Anti-abortion advocates claim that abortion is murder. They say that from the moment of conception, the fetus is a living human being. What they don’t know, or at least don’t say, that is that any fetus will not be sufficiently developed to feel real pain until after 30 weeks, well after the threshold where most abortions are carried out.
According to the United Nations, reproductive rights of individuals consist of being able to “decide freely and responsibly the number and spacing and timing of [one’s] children and to have the information and means to do so, and the right to attain the highest standard of sexual and reproductive health.” Furthermore, everyone should have the right to make decisions regarding reproduction “free of discrimination, coercion and violence.”
Despite these rights, 120 million couples in the developing world do not have the resources and support necessary to control their pregnancies. In fact, 43 per cent of all pregnancies are unwanted.
The motive of pro-life groups is to make women feel guilty for having sex, forcing them to give birth to unwanted children. The Roman Catholic Church views abortion as a sin. Pope John Paul II compared abortion to a mass genocide similar to the Holocaust.
Instead of enforced shame, we should show tolerance and empathy for a difficult situation. Providing support and unbiased information to aid women in their decision-making process would obtain better results than shaming them.
Each year 70,000 women die because of illegal abortions and slightly fewer suffer serious injuries. A grown woman should not have to risk her life to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.
Of course, there are also teenage pregnancies. Every year approximately 15 million girls under the age of 18 give birth. These girls are five times more likely to die in childbirth than a woman between the ages of 18 and 25. Not only is a pregnant teen’s life at risk, but also her future. Many schools with pregnant students offer them little choice. Without an abortion, they will be forced to drop out of school.
And what about women who have become pregnant after being raped? Can they be expected to carry a child for nine months, a reminder of the sexual assault they were forced to endure? According to Status of Women Canada, over half of Canadian women have been the victims of at least one act of physical or sexual violence since the age of 16. With such a high degree of sexual assault in our own society, can we realistically expect rape victims to deal with the results of an attack for the rest of their lives?
Women carrying a disabled child should also be considered. Children born with a mental or physical disability require a significantly greater amount of care and place financial strain on their parents. An illequipped mother giving birth to a child with special needs can only choose adoption or abortion. This child is much more likely, if adopted, to receive inferior care. Therefore, her choice is likely to be an abortion.
Why do many women choose abortion over adoption? One-third of all abortions are performed on unmarried women who not only wish to avoid becoming attached to a child, but also to escape judgment as they carry the child they will be giving up. Most of all, many women do not choose adoption because of the uncertainty of their child’s future. How will they know their child is being cared for?
Then there is the issue of contraception. In some places, contraception is not available to the majority of the population, or is too expensive for most to afford. In Canada, youth in rural areas cannot acquire contraceptives or information due to a shortage of sexual health centres. Sexual education in the school curriculum has become a joke, as many teachers are not qualified while some schools lack sex-ed programs entirely.
Rather than opposing abortion, we should be supporting contraception and sexual education. We should improve the lives of the children who are brought into the world, often abandoned or abused.
Put simply by Michael Jay Tucker, editorial advisor for OBGYN.net, “If the anti-abortion movement took a tenth of the energy they put into noisy theatrics and devoted it to improving the lives of children who have been born into lives of poverty, violence, and neglect, they could make a world shine.”
