Abortion hurts women~

Until Crisis makes available online its June issue, I can't provide the full text of a superlative article by Erika Bachiochi. But if you click on her name, it will link you to her website where some other great articles are available. She takes much the same position as Feminists for Life, one that Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Wollstonecraft, and I heartily endorse. I would like to draw your attention once again to the excellent database, Women Affirming Life. In the meanwhile, here are some choice excerpts from Erika's article, How Abortion Hurts Women, published in the June 2005 issue of Crisis magazine:

"America's reliance on abortion has relieved our culture of the costs associated with creating environments truly hospitable to women and their children. If a nation as rich as ours were truly committed to women's well-being and equality, we would look for real solutions to the underlying causes of abortion-- including the serious challenge women face of balancing work or school and family, the disrespect for motherhood, the feminization of poverty, and society's eugenic distaste for the imperfection and vulnerability of the disabled."

"So while 'pro-choice' ferminists hail abortion as the symbol of women's freedom and equality, the ordinary young woman may find no such liberation when she has sex with her date, thinking, as women are prone to do, that sex will bind the two emotionally. Instead, when he doesn't share the depth of her feeling and then hands her $400 for the abortion when she becomes pregnant, it's not only her heart that's broken. She alone has to live with the possible short-term and long-term medical consequences of the abortion for the rest of her life. For many women, 'reproductive freedom' has meant that women continue to negotiate all that comes with reproduction while men enjoy the freedom of sex without consequences."

And what are the possible medical consequences of abortion for women who have them?

1. - "Women who have had abortions suffer an increased risk of anxiety, depression, and suicide." Erika backs up this claim with studies published in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders, the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry (2002), the British Medical Journal (1996), and the Southern Medical Journal (2002).

2. - "Several studies analyzed in a landmark 2003 article in the Obstetrical and Gynecological Survey show that induced abortion also increases the risk of placenta previa by 50 percent and doubles the risk of pre-term birth in later pregnancies." Placenta previa "places the lives of both mother and child at risk in [later] pregnancy."

3. - "It is now common medical knowledge that a full-term pregnancy, especially before the age of 32, acts as a protective mechanism against breast cancer. Thus research shows that teenagers with a family history of breast cancer who have abortions before their 18th birthday have an incalculably high risk of developing breast cancer...Approximately one-fifth of women procuring abortions are teenagers, and half are younger than 25 years old. The risk of breast cancer is high for those young women who are delaying their first full-term pregnancy through abortion, yet such women are rarely informed of this indisputable link."

4. - "Astonishingly, many states do not require that abortion-related complications be reported to their health departments. Nevertheless, a review of available data reveals that thousands of women are injured each year from short-term complications such as hemorrhaging, uterine perforation, and infection."

5. - "This is not, of course, to say that illegal abortions were safe; though the actual data are nowhere close to the 10,000 claimed, at least 39 women died from illegal abortions in 1972. But an additional 24 women died that year from legal abortions in states that had weakened their laws in the years before Roe came down. As the medical data above reveal, more than three decades of legal abortion have not made the procedure much safer- women are still dying or suffering serious harm."

Women are still suffering. Did you catch that last part? Do you ever hear much about it in the mainstream media?

One of the things I've liked about Feminists for Life is the owness they place on men, referenced in the second excerpt above. A true gentleman would never allow women to be in a position to ever desire to choose something so destructive to themselves and to their children. Women must be freely able to become what God has created them to be: vessels of new life. This is where the feminine genius articulated by our late pontiff enters in, made available at the WAL website. What makes women so undeniably precious? What sets them apart from men? Why do we continue to oppress/suppress women living to their fullest potential? Abortion is the most hideous form of sexism our society upholds with the force of law. Break free! Be truly liberated women! Be true gentlemen! Uplift the noble sex- the wives, the mothers, the women- by rescuing society from the scourge, the void, the peril of abortion!

Mother Mary, pray for us and for our children~