A right to choose

A lot of people want to argue that being Pro-life will save lives.

They want to argue that teens can be told to “just say no” and keep their legs closed.

And they want to believe it.

Yet even Bristol Palin admits: “Everyone should be abstinent or whatever, but it’s not realistic at all.”

And then there’s the slippery slope of what about when it’s not two teens getting carried away, it’s rape.

And it’s not a young woman that might have wanted to do something else and ended up a young mother, it’s a child.

Say a nine year old child

pregnant with twins

raped by her step-father

Where then do you draw a line?

But if the story isn’t heart-renching enough,  the details at the end are all about the price women pay when they do not have the right to choose.

“Although abortion is illegal, an estimated 1 million women each year have one. The poor are forced into clandestine clinics or take medication, while the better-off are treated by qualified physicians at well-appointed surgeries known to anyone with money and overlooked by colluding authorities. That secrecy has a price. More than 200,000 women each year are treated in public hospitals for complications arising from illegal abortions, according to Health Ministry figures.”

More than 20% of the women have complications and need to be in a hospital. It doesn’t touch on how many might (or have) died without the hospital treatment for their complications, but does that really matter?  *

And this is in a predominately Catholic country where they know they will be excommunicated for choosing to have an abortion.

Protecting our right to choose isn’t saying that anyone HAS to have an abortion, it’s making sure that if a woman feels that they need to (enough to pay this high a price for it) that they will have access to quality medical care that won’t put their own life in danger.

Why is this so hard to understand?

*Ah, Romanian gives us some idea of that figure: “Abortion was made illegal in Romania in 1966; by the time Ceausescu was overthrown 23 years later, an estimated half-million women had died as a result of botched illegal abortions.” – that’s more than 20,000 deaths per year.

okay, this is apples and oranges to a degree, but Romania currently has a population of 22 million to Brazil’s  196 million.