COMMON ARGUMENTS ON ABORTION EXAMINED
Understanding the Arguments on Abortion
The Arguments and the Reality
In every country of the world those who support abortion use the same arguments to justify their position. These arguments may sound plausible at first, but they are based on little evidence and poor judgment.
"Every woman should have the right to choose."
If that means she should be free to choose to become pregnant, who would disagree? It is a basic human right of a woman to decide if she wants to marry, to have children, and how many and when. However, if the "right to choose" means that a mother can kill her baby, before or after birth, then this is a claim for a monstrous "right".
No one has the "right to choose" to kill another human being. This is a basic ground rule of Ethics shared by all cultures and civilisations around the globe. We talk about the dignity of the human person, and the need to respect it unconditionally. Abortion is - without any doubt the killing of a human being. If people have this "right to kill", murder and manslaughter would be legitimate and legal, too. Terrorist onslaughts, genocide and mass murder could be excused as somebody's "right to choose" who is to live and who has to die. Total chaos and anarchy would be the result.
Since the killing of any person is a contradiction of the Natural Law as well as the laws of all civilised nations, the killing of an unborn child (who has not even the means of self-defence) is to be treated in the same way.
And what of the "choice" of the aborted children? They have the same right to life as you or I, but the abortionists give them none. They treat them worse than animals in a slaughterhouse. In the abortion centres available in many western countries there is no choice.
"Every woman has a right to control her own body."
This is a variation of the first argument, and invokes the right of privacy. The phrase "her own body" really means two bodies and two distinct lives, that of the mother and that of the child. There are two heartbeats, two sets of brain waves, maybe even two different blood types and very often two different sexes.
Every baby girl threatened with abortion has control of her body taken from her.
"Every child should be a wanted child."
In a perfect world where there was no poverty or disease, where men and women treated each other with respect, every child would be wanted, welcomed and loved without conditions. Sadly, we do not live in a perfect world, and sometimes a child is neither planned nor wanted. Once conceived, he or she exists with all the dignity and promise of our common humanity. As such her existence demands that we give all love and care that we can.
It is argued that only "planned children" should be born, yet it happens that many children, the result of careful planning, later suffer neglect and abuse. Too easily planning is a cover for a self-centred lifestyle that views children as a consumer item and often a problem.
Shouldn't there be limited abortion for "hard cases"?
Experience shows that when a country allows "limited abortion for hard cases", abortion on demand inevitably becomes the norm. The courts and doctors find it impossible to distinguish hard cases from those that are not. In the United Kingdom where the 1967 Abortion Law was intended to be a strict law for "hard cases" only, nearly 200,000 abortions took place in 1999, and 99 % of those killed were perfectly healthy babies from healthy mothers.
Rape and incest are hard cases indeed. Of course, rape is a grave violation of a woman that leaves her deeply wounded, sometimes physically, always emotionally. Those responsible should be severely punished. Yet, it is a fact that a pregnancy arising from sexual assault is very rare, and it is not a justification for abortion.
The first study on this emotive topic was completed in 1981 by Dr. Sandra Mahkorn.
She studied 37 pregnant rape victims in the USA. Her findings, published under the title "Pregnancy and Sexual Assault-New Perspectives on Human Abortion", contradict the commonly held belief that victims of rape or incest need an abortion to recover their mental health. The conclusions of her study show that for the victims of rape who carried their child to term,
* Hostile and negative feelings towards the baby changed during pregnancy;
* Women who had planned to give up their baby for adoption chose to bring it up themselves;
* Some women stated that if they could see the pregnancy through, they would feel they have conquered the rape.
In the case of incest, an abortion will not solve the underlying problem. Abortion must never become a "treatment" for incest, and must certainly never act as a cover-up for the crime. In both rape and incest, an abortion is nothing else than a further violation of the violated women.
Abortion is necessary to save the life of the mother?
This is a very common argument and often used even by people who would not be generally in favour of abortion. Is abortion ever a medical necessity? What do the experts say?
"As obstetricians and gynaecologists we affirm that there are no medical circumstances justifying direct abortion, that is, circumstances in which the life of a mother may only be saved by directly terminating the life of her unborn child. We urge the government to give the people the opportunity, in an early referendum, to restore full constitutional protection to life before birth."
This is the joint opinion of the four leading experts in Ireland:
John Bonnar, Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Trinity College, Dublin;
Kieran O'Driscoll, Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at University College, Dublin;
Eamon O'Dwyer, Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at University College, Galway;
and Julia Vaughan, Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist.
This view is shared and supported by the Irish Medical Council and the Irish Medical Organisation.
With more than 364,000 births between them, the three Dublin maternity hospitals had only six deaths of pregnant patients with heart disease. Pregnancy did not cause or aggravate their conditions and abortion would not have saved any of these mothers.
A cancer specialist [who?]stated in the Irish Times on 29 June 1992 that "there is no evidence that pregnancy makes cancer worse. There is also no evidence that termination of pregnancy makes cancer better. All the necessary treatment can he given under specialised conditions."
In February 2000 the (Irish) Institute of Obstetricians & Gynaecologists made a clear distinction between "the unavoidable death of the baby resulting from essential treatment to protect the life of the mother" and "abortion carried out with the intention of taking the life of the baby".
And Dr. C. Everett Koop, a former Surgeon General (minister for health) of the United States, said that "Protection of the life of a mother as an excuse for an abortion is a smoke screen. In my thirty-six years in paediatric surgery I have never known one instance where the child had to be aborted to save the mother's life..."
"Isn't Abortion necessary where the mother is suicidal?"
This argument was successfully used in the infamous X case in Ireland in 1992. This was the case when the Supreme Court ruled that the Irish Constitution permitted a young woman to have an abortion because of her threats to kill herself. The legal judgment was the result of undue haste, unsound medical evidence, an embarrassed government and a media-activated outburst of emotion.
In fact, the statistics of suicide show that a pregnant women is much less likely to take her own life than women in general, while among women who have had abortions there is a very high rate of suicide.
Patricia Casey, Professor of Psychiatry at University College Dublin, and Consultant Psychiatrist at the Mater Hospital, Dublin, was most unhappy at the X case judgment. She stated in 1992 that pregnant women are six times less likely to commit suicide than non-pregnant women are. More recently, the Irish Family Newspaper interviewed her on 5 November 1999. Referring to the girl at the centre of the X case she said: "She was photographed on her return [from England], smiling and saying how happy she was. She has since been hospitalised for psychiatric disorders." A shocking proof that abortion does not work.
If more proof is needed, there is the evidence of "Suiciders Anonymous", a charitable self-help organisation in the USA. Meta Uchtman testified on 1 September 1981 before the City Council of Cincinnati/Ohio that over a period of 35 months "Suiciders Anonymous" in Cincinnati had counselled 5,620 people who had attempted suicide. 4,000 of these were women - 1,800 of them had had abortions.
Her experience is supported by an official statement of the World Health Organisation, which is a branch of the United Nations. In a report published as early as 1970 WHO stated:
"Serious mental disorders arise more often in women with previous mental problems. Thus the very women for whom legal abortion is considered justified on psychiatric grounds are the ones who have the highest risk of post-abortion psychiatric disorders."
"It is only a foetus"
How often people, especially on television, use the word "foetus" as if "it" were something sub-human. They carefully avoid using the word "baby" when speaking of the unborn, and always speak of "it".
The word "foetus" comes from the Latin word meaning "offspring", and describes the unborn human when its limbs and body parts are clearly formed. When we use the word "foetus" it is only a description of a stage of human development, in the same way as one might describe someone as a newborn, a teenager, or an old age pensioner.
From the moment of conception, a unique individual human being exists who is different genetically from both mother and father. This is a basic fact of biology as taught in any secondary school. To say that the baby in the womb is not human is the same argument used by the slave traders in the 18th century. We now recognise that no one in their right mind would hold that Blacks are not human beings, but there are still people arguing for abortion on the same ground.
"How can so many people be wrong about abortion?'
The answer to this question is the power of the media in the modern world that so influences our every opinion. Without the constant bias of the media in favour of abortion most people would still think of abortion as an "unspeakable crime", as they did in 1950. This has happened before. In the 18th century, the age of the Enlightenment, slavery was an accepted fact of life among all the "civilised" nations of Europe, and in the United States slavery only came to an end in 1865 after a terrible civil war.
Please see our separate topic, which describes the physical and psychological affects on women who have had abortions.