Prolife Information

Nine reasons why a just society trusts women to choose

At the most basic level, the abortion issue is not really about abortion. It is about the value of women in society. Should women make their own decisions about family, career and how to live their lives? Or should government do that for them? Do women have the option of deciding when or whether to have children? Is that a proper government function?

1. EVERY CHILD A WANTED CHILD
If women are forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, the result is unwanted children. Everyone knows they are among society's most tragic cases, often uncared-for, unloved, brutalized, and abandoned. When they grow up, these children are often seriously disadvantaged, and sometimes inclined toward brutal behavior to others. This is not good for children, for families, or for the country. Children need love and families who want and will care for them.

2. LAWS AGAINST ABORTION KILL WOMEN.
To prohibit abortions does not stop them. When women feel it is absolutely necessary, they will choose to have abortions, even in secret, without medical care, in dangerous circumstances. In the two decades before abortion was legal in the U.S., it's been estimated that nearly a million women per year sought out illegal abortions. Thousands died. Tens of thousands were mutilated. All were forced to behave as if they were criminals.

3. LEGAL ABORTIONS PROTECT WOMEN'S HEALTH.
Legal abortion not only protects women's lives, it also protects their health. For tens of thousands of women with heart disease, kidney disease, severe hypertension, sickle-cell anemia, severe diabetes and other illnesses that can be life threatening, the availability of legal abortion has helped avert serious medical complications that could have resulted from childbirth. Before legal abortion, such women’s choices were limited to dangerous illegal abortion or dangerous childbirth.

4. A WOMAN IS MORE THAN A FETUS.
There's an argument these days that a fetus is a "person" that is 'indistinguishable from the rest of us" and that it deserves rights equal to women's. On this question there is a tremendous spectrum of religious philosophical, scientific and medical option. It's been argued for centuries. Fortunately, our society has recognized that each woman must be able to make this decision based on her own conscience. To impose a law defining a fetus as a "person", granting it rights equal to or superior to a woman’s -- thinking, feeling, and conscious human being -- is arrogant and absurd. It only serves to diminish women.

5.BEING A MOTHER IS JUST ONE OPTION FOR WOMEN.
Many hard battles have been fought to win political and economic equality' for women. These gains will not be worth much if reproductive choice is denied. To be able to choose a safe, legal abortion makes many other options possible. Otherwise an accident or a rape can end a woman's economic and personal freedom.

6. OUTLAWING ABORTION IS DISCRIMINATORY.
Anti-abortion laws discriminate against low-income women, who are driven to dangerous self-induced or back-alley abortions. That is all they can afford. But the rich can travel wherever necessary to obtain a safe abortion.

7. COMPULSORY PREGNANCY LAWS ARE INCOMPATIBLE WITH A FREE SOCIETY.
If there is any matter that is personal and private, then pregnancy is it. There can be no more extreme invasion of privacy than requiring a woman to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term. If government is permitted to compel a woman to bear a child, where will government stop? The concept is morally repugnant. It violates traditional American ideas of individual rights and freedoms.

8. OUTLAW ABORTION. AND MORE CHILDREN WILL BEAR CHILDREN
Forty percent of 14-year-old girls will become pregnant before they turn 20. This could happen to your daughter or someone else close to you. Here are the critical questions: Should the penalty for lack of knowledge or even for a moment's carelessness be enforced pregnancy and child rearing? Or dangerous illegal abortion? Should we consign a teenager to a life sentence of joblessness, hopelessness and dependency?

9. CHOICE IS GOOD FOR FAMILIES.
Even when precautions are taken, accidents can and do happen. There is no perfect birth control method. For some families, this is not a problem. But for others, such an event can be catastrophic. An unintended pregnancy can increase tensions, disrupt stability, and push people below the line of economic survival. Family planning is the answer. All options must be open.

For an excellent discussion of the issues of so called "Partial Birth Abortion" and parental consent laws please see this information by Richard North Patterson the author of the book Protect and Defend

Speech to National Abortion Federation
Richard North Patterson, April 23, 2001

It's a great honor to be here, but it's also a little daunting. Not only am I with Vicki Saporta, but I'm speaking to so many of you who've done so much more than I.
But I can claim at least one unique distinction: to my knowledge, I'm now the author of the only New York Times bestseller even written on that foolproof commercial subject--partial birth abortion.

Truth to tell, my publisher implored me not to write this book. Their reasons were straightforward--that so-called "partial birth" abortion is unpleasant; that even most pro-choice folks oppose it; and that, by also taking on parental consent, I would repel much of my potential audience. But the reasons I wrote it, and what I found out when I did, go to the heart of what we're up against, and what we need to do.
For the two or three of you who may not have read my novel, I should briefly reprise the plot.

A fifteen year old girl, Mary Ann Tierney, discovers six months into her pregnancy that her fetus is hydrocephalic- likely, but not certain, to have no meaningful cerebral development. Her only way of knowing for sure is to deliver a full-term baby by means of a classical cesarean section- creating the small but measurable risk that she can never have children again. The only way to prevent that risk is by securing a late-term abortion. And Mary Ann's mother and father- a Catholic law professor and principled pro-life activist- oppose all abortions as a matter of conscience.

The legal context I've created is quite real. Under Roe v. Wade and its progeny, Congress or a state can ban all post-viability abortion unless necessary to protect the life or health of the mother. But "health" has never been defined. Does it include mental health? Does physical health include reproductive health? And how severe must the threat to health be to justify abortion?

To address all this, I imagined a fictitious but very plausible law-the Protection of Life Act. The Act provides that no minor can have a post-viability abortion unless a parent consents--based on a doctor's advice that continuing the pregnancy threatens life or health--or a court otherwise so finds. The act further confines "health" to a strictly defined threat to physical health--in essence, that the threat is not only severe, but more likely than not to occur.

Under this law, Mary Ann does not qualify for an abortion ordered by the court. Her parents refuse consent. So her only hope is to challenge the constitutionality of the Act in court--over her parents' opposition--in time to obtain an abortion.

Why did I invent this unpleasant dilemma? Because it enabled me to confront the two toughest issues the pro-choice movement faces: so-called "partial-birth" abortion, and the parental consent laws. But it was only after interviewing women who've had late-term procedures, doctors who've performed them, an array of legal and medical experts, and all the available data, that I became certain of what the truth about late-term abortion really is. It's this: the campaign against partial-birth abortion is a callous hoax--a slander on the women who've undergone them, and a cynical effort to attack all abortion rights by vilifying those who support them. And it demonstrates something we can never forget--that we, not they, occupy the moral high ground.

That's not what most people believe. They believe that post-viability abortions are common, and that they are performed on the healthy fetuses of healthy mothers, often moments from birth, by heartless doctors sanctioned by a pro-choice movement so inhumane that even the most distasteful kind of butchery does not offend them.
If that were true, that's what I'd have written. But it's not.

Here's the truth as I found it and as all of you know it all too well. Late-term abortions proceed from the cruelest fetal anomalies--such as the absence of a brain or other essential organs--or, rarer yet, when pregnancy prevents the emergency treatment of the mother for mortal risks from cancer, diabetes, heart disease and the like. They're performed only by a handful of brave and principled doctors. And they are exceedingly rare--roughly one of fifteen hundred abortions performed every year occur after twenty-four weeks.

As part of my research I interviewed several women who had such abortions, one a pro-life Catholic. Their situations involved deeply wanted children, in pregnancies gone hideously wrong. These fetal anomalies presented various threats to maternal life or health: at a minimum, that the fetus would die inside the mother, impairing her clotting mechanism--which, in the worst case, could have led to an emergency hysterectomy. By the time we spoke, this tragedy was several years in the past. But none could talk of it without deep emotion, often to the point of speechlessness or tears.

Yet the pro-life movement implies that these women--and those like them--have chosen virtual infanticide for no better reason than their personal convenience. They've invented the term "partial-birth" abortion-a term nowhere known to medicine--to summon horrific images and obscure the medical facts. They fudge whether "partial-birth" means all post-viability abortion, or a specific procedure most often used in legally-protected pre-viability abortions--but only in one in 3,200 cases. And they've drafted a host of state laws--so far struck down by the Supreme Court--which define "partial-birth" so vaguely that they threatened to criminalize abortion for all.

This strategy is ruthless, and it's brilliant. And so is the pro-life advocacy of another sentimental favorite--parental consent laws.

These laws--which exist in most states--require a minor to obtain the consent of, or at least notify, a parent before getting any abortion. The minor's sole alternative is to persuade a judge that she is sufficiently mature to make such a decision, or that abortion is otherwise in her best interests. Never addressed is the question of why a minor too immature to decide for herself is nonetheless suited to motherhood.

Yet most Americans support such laws. They believe that their purpose is to protect minors from rash decisions, and emotional damage. They look in the mirror, and see a good parent. And so they project their image of their own family on every other family in America.

Their assumptions, regrettably, involve a serious failure of empathy and imagination. They skip the question of whether their families--or most functional families--require an act of Congress to communicate on a matter so important. They never ask whether Congress can create in a moment of crisis the trust which a more troubled family has been unable to develop over the course of a child's life. They forget those families which are starkly different from theirs--incestuous families, abusive families, alcoholic families, or divided families where the parents use a child as a weapon against each other. They overlook families who view a daughter's sexuality with such overwhelming shame that they would rather have her dead than pregnant--or, at the least, out in the streets. They never imagine how difficult it is for a teenage girl to go to court alone; how often such difficulty will fall on the poorest, the least-educated, the least resourceful; how frequently such laws will prevent a minor girl from acting at all.

But one result that requires little imagination: parental consent laws will lead to more unwed teenage mothers. And that, the more intellectually honest pro-life leaders admit in private, is precisely their intent-to reduce abortion among teens.
Fine. So let's challenge them to say so, in public. And then we can have a debate over whether the deeply held belief of a minority of our population--that a fetus is an inviolate life from the moment of conception--should be transmuted into a social policy which compels more pregnant teenage girls to become mothers.

For anyone who loves their children, or their prospective children, our argument is compelling. An unplanned birth creates far more damage to most girls --emotional and otherwise--than does abortion. The incidence of depression is far more frequent, and far more lasting. Their education, and economic viability, are severely diminished. Their skills as parents are less, their resentment of parenting greater. And so, inevitably, their children as a whole do far less well in life than the wanted children of mothers who are more mature.

These pregnant girls have faces, and names--like Becky Bell and Spring Adams, whose stories I encountered in my research. Becky Bell feared that obtaining the consent of her loving parents would disappoint them, and so died from an illegal abortion. Spring Adams was forced by a parental consent law to tell her mother that her father had raped her, with the result that her father killed Spring, her mother, and himself. These, too, are American families.

You, more than anyone, are working to protect girls--and women-like these. And yet the right to choose has never been more endangered:

Our new administration is avowedly pro-life. John Ashcroft is Attorney General.
86% of American counties no longer have known abortion providers.
The partial-birth abortion ban is coming up in the Senate. Last year it took thirty-four votes to uphold the president's veto; this year it will take forty-one--a filibuster--to keep it from the president's desk.

Mifepristone, commonly known as RU-486, may be severely restricted. Too many of our supporters have been lulled into believing that this is the magic bullet, widening access to abortion beyond embattled doctors and women's clinics. But efforts are underway to confine its use to the relative handful of doctors who now perform abortions--because, the pro-life forces say, they are concerned for women's health.

So while we defend abortion in the rarest of circumstances, our opponents chip away at the right for all.

How did this happen? In large part because during the last election, when it mattered most, a lot of our constituency--people who believe themselves pro-choice--lulled themselves to sleep. For far too many, Roe is not only a permanent protection, but a one-way ticket to denial, enabling them to feel pro-choice while supporting those who are anti-choice. But the pro-life folks have no such illusions--they vote this issue first, last, and always, and they never, ever let up.

That's their privilege. But if we can only persuade the public at large that choice is truly at risk, we have by far the better argument--or rather, arguments, because a woman's pregnancy occurs in a myriad of circumstances.

Should concern for fetal life cause us to order women to have children because their birth control has failed--as has happened in the majority of abortions?
Should we force families to have more children when they can't support the ones they have?

Should the law compel women traumatized by rape or incest to then become mothers against their will?

Should teenagers forfeit their future because they made the same mistake so many of us made at a similar age--or later?

Should we consider a woman's life or health a fair exchange for a doomed fetus?

Should our only answer for a professional woman without a partner be that she should have just said no?

Should we, in short, treat pregnant women as the losers in God's-or nature's --lottery?

And should we take our moral cues from a movement which--far too often--seems to love our children most before they're born.

For most Americans, those questions would answer themselves. But more Americans must confront them. And that comes back to us, and the commitment we must demand of those who support the right to choose.

It's no longer enough to give money, though they need to give more.

Or to attend events with like-minded people, though it's an important source of strength.

We must ask them to be activists. We must ask them to vote this issue--period--with no rationalizations or excuses. We must ask them to talk to their friends and partners, parents and kids. We must ask them to write their congresspeople, and e-mail friends across the country. We must ask them to demand that their candidates, and their parties, support the right to choice as the price of their support. We must ask them to make protecting choice a priority, not just a preference.

To seek this depth of commitment is not always easy. But it's fair. Because it will be far harder for them someday to explain to their children, or their children's children, why choice slipped away. Faced with that choice, I am sure, each of them would far rather say: we helped save the right to choose, and I was part of that. And then, more than anyone, you will have made the difference.