Emma Berry

Archive for the ‘Abortion’ Category

Our nation needs more governors with the courage and decency of Governor Brad Henry of Oklahoma.

Gov. Brad Henry vetoed two abortion bills Friday that he said are an unconstitutional attempt by the Legislature to insert government into the private lives and decisions of citizens.

One measure would have required women to undergo an intrusive ultrasound and listen to a detailed description of the fetus before getting abortions. Henry said that legislation is flawed because it does not allow rape and incest victims to be exempted.

Lawmakers who supported the vetoed measures promised an override vote in the House and Senate as early as next week. A national abortion rights group has said the ultrasound bill would have been among the strictest anti-abortion measures in the country if it had been signed into law.

Henry said “it would be unconscionable to subject rape and incest victims to such treatment” because it would victimize a victim a second time.

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Anti-abortionists who want laws that would require victims of rape and incest and/or whose lives are threatened by a pregnancy to have their babies should move to Chile.

That would be the perfect place for them.  Chile has the most restrictive abortion laws on the planet, but surprise, they do not correspondingly have the lowest abortion rate.  Many nations, including the USA, who do not have such a restrictive anti-abortion law as Chile, have lower abortion rates.

Chile does not allow abortions, even in the case of tubular pregnancies–a pregnancy in which the child never survives and the mother rarely. Also in Chile they would be free to walk into churches and shoot people who disagree with them.

SO THAT  YOU CAN BE CLEAR ON WHERE I STAND ON ABORTION:  I support the Hyde Amendment which states that no federal money can be used for abortion except in three cases:  1) to save the mother’s life  2) rape   3) incest

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Abortion is indeed a huge wedge issue in politics–often a deciding factor as to how some people select their candidates.  And like all problems that we face as a society, many of our politicians and mainstream pundits treat the symptom and not the root cause and, as a consequence,  little or no progress is made.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, abortion is one of the most divisive and emotional issues facing U.S. policymakers today. We should not be surprised since individuals’ attitudes about abortion are shaped by their convictions regarding religion, morality, human rights, public health and the status of women in society. Moreover, lawmakers in the United States are not alone in their struggle over abortion policy. Abortion is controversial in many countries, and nations from every region of the globe are wrestling with questions about abortion, unintended pregnancy and the appropriate role of government in these matters.

Many of these policy debates are driven by the motivation to reduce abortion rates, and among some policymakers, the answer is to make abortion difficult to obtain or even illegal. Yet an examination of statistical trends reveals that the legal status of abortion in a country is not strongly correlated with the rate at which it occurs. Indeed, in many countries where the procedure is illegal, women obtain abortions at very high rates. Similarly, in some countries where abortion is legal and very widely accessible, abortion rates are low.

Thus making abortion illegal does not necessarily reduce the number of abortions. In fact there is strong evidence to the contrary.  These are just the facts, please don’t shoot the messenger.  I believe that we need to approach this highly emotional topic with a little more sensibility–if indeed our true goal is to eliminate abortions and not demonize other human beings who may be in situations that are more desperate than we, as outsiders, are capable of fully understanding.

A country’s abortion rate is not closely correlated with whether abortion is legal there. For example, abortion levels are quite high in Latin American countries, where abortion is highly restricted. (In fact, as you can see from the chart above, most abortions occur in countries with restrictive abortion laws.  You might also notice while you are looking at the chart that there seems to be a positive correlation between the poverty in a country and its abortion rate. ) At the same time, abortion rates are quite low throughout Western Europe, where the procedure is legal and widely available.  For example, in the Netherlands, which has the lowest abortion rate of all the countries, abortion is allowed to be done on demand until the 21st week–yet they have the lowest rate of all the countries.  Then again Vietnam which has a high rate of abortions has a very liberal legal policy toward abortion and they have the highest rate.  The point is that there is no correlation between legality and abortion rate for a country.

Chile, the Country with the Most Restrictive Abortion Law is also a country whose leadership has a history of violence against all its people. Chile was ruled by the illegal military and criminal dictator ship of Pinochet–a despot who was put into office by Richard Nixon and the CIA and ruled from 1974 until 1990.  At the time of Pinochet’s death in December of 2006, he had around 300 criminal charges pending against him for various human rights violations

In Chile, in the period 2000-2004 abortion was the third cause of maternal mortality in the country at 12%.  Thirty-five percent of all pregnancies end in abortion; this is 4.5 abortions for every 100 women aged 15 to 49. While there are no accurate statistics, it is believed that between 2000 and 2002 there were between 132,000 and 160,000 abortions in the country.  To circumvent legal problems, some women seek an unsafe abortion and many end up injured from it, afterward necessitating hospitalization. Once hospitalized, a woman may be reported to the police and imprisoned.

The illegality of therapeutic abortion extends to cases of tubal or ectopic pregnancy. Although embryos implanted in the fallopian tube cannot survive, the law requires waiting until the final stage of pregnancy before termination, risking the woman’s health and raising the probability of the loss of a fallopian tube.
Source:  WIKI

If legality is not the determining factor, what drives the rates at which abortions occur in a given country?

Is your goal honestly to reduce or eliminate abortions? If it is, then there are some steps that you can take that will make a difference because even if you are someday victorious in making abortion illegal in the USA, you still will not have made any  appreciable difference in the rate of abortions that are performed in this nation.

This is the first step to reducing abortions:  Find the answer to what factors drive the rates at which abortions occur in a given country.  Then work to reduce and perhaps even eliminate those factors.