Comments on Friend’s Earthcare Witness article:
Friends Seeking Clearness on Abortion – QEW (quakerearthcare.org)
by Rachel MacNair
There is much in the QEW that is well thought out and excellent reflections. There’s also much I would take issue with. Adding to the discussion is always a good thing, so I’m glad to see these reflections. I comment on a couple of points.
Population Control
The article suggests around 44 million annual abortions have an impact on the population growth rate. But if it’s acceptable to have killing millions of people as a method of cutting population for ecological reasons, wouldn’t it make more sense to kill oil company executives, or nuclear weapons producers? We could be much more efficient, killing a fewer number of high-impact people rather than a bunch of low-impact babies.
Only if abortion had nothing to do with killing or violence would it make sense to even bring it up as having an impact on population numbers. It would be as vile as pointing out that the 2005 tsunami that killed millions at least had some population control as a silver lining.
The Back Alley and the Front Alley
When Roe v. Wade first passed, I was actually pleased, because I thought it would put the back-alley butchers out of business. But here in Kansas City, there was an abortion doctor named Richard Mucie who was in fact put out of business pre-Roe because a woman had died a horrific death from an abortion he did on her. I will spare you the details. After Roe, he successfully sued to get his medical license back. And literally opened up a clinic on Main Street in Kansas City. In this case, Roe put a back-alley butcher back into business.
When Poland and Nicaragua banned abortion after several decades of legal availability, the overall pregnancy-related death numbers went down. In Mexico, states that left bans on abortion had lower maternal mortality than states that legalized them. There were other things going on besides the legal status of abortion in all cases – most particularly, policies giving attention to maternal health – but I would argue that taking women’s pregnancies seriously rather than dismissing them as something that could have been thrown away goes along with policies to help maternal health.
Meanwhile, the image of “safe” abortion clinics is, to my understanding, about as realistic as a Hollywood depiction of war as a drama in which the “good guys” win and the clear-cut villains lose. The human mind is commonly sickened by committing killing in all kinds of contexts – combat, executions, etc. – and such trauma symptoms can show up in terrible care for patients.
For documentation on the abortion providers with the best reputation, see Problems at Planned Parenthood – and the list of problems that include some horrific health violations found by authorities at some centers, many ambulance calls and malpractice suits, and most horrifying, some cases in which sexual abuse of minors continued because Planned Parenthood gave an abortion without reporting the crime. When sexual predators are aware that abortion is handy to cover up, then the abortion facility amounts to an accomplice to the crime.