the awful truth about illegal abortion

 

I was a third year medical student in 1973 when the Supreme Court of the United States legalized abortion by declaring it a constitutionally protected right that applied to all women. As a health care provider, this came as a huge relief to me because it guaranteed women access to a safe procedure performed by a trained specialist under sterile conditions, unlike the illegal abortions that were performed in back rooms and basements by frauds and quacks with no training...or worse, by desperate women themselves, with contaminated instruments, dangerous chemicals, and deadly manipulations. 

For those of you who don't remember, or who choose to ignore or to deny the brutality of illegal abortions, let me remind you how they were accomplished before Roe V. Wade. By pushing a straightened clothes hanger through the closed cervix and penetrating the amniotic membrane...without anesthesia. By drinking lye. By injecting air around the amniotic sac to separate it from the uterine wall...

...which is why women died from overwhelming infections (sepsis). From air and amniotic fluid embolism. From hemorrhage. From suicide.

Here are some of their stories.

There is little doubt in my mind that some women will be forced again to resort to these horrifying measures now that they no longer have access to safe, sterile abortions. There is no question that many will die...and with them, the fetuses who were supposed to have been saved by the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

And here, compliments of Amie Lynne Jordan who posted this on Facebook, are a few stories about women who will now be forced to carry their unintended, or non-viable, or life-threatening pregnancies to term:

• Becky who found out at her 20-week anatomy scan that the infant she had been so excited to bring into this world had developed without life sustaining organs.
• Susan who was sexually assaulted on her way home from work, only to come to the horrific realization that her assailant planted his seed in her when she got a positive pregnancy test result a month later.
• Theresa who hemorrhaged due to a placental abruption, causing her parents, spouse, and children to have to make the impossible decision on whether to save her or her unborn child.
• Vanessa who went into her confirmation appointment after YEARS of trying to conceive only to hear silence where there should be a heartbeat.
• Courtney who just found out she's already 13 weeks along, but the egg never made it out of her fallopian tube so either she terminates the pregnancy or risks dying from internal bleeding.

Regardless of your religious, moral, or ethical stand on abortion rights, you may want to consider the cruel consequences of illegal abortion before you strip women of their right to a safe medical procedure. You should at least try to imagine the psychological and emotional toll it will take on victims of rape and incest to be forced to carry their pregnancies to term. You should ask yourself what will become of these unwanted children. Who will care for them? How will they survive? You should weigh in on decisions that put a pregnant woman's life in danger. You should think long and hard about what it must feel like to carry a dead baby inside of you until it is expelled spontaneously, or "evacuated." You should understand that carrying a dead fetus puts the mother at risk of infection, hemorrhage, and coagulation disorders that can be fatal.

With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, five of our esteemed Supreme Court judges will, I fear, have blood on their hands. Before they deny women their reproductive rights, perhaps they should be working to codify a foolproof plan to absolutely end incest and rape in the first place. Good luck with that. 

It doesn't seem fair for men to retain the right to violate women, while women lose the right to protect, and indeed, to save themselves. 

~No means no...~

...in so many ways.

jan