Open Letter
If the state is going to outlaw abortion then they need to just outlaw it, get it over with and stop dancing around it. But if they do, they need to realize something. Roe wasn't the start of abortion, it was the end of women dying from it.
Prior to Roe, 10,000 women died every year from illegal abortions. They used things like bleach, drain cleaner, Lysol, knitting needles, button hooks and crochet hooks and herbal remedies such as black cohosh and pennyroyal. If they didn't kill themselves, frequently they were scarred for life and never able to carry a pregnancy again. It was a huge public health crisis and every one of those women was someone's wife, mother, daughter, sister, niece, cousin or friend.
Less than a hundred women a year now die from the procedure and in every single case it's a situation where the pregnancy, itself, was placing the woman's life at risk and the abortion failed to save her.
Legal or not, abortion will continue. The only difference will be how many women die from it.
And do not dare to pull the "murdering innocents" card. State sanctioned "murder of innocents" happens in this state on a daily basis. Until the state can and does guarantee that every "innocent" under the age of 18 has a stable home, housing, food, clothing, education and health care, then the state has no right to interfere in a woman's decision to terminate a pregnancy that she feels she cannot sustain. And it goes way beyond assuring her that Medicaid will pay for her childbirth expenses. It's a lifetime commitment and if the state isn't willing to step up to the plate and guarantee at least 18 years of it than the state has no dog in the hunt.
There is also the fact that it's a huge over reach for the state to give legal recognition and rights to an embryo that are greater than and take precedence over, the rights of an adult human being, especially when the state has no intention of supporting those rights once the child is born.
These are the facts and anything else is irrelevant; religious beliefs, belief in "personal responsibility" (when having an abortion is actually taking personal responsibility), belief in "personhood" or when "life begins", are nothing more than opinions, and opinions (unless they are by the courts) have no place in government.
The state needs to stop lying and just be honest. Because the real purpose of these bills and laws aren't to "save innocents". The state has already clearly demonstrated they don't care about "innocents". The purpose of these laws are to control women and their sex lives and the pretense and hypocrisy is getting more than a little obvious and thin. Adult women will die from this egregious need for control and outlawing abortion will be nothing less than state sanctioned murder. May their blood be on your head and hands.
UPDATE: 3/30/2013
In the interests of accuracy, further research was done. In a report from the CDC in 2011 (the latest year that data was available) 362 women had died from legal abortions since Roe. Since then, only one other death has occurred, bringing the total up to 363 in the forty years since that decision. (Mortality numbers have dwindled on a nearly yearly basis because of steady improvements in reproductive health care, including the development and introduction of chemical abortion in the first trimester, which is safer than surgical abortion.)
The CDC estimated that the death rate from illegal abortion was 10,000/ year in the decade prior to Roe BUT that number was effected by the fact that a number of states had already legalized the procedure prior to the decision by SCOTUS. Before that is anybody's guess but 10,000 deaths per year seems to be accurate as a conservative estimate.
Leslie Reagan, in her book, When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973, estimates that, prior to Roe, as much as 14% of all maternal deaths per year were attributable to illegal abortion.
Prior to Roe, 10,000 women died every year from illegal abortions. They used things like bleach, drain cleaner, Lysol, knitting needles, button hooks and crochet hooks and herbal remedies such as black cohosh and pennyroyal. If they didn't kill themselves, frequently they were scarred for life and never able to carry a pregnancy again. It was a huge public health crisis and every one of those women was someone's wife, mother, daughter, sister, niece, cousin or friend.
Less than a hundred women a year now die from the procedure and in every single case it's a situation where the pregnancy, itself, was placing the woman's life at risk and the abortion failed to save her.
Legal or not, abortion will continue. The only difference will be how many women die from it.
And do not dare to pull the "murdering innocents" card. State sanctioned "murder of innocents" happens in this state on a daily basis. Until the state can and does guarantee that every "innocent" under the age of 18 has a stable home, housing, food, clothing, education and health care, then the state has no right to interfere in a woman's decision to terminate a pregnancy that she feels she cannot sustain. And it goes way beyond assuring her that Medicaid will pay for her childbirth expenses. It's a lifetime commitment and if the state isn't willing to step up to the plate and guarantee at least 18 years of it than the state has no dog in the hunt.
There is also the fact that it's a huge over reach for the state to give legal recognition and rights to an embryo that are greater than and take precedence over, the rights of an adult human being, especially when the state has no intention of supporting those rights once the child is born.
These are the facts and anything else is irrelevant; religious beliefs, belief in "personal responsibility" (when having an abortion is actually taking personal responsibility), belief in "personhood" or when "life begins", are nothing more than opinions, and opinions (unless they are by the courts) have no place in government.
The state needs to stop lying and just be honest. Because the real purpose of these bills and laws aren't to "save innocents". The state has already clearly demonstrated they don't care about "innocents". The purpose of these laws are to control women and their sex lives and the pretense and hypocrisy is getting more than a little obvious and thin. Adult women will die from this egregious need for control and outlawing abortion will be nothing less than state sanctioned murder. May their blood be on your head and hands.
UPDATE: 3/30/2013
In the interests of accuracy, further research was done. In a report from the CDC in 2011 (the latest year that data was available) 362 women had died from legal abortions since Roe. Since then, only one other death has occurred, bringing the total up to 363 in the forty years since that decision. (Mortality numbers have dwindled on a nearly yearly basis because of steady improvements in reproductive health care, including the development and introduction of chemical abortion in the first trimester, which is safer than surgical abortion.)
The CDC estimated that the death rate from illegal abortion was 10,000/ year in the decade prior to Roe BUT that number was effected by the fact that a number of states had already legalized the procedure prior to the decision by SCOTUS. Before that is anybody's guess but 10,000 deaths per year seems to be accurate as a conservative estimate.
Leslie Reagan, in her book, When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973, estimates that, prior to Roe, as much as 14% of all maternal deaths per year were attributable to illegal abortion.