Don’t Defund Planned Parenthood
Why are Republicans still trying to defund Planned Parenthood? Don’t they know that by providing millions of women with effective birth control, Planned Parenthood is preventing the abortions that would result from the unwanted pregnancies? Three percent of their work is abortion-related, but 97 percent isn’t. Their main work is contraceptives, but they also do screenings for breast cancer, for cervical cancer, for prostate cancer, pregnancy tests, prenatal care, and general gynecological care.
There are medical reasons for having an abortion that a woman and her doctor — not a politician — should decide. A pregnancy could mean renal failure and death to a diabetic woman. If an ectopic pregnancy continues, it will kill the woman. Eclampsia can also kill a woman if the pregnancy is not ended immediately. If drug and alcohol abusers are willing to terminate a pregnancy, we should applaud them. Incest and rape victims have rights, too. Of course, not all abortions are for medical reasons, but late term abortions usually are.
Ending Planned Parenthood will increase unsafe abortions for poor women. Women of means will still have safe abortions in doctors’ offices. Only the poor will suffer with coat hangers and back-alley hucksters. An obstetrician/gynecologist, now deceased (Walter Tauber) wrote in the Springfield paper that when he was a young resident at Baystate, prior to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, women would arrive daily from botched abortions, and about one or two a week they could not save. Is this what pro-lifers want?
We don’t prosecute a homeowner who has raked and burned his acorns because we understand that acorns are not oak trees, so he has not burned down a forest. The acorns have potential, but only if given some land. Likewise a fertilized egg or an embryo is not a baby. It has potential if given a womb. No land/womb means no potential. A woman owns her womb the same as a homeowner owns his lawn.
Discarded embryos from fertility clinics or abortions (with permission) should be utilized for medical research that helps us all. Nobody benefits from trashing this material.
A Life-Saving Abortion
A few years back, I was in my earlier twenties and had just ended my year-long relationship. Flash forward a week or so, and I was finding myself running to the bathroom in the middle of transactions with customers at work to throw up and I felt close to blackout. I finally appealed to a woman I worked with. She listened and immediately knew what I didn’t: I was pregnant.
I could not have this child. I had seen the way the biological “father” took care of his child with another woman — he didn’t. I scheduled an abortion and my mother brought me to the clinic. We all nervously awaited our turn being led into the room. I was told that the fetus inside of me had died almost two weeks prior to my appointment…it had been spreading something they called a deadly sepsis throught my body and would have killed me had I not gone for the procedure.
That abortion saved my life. Thank you for this article [“Why I Am Pro-Abortion And You Should Be Too,” July 30, 2015]. The only shame I have felt is from other’s opinions. My family supported me fully through my experience and I appreciate your words on the subject.
