Though Amy was the first woman identified as an abortion victim in 1971, she wasn't the last. The National Center for Health Statistics noted 90 induced abortion deaths for 1971 -- 15 legal, 75 illegal. Though the total of abortion deaths had been falling since the introduction of antibiotics (except for a brief reversal in the mid-1950s), with massive decriminalization of abortion in 1970 we would see a quick rise in the legal abortion deaths like Amy's as they came to replace deaths from illegal abortions.
For more abortion deaths, visit the Cemetery of Choice:
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2 comments:
As tragic as her story is, I don't think Amy can be properly classified as a "victim". I don't mean to be unkind, but parents who freely choose to kill their unborn children (assuming they do it freely) are actually responsible for the crimes which they are committing.
Such people are in reality guilty perpetrators of a crime and they hire the criminal abortionist as a "co-conspirator", if you will. It was a mistake in the past not to hold mothers (and fathers) responsible for the deaths of their children through abortion. It is a mistake that the unborn human rights movement is still making. It cost lives through lack of deterrence and will cost lives in the future.
The reality is that the unborn child alone is a helpless and innocent victim, a victim of the crime of both mother and criminal abortionist, as well as the father if he is involved.
You need to take into account phsycology and the woman's background.
The normal psychology of pregnancy goes through predictable stages. The first is acceptance of the pregnant state -- which means not accepting the idea that she wants the baby, but accepting that she is indeed pregnant. A lot of abortion facilities I've researched are good at capitalizing on this early denial and treating abortion as if it just restores her missing periods. Abortion is presented not as killing an existing embryo, but restoring the normal state of menstruating every month. And if the woman is in the normal denial stage of early pregnancy, she's going to be very vulnerable to having an "expert" reassure her that an abortion is effectively hitting a "reset" button and restoring her to her former state.
The second psychological task is bonding with the unborn child. Until that point, ambivalence and rejection are very common. But with bonding, they tend to resolve. Bonding used to take place at about 16 weeks when she first felt the baby move and he became real to the mother. Now, with ultrasounds and the ability to hear the baby's heartbeat with doppler, this can happen much earlier. But abortion clinics are not in the business of helping women resolve the normal ambivalenc of early pregnancy. If they were, they'd have the same 80% turnaround rate that CPCs have when they set up ultrasounds. Instead, the clinic magnifies the ambivalence and rejection, reinforcing the woman's fears and treating them as abnormal and some sort of proof that she'd be a terrible mother and never accept the baby.
Add to this the stress factor. If a woman is so stressed that she's seeking abortion, she's in full "fight or flight" mode, looking for the quickest way out of the situation. Decades of research demonstrate the stressed-out, frightened people make terrible decisions, based on doing something, anything, to relieve the stress.
If you add to the mix a society that tells the woman that her abivalence is indeed proof that she'd be an unfit mother, that abortion doesn't kill babies, that it's just making her un-pregnant, that it's a responsible thing to do, you have a recipe for abortion. How responsible is the woman?
Well, imagine if in the wake of, say, the Andrea Yates case, all the Talking Heads and Experts were telling the public that what Andrea did was very normal and understandable, a rational and responsible way to cope with the normal stressors of motherhood. Imagine if instead of discussing her faulty thought processes, the way people around her failed her, etc., we had experts saying that the way to have alliviated her stress and her children's terror would be to set up Heaven Centers, where stressed mothers could bring their children to be mercifully and quietly "put to sleep". Imagine decades of hearing that. What would we be seeing?
Society takes some of the blame for sitting back and allowing the abortion lobby to teach lies and to sell women their dubious "services" under false pretenses. How many abortion clinics do you think tell women about the studies showing how normal ambivalence is? How many talk about studies of women who elect to continue the pregnancy after a failed abortion because their ambivalance resolved between the abortion and learning that the baby had survived?
I'd say ZERO.
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