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The following is excerpted from the Daily Signal. To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
“Pregnancy kills, abortion saves lives.” So proclaimed a recent New York Times commentary by Dr. Warren Hern. Talk about clickbait.
The fact is, abortion ends life.
A fetus is a living human being. The human heart starts beating in early pregnancy. Hence, the recent rise of “fetal heartbeat laws,” designed to protect life. In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruled that fetal life lacks the (ill-defined) trait of “personhood,” but it never denied that such life is a living human being.
I’ve worked as an obstetrician/gynecologist for 28 years, and I am grateful for the responsibility to care for two patients: the preborn baby and his/her mother. I love and value both of their lives, and I have no doubt that each unborn human has the potential to make significant contributions to the world.
I am not alone. Studies indicate that 9 out of 10 OB-GYNs will not perform an abortion when requested by their patients. That statistic alone should dispel the false assertion that abortion is a necessary part of women’s health care.
In his column, Hern repeated a common claim that “abortion is safer than childbirth.” Yet he must be aware that the studies supposedly documenting a low risk of death from induced abortion are based on very poor data. For starters, they rely on voluntary reporting—a notoriously weak methodology.
Moreover, they are woefully deficient in death certificate documentation. High-quality records-linkage studies from Europe show that 94% of abortion-related deaths are not identified on death certificates. Thus, the abortion-related deaths documented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention represent only the tip of the iceberg.
Using what little data it could collect, the agency concluded that the risk of maternal mortality rose dramatically throughout the period of pregnancy. The risk following an early second trimester abortion was 15 times higher than if the abortion had been performed at eight weeks, 30 times higher in the mid-second trimester, and 76 times higher after viability.
To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
HalJune 12, 2019
Thank you for printing this article. The statistics I've read are that less than 1% of abortions are performed to save the life of the mother. Perhaps a few more are to terminate a pregnancy resulting from rape or incest. Even in the case of rape, some wonderful human beings came into this life as the result of an unselfish mother choosing to bear the child of a rapist rather than destroy that precious and productive life. The rest are for "convenience" and to avoid taking responsibility for one's own actions.