World News Korner

The pro-life movement around the world thinks it is saving lives. But in fact it is helping to end them.

Courtesy of the Thomas Reuters Foundation:

Unsafe abortion kills nearly 50,000 women a year, making it one of the major preventable causes of maternal mortality, yet many countries, including the United States and Spain, are trying to impose tighter legal restrictions on abortion, according to Ipas, a global NGO that works to advance women’s sexual and reproductive rights.

There are an estimated 22 million unsafe abortions around the world every year, mainly in developing countries, and over the past 20 years unsafe abortions have killed more than 1 million women and girls globally and injured 100 million, Ipas president and CEO Elizabeth Maguire said.

At present, “47,000 women die every year from unsafe abortions - the equivalent of 200 jumbo jet planes crashing with no survivors every year,” Maguire said. “It’s intolerable that these deaths and injuries continue to occur in the 21st century.”

In many of these countries religious groups actively discourage, and even outlaw abortion, forcing desperate women to seek a solution to their "problem" elsewhere.

Without access to regulated medical facilities many of these women wind up mutilated, rendered sterile, or dead.

And where abortions are legally permitted, the number of procedures do not go up, they go down.

“Where abortion laws are liberalised, the number of people having abortions is lower,” said Zane Dangor, special adviser to South Africa’s social development minister and a member of that country’s delegation to the ICPD.

The frightening thing is that, especially in America, the very organizations which work to reduce unwanted pregnancies, like Planned Parenthood, are vilified and driven out of business all in the name of preserving a potential life, while often jeopardizing an already viable, and productive life instead.

Not only that but many of the women seeking an abortion are already mothers, who are unable, or unwilling, to care for another child.

Their death not only affect them, it affects the children left behind.

Outlawing abortion, or making it more difficult to attain, does NOT end abortion. It only increases the chances that when an abortion is performed it will end not one life, but two.

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