First of all, there is no evidence that legalizing abortion made any change in the abortion rate. Women had abortions all the time before Roe vs. Wade. Some died – certainly more than do now.
It wasn’t just back-alley abortions, BTW. When I was a teen, most of the girls that age knew all about using coathangers if they became pregnant.
BTW, a complete repeal of Roe vs. Wade would have no effect in New York State, which had legalized abortion beforehand.
Well, I know where I can move then, if necessary. Thanks!
Tars Tarkas, your link actually supports rather than disputes that pro-life web site. While the numbers are slightly higher in your cite, the difference is indeed slight - the point is still true that the number of actual illegal abortion deaths was miniscule compared to the number claimed by abortion-rights activists to win sympathy for their cause.
260 people per year (at a maximum) dying is a tragedy, but is very low on the death-cause list…almost certainly not enough to effect an enormous change in public policy.
And as for your statement:
The cite from that pro-life group says that most of the pre-Roe abortions - about 90% - were performed by licensed physicians. And their cite for that comes from Planned Parenthood, hardly biased against abortion.
Chaim Mattis Keller
Yes. So? Are you suggesting that this is sufficient reason to reject the claims made?
Should we discount every argument that comes from a pro-choice site, simply because it DOES come from a pro-choice site? If not, then why the double standard?
“Anybody’s guess”? It seems to me that such a statement is actually fatal to the specific pro-choice claim that over million women were having illegal abortions each year before Roe v. Wade.
Besides, the numbers you cited date way back to the 1950’s. Thanks to advances in antibiotics, the number of abortion-related deaths dropped to 24 in 1972 – the year immediately before Roe v. Wade. While this is still tragic, it falls far short of the pro-choice claim that thousands of women were dying per year.
In fact, Dr. Bernard Nathanson – one of the founders of NARAL – confessed that these allegation of thousands of deaths was nothing but a fabrication. His astounding confession is consistent with actual government statistics, as provided by the National Center for Heath Statistics.
I’m sorry, but that’s not true. There was a dramatic increase in the abortion rate in the years following Roe v. Wade.
All the time? Not so, as evidenced by the link which I cited. Besides, even if that were so, it would not mean that there was NO change in the abortion rate after abortion was legalized.
“Certainly” so? Can you substantiate that claim? We’ve already seen that the allegations of thousands of maternal deaths is unsubstantiated, and contradicted by Department of Health statistics.
If abortion became illegal again?
More unwanted children.
More abused/neglected/mistreated/just plain brought up wrong children.
Even more parents who have absolutely no business being parents.
More lives thrown horribly off track. Carreers brought to a crashing halt in an instant.
Almost certainly more infanticides (if a well-off homemaker who knew exactly what she was getting into can get pushed over the edge, imagine a desperate single mother with no recourse).
A greater demand for welfare and other social services. What, you think the need for welfare is going to go away just because some President thinks it should?
Look, I don’t care about the validity of abortion death stats way back when; any ONE of these reasons, as far as I’m concerned, is enough to support legal abortion.
Yes, pro-choicers often do say that abortion must surely reduce the incidence of child abuse. Empirical evidence, however, shows otherwise. The incidence of child abuse has risen by over 600% in the years following Roe v. Wade.
As for lives being disrupted, I feel that is a great tragedy. However, should we really believe that the disruption of someone’s life is sufficient reason to end someone else’s?
Jthunder, don’t you see?
It’s all about what was recorded, and what was not. If you got pregnant at 16 in 1955, and managed to get an abortion, chances are your doc (or back alley abortion specialist) wasn’t informing the Surgeon General for statistics purposes.
Similarly, child abuse often gets reported these days -thank God for that. It was kept quiet a lot more in the old days.
Comparing plain numbers doesn’t work in this case. Especially not in the case of abortion statistics.
I can respect both opinions here, but don’t try and bombard one another with stats. It just doesn’t work that way.
If the Supreme Court decided to let the states have the final say, the abortion opponents that use harassing and threatening technics will be able to concentrate their forces and be effective one state at a time, until every state has banned it. They’ve been pretty effective now, spread out as they are, in frightening hospitals, clinics and the doctors in them into quitting the business.
I’m sorry, are you looking for an objective point of view regarding abortion? If you believe you can find one, then I’ve got a bridge in San Francisco I can sell you. Cheap.
My guess is that if abortion were made illegal, the main thing that would happen would be the going underground of the “Day After” pill (sorry, don’t remember it’s name). Can you imagine someone coming up to your car in DC or Detroit going, “Okay, what you need? Weed? Pot? Baby-killer pills?” (I did I say you wouldn’t going to find an objective point of view here, didn’t I?)
I don’t care if one million women died from illegal abortions, or only one. There is still no scientific reason to call a first-trimester embryo a “person.” Religious, yeah; emotional—but not scientific.
However . . . While I strongly disagree with anti-abortionists, I also recognize that they genuinely feel they are “doing the right thing,” and “saving lives.” I feel they are misguided, but I can’t fault their motives.
I think that women should always have the option of abortion. Do I think that I would be able to go through with it? No. But if a woman is mentally able to handle it, then she should be able to. There are several reasons why abortion is important. First of all, there is the quality of life for the baby. I know that everyone just says, “Have the baby and then put it up for adoption” but that is just adding one more child to the foster homes. Although I understand that most foster parents try their best to shower these kids with love, its just not the same as if it were coming from the actual parent. And what if the child stayed with birth parents? Well, either the child would be brought up in a single household, or, if the parents got married, probably an unhappy one. Marriages that are forced to be made don’t normally last happily. Also, the child could quite probably be blamed for having ruined the parent(s)'s life. The parent, if younger, would most likely have to stop her education in order to care for the baby, and thus relinquish her dreams and be forced to work low-paying jobs for the rest of her life.
Besides quality of life, there is also the issue of health. If the mother is a teenager, then she should not be having the baby. Her body simply is not ready to bear a child. Also, if the child is unexpected or unwanted, the mother probably isn’t eating right or is using substances (i.e. alcohol, drugs) which would be harmful to the baby. Also, sometimes the baby is endangering the life of the mother. What then? Shouldn’t we remove the baby in order to save the already formed life of the mother? And what if the baby is shown to have some sort of disability? Isn’t it kinder not to make it suffer with it?
There’s no scientific reason to call anything a person. “Person” is not a scientific term.
JThunder while not mentioned in your linked advertisement above (and yes, the page states it’s an ad at the bottom of the page), your “Empirical evidence” makes no mention whatsoever about the fact that society’s definition of child abuse has changed dramaticly in the last three decades. :rolleyes:
What was considered discipline in the 1970’s (which I experienced firsthand, being a tike myself at the time) is now likely to get you a visit from the Child Welfare people. My mother thought nothing of taking me into the restroom of a movie theatre or resturant and spanking me for misbehaving in public. Today, I rarely see a parent even willing to remove the screaming child from the theatre, much less lay a hand on their tender backside and explain the error in their ways.
But your cite makes no mention of these changes in society.
Sorry to interrupt, but my pet peeve was running amuck again.
Thurgin
I strongly disagree with your application of the 14th Amendment there. If a fetus were held to be a “person” within the meaning of the 14th Am., the state could not privilege another person to take the life of that fetus. Can you imagine if a state passed a law permitting its citizens to kill a certain class of persons with no legal consequences? No way would that survive 14th Amendment scrutiny. If a zygote is decided to be a 14th Amendment “person,” legal abortion in America comes will immediately end.
Hmmmm…I think I see your point…but you example goes back to my point: in that case, the state is sanctioning the death of a class of persons (which would be both a liberty and an equal protection violation) and would therefore be unconstitutional.
BUT…murder as best I know is in the domain of the states, not the feds. (This is why we don’t have a national murder statute.) OK, how’s this: the prevention of abortion would be up to the states individually, but federal law would intervene if it wasn’t covering the unborn?
Well first of all, even if we grant your claim to be true, the burden of proof still rests on the pro-choice side to show that thousands of women were indeed dying due to back-alley abortions before Roe v. Wade. Since Planned Parenthood itself claimed that 90% of all abortions were actually being performed by licenced physicians, that claim would be rather difficult to substantiate. If you couple that with Dr. Nathanson’s admission that such claims were entirely fictitious, then one must wonder how the pro-choice camp can possibly defend that assertion.
You can’t have both ways. You can’t claim, on the one hand, that thousands of women were dying each year, and then protest that we have no way of gathering statistics on the matter.
And second, on could just as easily argue that the current number of abortion-related deaths is underreported as well. In fact, the National Center for Health Statistics agrees, as cited here.
I think that’s an oversimplification. We do indeed have higher statistics now, thanks to more stringent laws on child abuse reporting. However, these laws were enacted in the 1980’s and the rise in child abuse dates back to before then. Indeed, there are several studies which indicate a causal connection between abortion and child abuse – and in the past few years, we have been hearing Peter Singer and other pro-choicers use pro-choice rhetoric to argue for legalizing infanticide!
Moreover, even if that weren’t true, the pro-choice side must still substantiate their frequent claim that abortion reduces child abuse. Without any such substantiation, that claim is nothing but speculation and wishful thinking.
With all due respect, that sounds awfully speculative. While U.S. society’s definition of child abuse may have been changing, it still seems awfully speculative to merely chalk this dramatic increase up to changing definitions. Moreover, one of my earlier links showed that the same trend has been observed in other countries, and that child abuse in the state of Washington exhibited a sharp increase immediately after abortion was legalized there. My earlier citations also incidated a causal relationship between abortion and child abuse, which can not be accounted for by increased reporting.
Besides which, my earlier challenge still stands. If pro-choicers do claim that abortion reduces child abuse, then the burden of providing empirical evidence rests on their shoulders. They can’t simply provide speculations and then challenge pro-lifers to prove them wrong.
I am strongly pro-choice, and I’m old enough to remember the promises made by Planned Parenthood and other groups I supported. The promises were the opposite of DKW’s doomsday scenario. They have not been fulfulled, by and large. (Although I cannot say why these gains failed to occur.)
Choice was supposed to end teen-aged pregnancies. Instead their number soared. Ditto for unwed motherhood. Ditto for the number of parents who had no business being parents (at least, not at that age and in those circumstances.)
We’ve seen an increase in the rate of “abused/neglected/mistreated/just plain brought up wrong children” – due to the problem of “children raising children.”
I would hate to see abortion made illegal. I absolutely do not expect that to happen. Fortunately, it’s just well-enough entrenched IMHO.
Furthermore, IF abortion were made illegal, I wouldn not expect social conditions to return to what they were before. Heaven only knows how society would adapt. My only point is, legalized abortion has not produced some of the social gains that we had hoped for.
BTW – Easy access to birth control has also not succeeded in producing these types of hoped-for gains, either.