By Gabrielle Stafford and Andrea Guachalla
Tomorrow, September 28th, International Safe Abortion Day is celebrated around the world.
According to SafeAbortionWomensRight.org, “28 September, International Safe Abortion Day, is the annual day of action in support of the right to safe abortion. It has been celebrated since 1990 in Latin America, and since 2011 around the world. Recent years have seen hundreds of activities in dozens of countries across all global regions. National and world leaders have begun to make statements in support of the day, and a growing number of media outlets report national and international events and write articles on the theme.”
By playing with words the United Nations, the World Health Organization and other organizations have achieved to make something as horrendous as killing an unborn child sound good and necessary. Killing innocent human beings is no longer known as a crime according to them, but as a “fundamental” right. The “reproductive health” of women has been reduced to the idea of “my body, my choice” that gives women the “right” to kill unborn babies that are held inside their wombs. We are all encouraged to join the fight to get “safe abortions” for women, and to make them free so abortion clinics can be access by anyone, anywhere.
But here is what we must know: no matter what health organizations or experts say, abortion is NEVER safe. Neither for the mother, nor the baby, nor for society.
Abortion kills a baby
By definition abortion is,” the deliberate termination of a human pregnancy.”
So let’s define the word safe. According to Webster’s 1828 Dictionary, safe means “Free from danger of any kind; Free from hurt, injury or damage.”
The word, termination means, “the action of bringing something or coming to an end.”
Abortion literally kills a person, bringing the life of a child to an end; therefore, it is not free from danger, hurt, injury or damage.
People who support abortion like to argue that the baby inside the womb is just a “clump of cells”, and that we shouldn’t refer to it as an actual person. However, the truth is that the baby inside the womb IS a person, created in the image of God, who can feel what is going on around him/her including the atrocious procedures that are meant to end his/her life.
Only this should be enough argument to debunk the idea that “safe abortions” exist. But there is more:
Abortion hurts a mother
In addition to the danger of abortion to a child within the womb, it also presents danger to the mother as well. There can be serious physical, mental and emotional damage due to an aboriton for mothers. It may not always look the same, and a mother may not ever speak about it, but there is always some kind of damage done.
The type of risk and effect from an abortion may depend based on the type of abortion a woman recieves and how far along she is, but they are risks all the same, and in the long run show just how unsafe abortion is. Palm Beach Women’s Clinic shares some of the potential long-term effects of abortion for a woman – physically, psychologically and emotionally – as well as the risks and side effects that women may experience.
Some women use abortion, whether the pill or surgery, as birth control, so their body goes through the trauma of an abortion multiple times, and sadly this results in an increased risk of pre-term birth, which means that any child that a woman conceives and actually want to keep and parent may be born too early. Being born prematurely can cause “Complications associated with a preterm birth including immature lungs, difficulty regulating body temperature, poor feeding, and slow weight gain. Preterm babies may need longer or more intense nursery care, medications, and sometimes surgery.”
So, not only can multiple abortions cause premature births, but also can cause a mother’s future children to have long-term health problems.
There have been stories reported of women who had an abortion and developed serious health issues when conceiving afterwards, which affected their babies in gestation. Palm Beach Women’s Clinic shares how, “an untreated infection after an abortion procedure can spread to the fallopian tubes and ovaries and turn into pelvic inflammatory disease (PID). Pelvic inflammatory disease is serious and can increase your risk of infertility and ectopic pregnancy in the future.”
There may not always be an infection after an abortion procedure, but there is a high risk for an infection with any form of abortion that could spread and cause serious problems to a woman’s fallopian tubes, ovaries, uterus and pelvic area, which may even create issues for any future wanted pregnancies. Damage to the uterus is a real risk, as well as uncontrollable bleeding.
Regarding psychological and emotional effects, Palm Beach Women’s Clinic asserts that many women deal with post-abortion depression, anxiety and post-traumatic flashbacks. This can be due to the fact that women do understand that abortion is murdering a child; therefore, many do experience feelings of extreme regret, guilt or shame.
One night, when I (Gabrielle) was sidewalk counseling in front of the local abortion facility ready to give free life-affirming resources to clients coming in or out and help them choose life and direct them somewhere different for what they needed, I encountered a woman coming out. She had gone in for an abortion, and she said that Planned Parenthood (the local abortion facility) had paid for travel expenses to get there from several states away.
As my partner and I spoke with her, she just cried and cried and we could tell that she felt the loss. She had indeed just experienced a huge loss – the loss of her child. No matter what the abortion industry tells us, women do indeed feel sadness, shame, regret, depression, grief and perhaps even anger after an abortion, whether immediately or years later.
In my three years of sidewalk counseling and witnessing countless clients going in and out of the local abortion facility, I have seen many in tears and since the inception of the organization that I’ve been working with, there have been many emergency vehicles come and rush a client to the hospital after an abortion procedure.
Here are some relevant statistics and research from the National Library of Medicine about abortion:
“Every year, worldwide, about 42 million women with unintended pregnancies choose abortion, and nearly half of these procedures, 20 million, are unsafe. Some 68,000 women die of unsafe abortion annually, making it one of the leading causes of maternal mortality (13%). Of the women who survive unsafe abortion, 5 million will suffer long-term health complications. Unsafe abortion is thus a pressing issue.”
“According to the World Health Organization (WHO), every 8 minutes a woman in a developing nation will die of complications arising from an unsafe abortion. An unsafe abortion is defined as “a procedure for terminating an unintended pregnancy carried out either by persons lacking the necessary skills or in an environment that does not conform to minimal medical standards, or both.”
“Worldwide, some 5 million women are hospitalized each year for treatment of abortion-related complications such as hemorrhage and sepsis, and abortion-related deaths leave 220,000 children motherless. The main causes of death from unsafe abortion are hemorrhage, infection, sepsis, genital trauma, and necrotic bowel.”
Many of these statistics are used to argue for “safe” abortions, but the truth is that killing an innocent being can NEVER be justified, and as we will see in the next section, it has a wider negative effect than what is thought of.
The abortion industry is worse than you think
Who hasn’t heard about Planned Parenthood and the fact that their focus on “reproductive health” is really just a disguise for their goal of making money out of killing unborn babies? Murder is their main business.
What less people have heard though, is that they target specific groups of women in order to meet their “quotas” (amount of abortions to be performed per month), and that very often these women come from minority groups around the United States.
But wait, wasn’t Planned Parenthood for the empowerment of women, especially those from minority groups? Then why is the only thing they are offering to women is the idea that they are not strong enough to have a baby, therefore, they must murder it?
The abortion industry does not only affect all women, especially those who Planned Parenthood decides to focus on more, but it affects all the workers who had been working in abortion clinics, and decided to leave.
For years now there have been dozens of testimonies of people who used to work in Planned Parenthood and have had the courage to unveil the atrocities that have been taking place in their facilities. Babies who survive the abortion procedure and are later killed by the staff, mothers from low-income families who are payed a little amount of money so they don’t go to newslets and reveal how their health deteriorated due to an abortion they had, etc, etc.
Not only are the mothers and the babies affected, but all the former Planned Parenthood workers who are threatened both physically and legally to keep their mouths shut in regards to what they witnessed in the abortion clinics. They are not allowed to speak, and most are left on a lonely walk to recovery from the trauma of witnessing the culture of death up close.
The world might say abortion can and should be safe, but that is only because they don’t understand that by definition IT CAN’T. Abortion can’t be safe, and will never be. Women have been tricked into thinking abortion is healthcare, when it isn’t. And that is why we must fight against the culture of death and stand firm on our convictions as Chrisitians.
Where there is darkness we must shed light. Where there is injustice, we must stand for what God calls just. Where innocent beings are being murdered, unable to speak or defend themselves, we must speak up and be prepared to defend them.
