The oxymoron of “safe” abortions

Liberal blogger Amanda Marcotte wrote a recent piece for USA Today titled “How to prevent another Gosnell.” In the article, Marcotte seeks to answer the question she believes is lurking on everyone’s mind after his verdict: “How can we prevent future tragedies like this?”

Marcotte is under the impression that Gosnell is the lone bad cowboy on the abortion frontier. We’ve rounded him up and put him in prison, and now the world is a much better place. In reality, Gosnell is one among many crooked abortionists in our nation. Our latest videos from the Inhuman project show the extent doctors and clinic workers will sink to in the name of “reproductive rights.” I hope Marcotte will watch those videos and realize women are being victimized and deceived today. Sadly Marcotte would rather focus on future prevention, which she states can be accomplished by making abortion “safer”.

Indeed, if we want to prevent future Gosnells, the solution is simple: Abortion should be regulated, of course, but in the same way that all other medical practice is regulated, with an eye towards making it safe, not making it hard to get.

Safe and legal – the all too familiar rallying cry of those who champion abortion. How easy it is to disregard the fact that it’s legal in some states to abort a 26-week-old in the womb, yet Gosnell was convicted of first-degree murder for killing children born alive at 24 weeks. I guess as long as it’s legal and sanitary, ethical questions need not be raised.

I’m not against clean facilities and good health care. It’s clear that Gosnell’s Women’s Health Center was a horrific place: dirty equipment, bloodstained tables, cat feces on the floor. By now most of us have read the details, and they’re stomach-turning. Marcotte wants women in sterile environments, where they can terminate their children with little risk to their own heath and well-being. I’ll admit that I can see how that certainly sounds better than being in a clinic where baby feet are held in jars. Yet do a clean room, decorated walls, and a certified OB-GYN constitute a safe abortion?

A Planned Parenthood question-and-answer page has this question posed:

How Safe Are In-Clinic Abortion Procedures?

“Safety is an important and common concern for women. In-clinic abortion procedures are very safe. But there are risks with any medical procedure.

• an allergic reaction

• blood clots in the uterus

• incomplete abortion — part of the pregnancy is left inside the uterus

• failure to end the pregnancy

• infection

• injury to the cervix or other organs

• undetected ectopic pregnancy

• very heavy bleeding

“Most often, these complications are simple to treat with medicine or other treatments.”

In a paragraph below, Planned Parenthood admits this fact:

“Even though in-clinic abortion procedures are generally very safe, in extremely rare cases, serious complications may be fatal.”

In reality, even one of these risks is much more problematic than this simple list tells. Just ask any women who’s had an “incomplete abortion” if she thought having a doctor inform her that a piece of her baby was left inside was a “simple complication.”

As for extremely rare cases of death, we know of two women in the past year alone who suffered that fate: Tonya Reaves, who was left bleeding to death for five hours in a Chicago Planned Parenthood, and kindergarten teacher Jennifer Morbelli, who died days after her late-term abortion by LeRoy Carhart.

Not to mention the fact that there are studies that show potential risks that remain unnamed on Planned Parenthood’s website. Walter Hoye, founder of the Issues for Life Institute, has a website with an entire page dedicated to “Medical Studies.” This page contains hundreds of documents from studies and research on abortion and its link to issues like breast cancer, premature birth, low birth weight, autism, and a host of other issues.

Hoye recently released documents on a study called “Abortion’s Impact on Prematurity” by Dr. Martin McCaffrey, M.D. In the study, Dr. McCaffrey writes, “Once an abortion has occurred it might remain an immutable risk factor for future preterm birth.” McCaffrey is a clinical professor of pediatrics at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Medicine, director of the Perinatal Quality Collaborative of North Carolina, and member of the N.C. General Assembly Child Fatality Task Force. The full study can be viewed here.

Those are only the potential physical risks. There are many organizations like “Silent No More” or “Operation Outcry,” where thousands of women tell their stories of the great emotional trauma they suffered from abortion.

Along with the physical, emotional, and spiritual consequences of abortion remains the ethical one. We can’t ignore the morality issue. Abortion allows for the termination of a life. Whether through suction instruments, abortion pills or tools that dismember, a growing fetus is destroyed. Rev. Thomas Berg is a moral theology professor at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers. He told USA Today that there’s a “cultural schizophrenia” in our country when it comes to the status of the unborn.

On one hand, the federal government and dozens of states recognize the fetus as an unborn child when a crime has been committed and leads to an injury or death. At the same time, the abortion industry co-exists with a health-care system in which fetal surgery is becoming commonplace. There’s very little rationality behind that contrast. How can the abortion industry co-exist within the same culture where we’re performing operations on the fetus, where we’re … bringing legal lawsuits against people who kill the unborn.

Former Planned Parenthood director Abby Johnson has gone public with her traumatic story of having a medical abortion. She describes her experience of Planned Parenthood workers downplaying the risks of her decision in an article titled “Planned Parenthood kept me in the dark about my abortion.” Abby writes:

It was all pills and that seemed really simple.  Everything was done at home.  It was private, on your schedule, under your control and seemed less invasive.  “Nothing worse than a heavy period,” according to Planned Parenthood.  Sounded pretty easy to me.  So, I took the bait.  I made and appointment and got the money together.  The day came and it really felt like any other day.  I wasn’t nervous…I wasn’t having surgery.  This was going to be simple.

Abby goes on to tell a story that is truly frightening. Something that was supposed to be “simple” ended up being a nightmare. After the first day, when she thought she was literally dying, followed eight more weeks of blood clots, nausea, excruciating cramps, and heavy bleeding.

Later she questioned the Planned Parenthood staff she worked with as to why they didn’t tell women of the risks associated with the abortion pill. Their response was, “We don’t want to scare them.”

Planned Parenthood, writers like Amanda Marcotte, and biased liberal media outlets choose to sweep under the rug the reality of abortion. Gosnell’s case gave them an opportunity to view the most heinous side of the abortion industry. Now that the trial is over, his case has been spun as a means to protect abortion rights and fight for “safe” abortions.

There is no such thing as a “safe” abortion. The instruments may be clean, the doctor may be credible, a woman may not even regret it later. Nevertheless, when two living beings come into a clinic, and only one walks out alive, that makes for a deadly and dangerous scenario.