Making abortion less necessary is by far the better approach. The first way to do so is to reduce the incidence of unintended pregnancy. Half of all pregnancies in this country are unintended, and, of those, half end in abortion.
Unintended pregnancy could be reduced significantly if we showed true commitment to: 1 comprehensive sexuality education that includes medically accurate information about abstinence and contraception; 2 insurance coverage of and public funding for family planning services; 3 greater access to emergency contraception which prevents pregnancy and does not cause abortion ; and 4 programs that curb domestic violence and sexual abuse.
Clearly, women who are able to avoid unintended pregnancy do not have to make the difficult decision of whether to have an abortion. Unfortunately, even with the supports listed above, there will always be some unintended pregnancies; birth control methods are fallible, as are human beings. Therefore, once a woman finds herself with an unexpected pregnancy, a second positive way to reduce abortion is to ensure that she has the means to have and raise a child in health and safety should she wish to do so.
According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute , one of the two most common reasons women choose abortion is because they cannot afford a nother child. By providing low-income and young women with genuine education and career opportunities, health care, child care, housing, services for disabled children, and other basic supports, many would have the resources they need to fulfill the serious obligations that parenting brings.
Instead, the formula that many moderate politicians have adopted is to look at the list of restrictions promoted by anti-abortion activists — e. Even the initiative promoted by Democrats for Life, an ostensibly middle-of-the-road group that claims to have an agenda that would reduce abortions by 95 percent in 10 years, contains meager supports for pregnant women funding for domestic violence programs and university day care , no provision for birth control, and only vague allusions to pregnancy prevention education.
An autopsy revealed massive necrosis of her kidneys and liver. The second woman was 28 years old and bleeding profusely from her vagina. She was given a blood transfusion and antibiotics. Doctors performed a dilation and curettage, removing necrotic tissue that had a strong smell of phenol, then a main ingredient in Lysol. She survived.
The third woman was 35 and had been bleeding abnormally for two weeks. She was given a blood transfusion and antibiotics, but did not improve. Her pelvic discharge smelled strongly of phenol. She was given a D and C, and a placenta was removed.
She recovered. Shortly after being admitted, she spontaneously aborted a four-and-a-half month fetus. Phenol was found in both the fetal and placental tissue.
The girl recovered. I have read many accounts of complications and deaths from the years when abortion was illegal in this country.
The subject has always compelled me, because my mother told me many times that when she was a young nurse at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, she had twice sat beside girls as they died from botched abortions. This was a fact that millions of women knew via the oldest whisper network in the country, but that physicians—almost all of them male—would discover slowly, leaving behind a bread-crumb trail of reports like this one: based on recent admissions, and available only to other doctors who happened to pick up a particular issue of a particular journal.
In addition to medical reports, we find evidence of Lysol abortions in personal accounts—the actor Margot Kidder, for example, spoke powerfully about hers—and in testimony from criminal proceedings. Court records from , for instance, tell the story of a year-old California girl named Rebecca, who moved in with her sister-in-law to hide her pregnancy and to get an abortion.
A local woman named Sophie agreed to perform it. The girl was in distress but was given only aspirin. By that night, her symptoms had become intolerable, and Rayette brought her to the hospital. From May Caitlin Flanagan on abortion and the bloodiness of being female. Check out the full table of contents and find your next story to read. By the s, doctors seemed to have realized that Lysol was in fact a commonly used abortifacient, one with particular dangers.
In , Dr. One of the women died; the other survived. In , two physicians, Robert H. The doctors estimated that , to 1 million criminal abortions took place each year in America, and that in many parts of the country abortion was a leading cause of maternal death.
Overall mortality for patients who had become septic from botched abortions and were admitted to a hospital was 11 to 22 percent, but for those whose abortions had been induced with soap or Lysol, the mortality rate was reportedly an astounding 50 to 66 percent. We will never know how many women had abortions via this method, or how many died because of it. Why was Lysol, with its strong, unpleasant smell and its corrosive effect on skin, so often used?
Because its early formulation contained cresol, a phenol compound that induced abortion; because it was easily available, a household product that aroused no suspicion when women bought it; and because for more than three decades, Lysol advertised the product as an effective form of birth control, advising women to douche with it in diluted form after sex, thus powerfully linking the product to the notion of family planning.
The implication was that sex made them stink, which revolted their husbands. Read with this in mind, the ads appear rife with coded references to the idea of contraception.
There are dozens of these ads on the internet, where they forever shock young feminists. The problems can be restated in terms of the sort of decisions that pregnant women and their doctors have to face:. If we follow this argument and accept that a foetus has a right to live, then we face part two of the problem:. Search term:. Read more. This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets CSS enabled. While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience.
Please consider upgrading your browser software or enabling style sheets CSS if you are able to do so. This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Find out more about page archiving. Ethics guide. Introduction to the abortion debate. On this page Introduction The issues Page options Print this page.
0コメント