The last time a pro-life group came to the campus of the university I attend, they had those huge signs. The only thing that made me question them though was this: They were telling people that ectopic pregnancies pose NO THREAT whatsoever to a woman, and even if they do, the life of the unborn must be respected over the life of the mother. Sorry, mom's life is in danger, that's where I draw the line.
We are talking here about 97% or more of all abortions that are not due to any health or life risk to the mother A woman's LIFE is rarely at risk due pregnancy. If someone said NEVER, then shame on them. They should have said "ALMOST NEVER". Please do not red herring this.
Why Women Have Abortions
In 1988, the Alan Guttmacher Institute conducted a survey of women who were getting abortions, asking why they had made this decision. They received responses from 1900 women at 27 abortion "clinics" and 3 hospitals. The results were printed in
Family Planning Perspectives, Planned Parenthood's magazine.
Both the Guttmacher Institute and Planned Parenthood are pro-abortion, so it is fair to suspect that there may be a "pro-choice" bias to the study. Additional bias may be suspected from the nature of the survey: It is fair to ask if a woman who is getting an abortion for less-than-earthshaking reasons might not exagerrate or even invent justifications in order to make her decision sound more justified. Nevertheless, the results of their study are interesting. The following text and numbers are taken from the chart in Family Planning Perspectives, July/August 1988 issue, page 170:
| Woman is concerned about how having a baby could change her life |
16% |
| Woman can't afford baby now |
21% |
| Woman has problems with relationship or wants to avoid single parenthood |
12% |
| Woman is unready for responsibility |
21% |
| Woman doesn't want others to know she has had sex or is pregnant |
1% |
| Woman is not mature enough, or is too young to have a child |
11% |
| Woman has all the children she wanted, or has all grown-up children |
8% |
| Husband or partner wants woman to have an abortion |
1% |
| Fetus has possible health problem |
3% |
| Woman has health problem |
3% |
| Woman's parents want her to have abortion |
<1% |
| Woman was victim of rape or incest |
1% |
| Other |
3% |
(Totals do not add to 100% because of rounding.)
Comment
Pro-abortionists routinely use hard cases like rape and deformed children to justify abortion-on-demand. Even if we accepted abortion in such difficult cases, and even if we accepted the numbers from this study as authoritative (and other studies by pro-lifers find much lower incidence of these hard cases), we could still summarize the above as:
| Deformed baby |
less than 3% |
| Threat to life or health of mother |
maybe 3% |
| Rape and incest |
1% |
| Mother has social problems |
93% |
Now don't misunderstand me, I am not saying that these social-problem reasons are all frivolous. Sometimes they are legitimate, serious problems. But ... under what other circumstances would we accept the idea that one person has the right to kill another person to solve his or her social problems?
Copyright ©1995, 2000 by Ohio Right to Life and Pregnant Pause
Contact Pregnant Pause
Sadly, they were misinformed. An ectopic pregnancy cannot develop normally and puts the mother's life at risk.
Did you know that a prior abortion puts a woman at a higher risk of ectopic pregnancy?
New Study Finds Abortion Increases Risk of Ectopic Pregnancy by 50%
by Randall K. O'Bannon
National Right to Life Director of Research
http://www.prolifeinfo.org/risk004.html
An article published in the March issue of a leading American medical journal reports that a large study has found a 50% increased risk of ectopic (or tubal) pregnancy among women who have undergone abortion, with an even greater risk among women who have had more than one previous abortion. Publishing in the American Journal of Public Health, a team of French doctors and researchers reported the results of a multicenter study involving 1,955 women conducted in two regions of France between 1988 and 1991.
An ectopic, or tubal, pregnancy results when the embryo implants in the fallopian tube or elsewhere rather than the uterine wall.1 Undetected, the tube may rupture as the child grows (the fallopian tube lacks the expandability of the mother's uterus), resulting in the child's demise and presenting a serious threat to the mother's life. Currently, approximately 1.5% of pregnancies are ectopic pregnancies. The authors indicate that despite progress in diagnosis and treatment, ectopic pregnancy is still the leading cause of maternal death during the first trimester of pregnancy.
All women younger than 45 admitted into maternity centers for ectopic pregnancy in the Paris area in 1988 and in 15 maternity centers in the Rhne-Alps area between 1989-1991 were paired with the next two patients admitted to those same centers for regular deliveries. According to the report, the authors found that among women each of whom had no previous ectopic pregnancy, women who had previously had at least one induced (surgical) abortion were 50% more likely to develop an ectopic pregnancy than women who had not had a previous induced abortion.
Among women who had had two or more previous induced abortions and no previous ectopic pregnancy, the risk was nearly twice as high (90% increased risk).
The authors of the study say there has been a three- to fourfold rise in the incidence of ectopic pregnancy in developed countries in the last 20 years. Several risk factors for ectopic pregnancy have been identified, among them smoking at the time of conception, pelvic surgery, use of an IUD, pelvic inflammatory disease, and induced ovulation.
Yet these factors, according to an earlier French study by many of the same researchers, accounted for only about 65% of all ectopic pregnancies. The present study was initiated to determine if other factors, such as previous reproductive history, might explain some of the remaining one-third of ectopic pregnancies among women without any of these known risk factors.
Even the most basic analysis offers solid grounds for making the association. Twenty-two and half percent of the case patients (those presenting to the maternity centers with an ectopic pregnancy) had had abortions, while only 16.2% of the controls (those women reporting for a delivery to those same centers immediately after a woman with an ectopic pregnancy had been admitted) reported having an abortion. Even with other risk factors and the possibility of the controversial idea of recall bias (women not wanting to admit having had an abortion) factored out, the discrepancy remained.
Women who had previously aborted had a 50% higher risk.
The authors speculate that the higher risk could be "the consequence of uterine injuries consecutive to this procedure, either inflammatory lesions or asymptomatic ascending infections," in other words, due to injuries, inflammations, and infections resulting from the scraping and suctioning of a woman's uterus in a surgical abortion. These inflammations or lesions may damage the fallopian tube, inhibiting the transport of the embryo. Instead of implanting in the uterine wall, the embryo implants in the fallopian tube.
With approximately six million pregnancies in the United States each year (6.4 million in 1992, according to the 1996 Statistical Abstract), 1.5% represents some 90,000 ectopic pregnancies, or more, per year.
If one assumes that women having abortions have the same rate of pregnancy as those who do not, and that something in the neighborhood of one-third of all women have had abortions, figures such as those generated by the French study would lead one to estimate as many as 12,000 or more ectopic pregnancies every year in America being attributable to abortion. Despite the prevalence of abortion in the United States, there have been few studies on American populations. Some have shown a similar risk, but most, the authors say, "have not revealed any significant association." The French researchers dismiss such studies, saying they "generally have not included enough subjects to allow satisfactory statistical power."
Because of the size and design of the French study, there is little doubt that an association exists between abortion and ectopic pregnancy. This leads to an important series of questions. Why have there been so few American studies? Why have scientifically and statistically weak studies been put forward as proof of abortion's safety? Why should Americans have to look to France to get a thorough and unbiased appraisal of abortion's health risks?
One cannot help but see a parallel between this case and the situation with the abortion-breast cancer link.
When a cause, like abortion, is "politically correct," much of the medical establishment often ignores or covers up research, or simply fails to conduct research, that would challenge the view of abortion's relative safety, even if, biologically, there is reason to suspect a danger. And American women, as well as their unborn children, suffer the consequences.
At a minimum, this study presents a strong case for informed consent or "women's right to know" legislation. If this latest study is correct, a woman who aborts her baby may not only lose that baby but the next one as well and maybe the next one after that. How many women are told that death, once chosen, is a companion not easily abandoned?
1. There are other forms of ectopic pregnancy, such as abdominal or cervical pregnancies, but these are much rarer (though not necessarily less dangerous).