Ann Voskamp writes powerfully about abortin and the changes needed in the attitude of the church to make life a more powerful option than death
When I get the message that Sozan wants an abortion, it feels like all the air got vacuumed out of my lungs.
But I get it.
I once sat in a doctor’s office and the atomic blast of my own pregnancy test ripped through me and I’m telling you, it was impossible to breathe through the shockwaves, the thermal heat.
Every time I post something on my Facebook about abortion, there will inevitably be someone who makes a comment that says something like this, “Don’t women know how to use birth control these days? What is wrong with them? With so many birth control options these days, no one should ever have an abortion.”
I supposed that is a really common misconception…that birth control reduces the abortion rate. But is that true? Look at this quote from Ann Furedi, the former director of British Pregnancy Advisory Service, Britain’s largest abortion provider:
Often, arguments for increased access to contraception and for new contraceptive technologies are built on the assumption that these developments will bring down the abortion rate. The anti-choice movement counter that this does not seem to be the case in practice.Arguably they are right. Access to effective contraception creates an expectation that women can control their fertility and plan their families. Given that expectation, women may be less willing to compromise their plans for the future. In the past, many women reluctantly accepted that an unplanned pregnancy would lead to maternity. Unwanted pregnancies were dutifully, if resentfully, carried to term. In days when sex was expected to carry the risk of pregnancy, an unwanted child was a chance a woman took. Today, we expect sex to be free from that risk and unplanned maternity is not a price we are prepared to pay.
It is clear that women cannot manage their fertility by means of contraception alone.
Contraception lets couples down. A recent survey of more than 2000 women requesting abortions at clinics run by BPAS, Britain’s largest abortion provider, found that almost 60% claim to have been using contraception at the time they became pregnant. Nearly 20% said that they were on the pill. Such findings are comparable to several other smaller studies published during the last decade… It is clear that contraceptives let couples down… The simple truth is that the tens of thousands of women who seek abortion each year are not ignorant of contraception. Rather they have tried to use it, indeed they may have used it, and become pregnant regardless.
Here’s a statistic from the Guttmacher Institute, Planned Parenthood’s research arm. This stat makes Planned Parenthood look terrible, so I can’t imagine that this is not accurate. They have absolutely nothing to gain by putting this out there: “More than half of women obtaining abortions in 2000 (54%) had been using a contraceptive method during the month they became pregnant.”
How is it that abortion supporters understand that birth control does not reduce abortion, yet pro-lifers don’t? Birth control was created so that we could separate sex from procreation. How do we not get that, pro-lifers? When you separate the act of sex from babies, of course abortions occur.
Let’s look at a quote from Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, famous abortion-supporting feminist: “Until a ‘perfect’ method of contraception is developed, which will probably never happen, periods of heightened consciousness and extended practice of birth control will inevitably mean a rise in abortions.”
In a book written by Petchesky, she comments on the research of demographer and feminist Susan Scrimshaw who linked rising abortions to wide acceptance of the birth-control pill:
But Scrimshaw reminds us that the pill, as a more effective method of reversible contraception that women had ever known, contributed to a climate of expectations that women need not and should not have to fear an unwanted pregnancy. Having a baby when you didn’t want to became “unthinkable” for new generations of women, or for older generations in new stages in their lives. This change consciousness undoubtedly contributed to the rising abortions, for women who did not use the pill as well as those who did.
I’m not saying that you should only have sex when you are fertile. But to be perfectly honest, you should only have sex when you are open to life. Because believe it or not, babies are many times a result of sex. And that’s the way it was intended to be.
The world says outlawing abortions “forces” women to seek so-called backyard operators. The truth is different.
From Life Site News:
This country banned abortion and now, abortion promoters can’t believe their eyes!
“Outlaw abortion and abortion won’t stop. Women will just do it illegally and women will die!”
Or so the argument goes… But facts are pesky things, and they show that the opposite is true in Chile.
According to new research from the MELISA Institute, since Chile’s ban on abortion, not only has maternal health improved but the number of women seeking illegal abortion has plummeted!
Since Chile banned abortion in 1989, the number of maternal deaths decreased from 41.3 to 12.7 per 100,000 women (69.2% reduction). That puts Chile in second place for the lowest maternal mortality rate in the Americas (that’s right, even better than the United States).
Prof. Elard Koch, a molecular epidemiologist and lead author of the study, says educating women enhanced their ability to access existing health care resources, and since those resources included skilled attendants for childbirth, that directly led to a reduction of maternal deaths during pregnancy and childbirth.
As Dr. Koch explains, “it is a unique natural experiment conducted in a developing country.” During the fifty-year period under study, the overall maternal mortality rate dramatically declined by 93.8%, from 270.7 to 18.2 deaths per 100,000 live births, making Chile a leader in maternal healthcare outcomes in the Americas.
But wait. If abortion is legally banned, wouldn’t we expect to see the number of women hospitalized due to illegal abortion procedures increase? Aren’t women just seeking abortions outside of proper healthcare facilities?
No. Not only is Chile one of the safest places in the world for women to give birth, but the number of women actually seeking abortion is also declining. According to data from the Chilean Ministry of Health, the country displays a continuous decreasing trend of hospital discharges due to complications of abortions suspected to be illegally induced at a rate of 2% per year since 2001. In contrast, a decreasing trend was not observed in hospital discharges due to miscarriage or ectopic pregnancy, which have remained constant during the same period.
Dr. Koch’s research also found that a large sample of abortion-minded women in Chile displayed a vulnerability profile marked by coercion and fear, which accounted for nearly 70% of the reasons women considered abortion. Moreover, the research indicated that support programs directed to vulnerable women can prevent most illegal abortions, with an outcome of live birth (with or without adoption) ranging between 69% and 94% depending on the risk group.
It’s not sheer coincidence that Malta, The Republic of Ireland, and Chile, all of which have prohibited abortion, have lower maternal mortality rates than the United States. In Africa, where 56% of all maternal mortalities occur, abortion-related maternal mortality is less than half what it is in developed countries. Yet there are more restrictions on abortion in Africa than in developed countries! So what’s the deal? In countries with higher abortion restrictions, fewer women have to seek treatment for “unsafe abortion” than in countries where abortion is “safe and legal.”
The result’s of Chile’s natural experiment is bad news for the pro-abortion lobby. But it’s great news for mothers and the unborn!
When we read in Psalm 139 “You knitted me together in my mother’s womb”, this is what it’s talking about. Awesome article from Lifesitenews
10 mind-blowing things that happen to babies before they’re born
With today’s modern technology and medical information, we have a real-time window into the womb. What happens to babies before birth – all the ways they move, grow, and change – is nothing short of amazing.
Here are just 10 things that happen to babies before birth. These 10 things demonstrate their uniqueness, value, and of course, their humanity.
What’s more, each of these 10 things happen in the first trimester – when approximately 90% of abortions in the U.S. occur!
1) “On the first day following fertilization, the human embryo is identifiable as a specific individual human being on a molecular level.”
A South Dakota legislative task force, appointed to examine the science behind unborn life, found that “the new recombinant DNA technologies indisputably prove that the unborn child is a whole human being from the moment of fertilization, that all abortions terminate the life of a living human being, and that the unborn child is a separate human patient under the care of modern medicine.”
After examining scientific resources and hearing medical testimony, the South Dakota Task Force found that “(the necessary pieces) for pain detection in the spinal cord exists at very early developmental stages.” Babies have also been documented moving away from unwanted or painful touch in their first few weeks of in utero life.
These fingerprints will be the same throughout the baby’s life. His permanent identification is already developing. Watch a video and see an unborn baby’s fingerprints here.
10) A Baby Can Suck Her Thumb and Yawn at 9 1/2 Weeks Old.
According to The Endowment for Human Development, most babies prefer their right thumb. At this age, plenty is going on. A baby’s vocal cords are forming, her bones are hardening, and her toenails and fingernails are emerging. See a video of a ten-week-old baby yawning here.
Editor’s Note: The information here has, in large part, been studied and documented by The Endowment for Human Development (“a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving health science education and public health” that has cooperated with National Geographic to put out a video about prenatal development) and The South Dakota Task Force to Study Abortion.
There have been several very concerning news reports coming out lately about babies being ordered, gestated and born in Asia to parents from wealthy countries.
A few months ago, an Australian couple took home a baby girl but rejected her twin, a boy with Down’s Syndrome. The boy was left for the Thai mother to care for. Clearly the intent was that they didn’t want the inconvenience of a baby with obvious imperfections. It turned out that the adoptive father had previous convictions for abusing little girls.
About the same time there was the report of a wealthy Japanese business man who had fathered literally dozens of babies through a surrogacy agency, again in Thailand. It was never explained why he needed to have so many children.
Last night there was a report of an episode from 2012 where Australian parents took home one twin and left the other in India because the baby was the wrong gender.
So babies are now just another consumer item which you can buy.
Many Western countries have outlawed what is called commercial surrogacy which is an agreement for a woman to be paid to bear a child on behalf of someone who is unable to have children themselves. So infertile couples are turning to developing countries and, often through commercial agencies, paying healthy but poor mothers to have babies for them.
This is just repugnant on so many levels. It treats human beings- both the mother and the baby- as no more than economic units, a factory and a product. You pay a price and effectively buy yourself a baby.
When human beings are bought and sold like this it devalues all humanity.
When babies become commodities the potential for abuse is infinite. Even when regulations are in place, in many countries they are not enforced or will be ignored by bribing officials.
It’s not hard to imagine babies being mass produced for paedophiles to abuse and for pornography.
We kill babies who are inconvenient in the name of choice. We procure babies on the open market in the name of choice.
If this isn’t human trafficking, slavery by another name, I don’t know what else it is.
Last week strident atheist Richard Dawkins wrote that mothers who find they are expecting a child with Downs’ syndrome have a moral responsibility to abort the baby. Elizabeth Schilz disagrees:
My Oma was born in a little village near the town of Hadamar. Hadamar sits in the shadow of a tall hill called Mönchberg – Monk’s Mountain. On top of that hill stands an old Franciscan monastery, which was converted into a state hospital and nursing home in 1803. In 1940, however, that hospital was turned into one of the infamous Nazi ‘killing centres’. These were the six institutions spread all over Germany where first children, and later also adults, with disabilities such as (in the language of those times) ‘idiocy and mongolism (especially when associated with blindness and deafness), microcephaly, hydrocephaly, malformations of all kinds, especially of limbs, head, and spinal column, and paralysis, including spastic conditions’ were taken, systematically starved to death or gassed, and cremated.
Oma rarely spoke to us about her experiences during the war. But we know that she was affected by the experience of living in the shadow of Mönchberg. I was the fifth of sixth children. Oma loved us all very dearly, but she had a favorite, and she never made even the feeblest attempt to hide it. The other five of us were all her Silberfische – silverfishes. My older brother, Jim, was her Goldfisch – her goldfish.
Jim was born ‘mentally retarded’. When he was born back in 1952, the medical professionals counselled my parents to send him to live in an institution. My parents refused, and with much work and love, they taught Jim to do all those things that the medical professionals told my parents he would never do, like talk and walk. Jim graduated from high school. He is bilingual – fluent in German as well as English. He reads the newspaper everyday. Jim has held the same full-time position in the kitchen of a country club for twenty years now, and does not receive any sort of public assistance. Jim is known around our family as ‘the human jukebox’, for his uncanny ability to remember the lyrics to any song, from any era, by any artist.
In some sense, although we did not live in the town of Hadamar, I think that all the kids in my family grew up in the shadow of Mönchberg as well.
New Life Narrabri 