autonomy of women.

 

Moreover, insisting single-mindedly that abortion should be "rare" further stigmatizes the one in three women who will make this decision. From a public health perspective, the end-all objective should not be to reduce abortion rates, but instead to further empower more women to make informed reproductive choices.

This may seem like a trivial distinction, but it is the difference between an agenda that conforms women's health to socially accepted standards and an agenda that truly promotes the health of women.