A Reality Check On Abortion


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Protesters in support of Planned Parenthood (Photo credit: S. MiRK/Flickr, via Wikimedia Commons).


With Ted Cruz leading an assault on Planned Parenthood after hack-job videos were released by a group of radical Conservatives, the abortion debate has been resurrected. Many people don’t understand the implications of making such a necessary service illegal.

Abortion has been highly controversial since the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe V. Wade made it legal in 1973. Women all over the world deserve and are fighting for access to the service for a variety of reasons. Without abortion many women will be forced to have a child they did not want. This could force them into a life of poverty with their child because they may have to drop out of school or lose their job. In some cases they may lose their life over being pregnant out of marriage. Many women left without a choice will often find unsafe ways to terminate the pregnancy.

Conservatives don’t want their followers to know that when you make abortion illegal it doesn’t just magically disappear. In fact, in countries where abortion laws are stricter the abortion rates are higher. This reality is alarming, because inherent to abortion being illegal is the problem of no regulation. When there is no regulation safety becomes a major issue. Of the about 43.8 million abortions done each year in the world about forty-nine percent of them are unsafe. This means that about 21 million women perform unsafe and potentially lethal abortions. In fact about 47,000 of those women die, and between two and seven million of the women who survive suffer from complications like bowel and bladder injury or uterine perforation caused by the unsafe abortion.

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Infographic courtesy of the Guttmacher Institute

Unsafe abortion can and will be combated by ensuring that women have the right to choose. But the biggest problem faced by the Pro-Choice movement is the lack of reliable information readily available to common people. With many people not knowing that you can’t get an abortion once the fetus is considered viable, they are left to believe that you can abort what would be a perfectly living baby without the abortion. But this could not be further from the truth. When the fetus is not viable it is NOT A BABY. Though the fetus may have produced several organs that are viable, the fetus itself is not viable. The few viable organs can be donated by the woman choosing to terminate the pregnancy, but it IS NOT a requirement. All sale of these organs is legal and is NOT for a profit. The organization doing the sale is simply reimbursed for the organs.

When the government gets in the business of controlling people’s bodies we have a problem. As you may know the loudest proponents of civil liberty are the Conservative, but when it comes to abortion they tend to want government intervention. Their wanting of government intervention is totally against their core beliefs, but this comes from the fact that they want complete control of women.


The abortion debate may have been resurrected, but the people who accept reality will win against all attacks on women’s rights

Featured Image via Aeura

Brett Banks is a native Texan majoring in Political Science. His interest in politics started when he was very young and has no end in sight. Brett is a fire breathing Progressive. As an advocate and member of the LGBTQ+ community he has aspirations to one day see equality for all. Follow him @brettbanks81 on twitter or find him on other social media.