Serious health risks of abortion

THE EDITOR: “We are a society wounded psychologically by the culture of death. Our women, in particular, reap disproportionate psychological injury and suffering as a result of health-related practices which are opposed to the culture of life.” Thus said Dr  Gladys A  Sweeney, Dean of the Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Arlington, Virginia in a speech at the Library of Congress in Washington on April 17, 2002. After 30 years of legalised abortion in the United States, each day thousands of poor women allow themselves to undergo the violence and violation of abortion because they feel there is no other way. All over the world, women are ill-informed about abortion’s effect on their health and fertility — and their “poor” situation has hardly ever been helped by the killing of their babies. Many women have an abortion without discussing the medical procedure or the health considerations with anyone. Perhaps no other procedure is performed with this degree of patient ignorance.

There is no reason why a woman should go through surgery of any kind, especially induced abortion, or take powerful drugs that induce abortion, and not be informed about potentially serious side effects. Few women who have had a sonogram and heard a fetal heartbeat can pretend that abortion is not a more profound life-and-death decision that the gang at ASPIRE would like us to believe. Women are seduced into believing their baby is just a blob of tissue, when in fact by the time an abortion takes place — usually between the seventh and tenth week — her baby’s heart is beating (31 days), baby has identifiable arms and legs and displays measurable brain waves (40-45 days), fingers and genitals are present and the child’s face is recognizably human.  (Robert Rugh, PhD, and Landrum Shettles, MD, PhD, From Conception to Birth)

Despite use of local anesthesia, 97 percent of women having abortions reported experiencing pain during the procedure, which more than a third described as “intense,”  “severe” or “very severe.” Compared to other pains, researchers rated the pain from abortion as more painful than a bone fracture, about the same as cancer pain, though not as painful as an amputation. (Phillip G Stubblefield, MD, et al, “Pain of first-trimester abortion” American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology) Studies reveal that younger women find abortion even more painful than older adults, and patients found abortion more painful than their doctors or counsellors expected. The use of more powerful general anasthetics reduces the pain, but significantly increases risk of cervical injury or uterine perforation. Complications such as these are common, as are bleeding, haemorrhage, laceration of the cervix, menstrual disturbance, inflammation of the reproductive organs, bladder or bowel perforation and serious infection.

More harmful long-term physical complications from abortion may surface later —- overzealous currettage can damage the lining of the uterus and lead to permanent infertility.  Women who have had abortions face an increased risk of ectopic (tubal) pregnancy and a more than doubled risk of future sterility. Is this what our women need or want? Is abortion the answer to Trinidad’s problems? Or will it not bring with it deeper psychological problems for our nation? Government is again being bombarded by the propaganda of the “reproductive health” drive, falsely promoted as the only way to help our nation’s “poor” women — through the murder of our children. Once more I thank God for our government — for it is God who chooses leaders — and He has given us one that has shown itself thus far, unwilling to legalise abortion, thereby restricting the tide of the Culture of Death in our land.

While we lament the deaths of the hundreds who were murdered over the past year, the kidnappings, the rape, death on our highways, and the violence, could we not spare a thought for the thousands of our nation’s children who have been killed — never to see their mother’s face, to be caressed and to experience life — over the past year also? Mother Teresa of Calcutta said: “I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child — a direct killing of the innocent child — murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?” Could we not work for another way, a more humane way to educate and help our women?

MARIA ANNETTE
DOPWELL
Port-of-Spain