Quote:
Originally posted by HelloKitty22
I think this is a really important point. Abortion was illegal once and it didn't keep women from having abortions it just made abortions more dangerous. Women who were wealthy could still get abortions. They went to Europe or to other countries for them. And women who were poor went to "doctors" who did back alley abortions in unsafe conditions. Desperation can make somebody do pretty risky stuff.
When my mother was in college a girl on her floor got pregnant. Her parents were relatively well off. They paid a GYN a lot of money to do an illegal abortion. She suffered a complication, one that today would be easily treatable, but because he was afraid of prosecution he didn't call an ambulance and she bled to death. Left with her dead body in the office, he freaked out and hacked up her body and tried to flush it down the toilet. He then left the country in an attempt to flee prosecution. She was 18 years old.
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I hesitate to get involved in abortion debates because they rarely, if ever, go well. Nevertheless, I have two points.
First, part of the initial outcry in this particular thread was that anti-abortionist groups were using emotional arguments in the form of pictures of aborted babies.....er......fetuses. Yet isn't the above quoted statement not the same thing? In other words, if pro-abortionists can mention the horrors of back-alley abortions, etc, in efforts to support their argument, isn't this an appeal to emotion as well?
Second, legal abortions are not always safe, either. I have on my desk right now the December 1, 2005 New England Journal of Medicine, which has a case report of 4 women who died of fatal Toxic Shock Syndrome from the bacteria
Clostridium sordillii after a medical abortion.
An 18-year-old, a 22-year-old, a 21-year-old, and a 34-year-old woman died within a week of receiving 200 mg of oral mifepristone + 800 mcg of vaginal misopristol.
So, I hope no one is laboring under the delusion that just because an abortion is "legal" that it is automatically safe. The tragedy of this NEJM case report is that eight, not four, lives were lost as a result of abortion.
*putting on flame-retardant gown in preparation for responses*