Posted on 12/14/2009 9:30:35 PM PST by bdeaner
A new report from the World Economic Forum (WEF) shows that countries with restrictive abortion laws are often the leaders in reducing maternal mortality, and those with permissive laws often lag. According to the report, the pro-life nation of Ireland has topped the global rankings once again with the best maternal health performance.
Abortion advocates have attempted to push an international "right to abortion," claiming that restrictive laws force women to seek unsafe abortion, which in turn leads to high maternal mortality. In October, the Guttmacher Institute released a report on global abortion calling on states to "expand access to legal abortion and ensure that safe, legal abortion services are available to women in need." Sharon Camp, president of the Guttmacher Institute, asserted that "in much of the developing world, abortion remains highly restricted, and unsafe abortion is common and continues to damage women's health and threaten their survival."
An examination and comparison of several countries included in the WEF survey show that legal abortion does not mean lower maternal mortality rates.
Both Ireland and Poland, favorite targets of the abortion lobby for their strong restrictions on abortion, have better maternal mortality ratios than the United States. Ireland ranks first in the survey with 1 death for every 100,000 live births.
In recent years Poland has tightened its abortion law and ranks number 27 on the list with 8 deaths per 100,000. In the United States where there are virtually no restrictions on abortion, the maternal mortality ratio is 17 out of 100,000 live births.
Other regions of the world show similar trends. The African nation with the lowest maternal mortality rate is Mauritius, a country with some of the continent's most protective laws for the unborn.
On the other end of the spectrum is Ethiopia, which has decriminalized abortion in recent years in response to global abortion lobby pressure. Ethiopia's maternal death rate is 48 times higher than in Mauritius. South Africa has the continent's most liberal abortion laws and also a high maternal mortality ratio of 400 deaths per 100,000.
Chile, with constitutional protection for the unborn, outranks all other South American countries as the safest place for women to bear children. The country with the highest maternal mortality is Guyana, with a rate 30 times higher than in Chile. Guyana has allowed abortion without almost any restriction since in 1995. Ironically, one of two main justifications used for liberalizing Guyana's law was to enhance the "attainment of safe motherhood" by eliminating deaths and complications associated with unsafe abortion.
Similarly in Asia, Nepal, where there is no restriction on the procedure, has one of the world's highest maternal mortality rates. The lowest in the region is Sri Lanka, with a rate fourteen times lower than that of Nepal. According to the pro-abortion public interest law firm Center for Reproductive Rights, Sri Lanka has among the most restrictive abortion laws in the world.
Pro-lifers emphasize that the WEF report reinforces their contention that skilled birth attendants and access to emergency obstetric care should be the focus of maternal mortality reduction efforts, rather than increasing access to legal abortion.
Weird that a true scientific study has proven the an age-old progressive-liberal lie to be just that, a lie based on nothing but racist and marxist feelings.
Unfortunately for the 17 mothers out of 100,000 who will die, their deaths don’t matter to the pro-abort lobby who value abortion ove life—whether the life is the unborn or the mother.
...or the 400 deaths per 100,000 in South Africa.
They’ll say that they are just abnormalities in the numbers....i.e. “the ends justify the means”.
Of course, abortion is 100 percent mortality for the baby.
Not sure if that’s a solid argument or linkage. That would be like the health care takeover debate, saying that we want to control our own bodies (which we do) is not akin to saying we must forgo anesthesia and not be in the care of a doctor.
In neither case do we in fact have full control of our bodies anyway. For example, we would die without symbiosis with billions of bacteria over which we can exercise little control at all. We exercise little control over the flora we encounter as well. We hurtle through space on a rock taking us goodness knows where. So, the pro-baby-killers want is not control of their bodies; but control of the choices about what is to be physically done to them by other people. The problem is that it doesn't make a catchy slogan.
Even then, we are still not in charge. Oh yes, you did tell that doc to work on the left knee, but once you're under, you will have to deal with whatever he does. What you want from government is the power to help enforce control over the doctor's choices within his capabilities. Outside that limit, you have no control. Yes, you want to go to Poughkeepsie after the operation, but that meteorite that blew out the hospital had other plans...
Life is full of uncertainties over which we have no control. We may want it, we may want help in asserting it, but to demand it is as silly as to say that the government can physically protect the unborn from a mother that wants to kill her baby without becoming ridiculously intrusive (if we can't stop illegal drugs or guns from distribution on an island, that desire is simply whimsical as you will not stop illegal trade in drugs to kill a fetus). What the anti-abortionists really want is the power to exact punishment for a demonstrably willful act of killing a baby, that is, if they can even detect the attempt. The goal is to make the prospect of that punishment sufficiently likely as to modify HER choices, but that doesn't make an attractive slogan or preclude babies from being killed, influential but not determinative.
Most of the contentions we face in politics are because people are asking the wrong questions over the wrong determinants, usually due to the existence of an attractive whim, but without consideration of (or accountability for) what performing or enforcing it would entail. My post was merely to point out that typical paradox in this instance.
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