I often lie awake in the wee hours of the night, desperately wishing for sleep but maddeningly full of thoughts. Last night, while my own due-any-day daughter thumped with a strange regularity in my belly ("She has hiccups!" I realized), those thoughts centered on the Reproductive Health Act that New York passed this week. I was a long time falling back to sleep.
It seems that the awful implications of this law for babies are obvious, so who is it meant to benefit? Women, right?
We all know that life begins at conception. We may not like it, we may deny it, but we can't actually refute it. For almost every woman, there are signs to indicate the life growing inside before her belly begins to look baby-full, and long before baby's own movements are felt. It is hard to deny that something substantial is changing inside, but easier to convince ourselves that our decisions affect our own bodies, our own futures, and no one else's. But by about half-way, not only are we aware of a distinct person inside ourselves, separate, but we become more and more aware of the actual personality growing inside.
At that point, to choose to end the life is obvious not just to ourselves, but to others. "She was pregnant; now she is not."
For almost every woman considering abortion, the decision is not easy, peaceful, or considered good. It is a lesser of evils, perhaps the only perceived option, arrived at out of desperation. It is a haunting decision. We may not like that idea, we may deny that idea, but I have never heard of a woman who was not haunted by the consequences of that decision.
From this perspective, how does legalizing late-term abortion benefit women?
This new law authorizes non-doctors to perform abortions. According to the CIA World Factbook of 2015 information, there are FORTY-FOUR NATIONS with lower maternal mortality rates than the United States.
The maternal mortality rate (MMR) is the annual number of female deaths per 100,000 live births from any cause related to or aggravated by pregnancy or its management (excluding accidental or incidental causes). The MMR includes deaths during pregnancy, childbirth, or within 42 days of termination of pregnancy, irrespective of the duration and site of the pregnancy, for a specified year.
How does the removal of medical safeguards and standards from an already against-nature procedure benefit women?
This new law removes substantial layers of criminal prosecution from anyone who would act violently against a woman with the intent of causing her to miscarry her baby. This means that the choice was made BY SOMEONE ELSE, not the woman, to attempt to terminate her pregnancy by actually violent means, no medical safeguards considered.
How does this change in legislation benefit women?
These are only three thoughts to think on. They seem to me to be sufficient evidence that this law is not meant, in fact, to benefit women.
Separate, but closely related, are pro-life and pro-family issues, such as:
- Why are adoption options being actively made less available?
- Why are maternity and paternity leaves painfully short, often unpaid, sometimes non-existent?
- Why are pregnancy prevention or termination medications, devices, and procedures so much more widely covered by insurances than medications, devices, and procedures to enhance the chances of conception for couples facing infertility?
I could go on. But these seem like sufficient food for thought. My state is in the news this week, but our culture at large is less and less pro-choice, more and more pro-death. My heart is so sad.
For those of us who are pro-life, AND for those of us who are actually pro-choice--as in, make all the viable options really, really obvious and available--let's work together. Let's actually work to make abortion rare, even unnecessary. Let's love babies AND their mothers.
