The Deadly Dangers of Childbirth

Those are the dangers pro-abortioners like to point out. It isn’t uncommon for pro-abortion organizations to claim that abortion is many times safer (sometimes they claim up to twelve times safer) than childbirth. This has always sounded odd to me, since pregnancy and childbirth is flowing with what comes naturally to the female body, and induced abortion disrupts that flow. Unlike other surgeries, abortion gives absolutely no benefit to the body—it doesn’t improve your heart or help your knees or hips or any such thing. So the question is: what does abortion do to the body, what dangers does it pose, and is it really safer than childbirth?

The short answer is no. Common sense should tell us this. It isn’t safer than childbirth. And abortion isn’t an extraordinarily safe insignificant surgery. For one thing, it’s a blind surgery. The abortionist can’t see what he’s doing, unless he does an ultrasound-guided abortion, which doesn’t happen often because it takes five to ten minutes longer. (Longer abortions = fewer abortions = less money.)

As I said in another post, when death certificates are made out, the cause of death is rarely listed as abortion, unless the woman dies on the operating table, or perhaps in an emergency room immediately following the abortion—and not always then. Instead, the direct cause of death (infection, bleeding, etc.) is listed. Abortion is the indirect cause of death, and in most cases it is not mandatory to list abortion as an indirect cause of death (Here is an excellent article by Physicians for Life that gives more details on how abortion deaths vs. other maternal deaths statistics are warped.)

There have also been studies that research a randomly selected group of women who died within a year of their last pregnancy (whether it ended in birth, miscarriage, or induced abortion), compared to women dying with no recent pregnancy. The study I link to here includes not just physical-complication-deaths, but also suicides and motor vehicle accidents and such things, and then explains possible reasons for why (in this particular study, anyway) women who have had abortions always (except in natural death, where non-recent-pregnancy women were the highest) have the higher death rate.

It is also likely abortion causes (or helps cause) even more indirect causes of death. For example, I ran across this recent report the other day. It stated that the United States ranks 41^st in maternal deaths, with 1 death for every 4,800 births. First on the list was Ireland with 1 death for every 47,600 births. On a whim and a hunch, I looked up Ireland’s abortion laws. Turns out that abortion is illegal in Ireland, except when the life of the mother is in danger, and perhaps for severe physical complications; there is quite a bit of conflict in Ireland over its abortion laws, so I’m not positive how restrictive its laws currently are, but it is obviously more restrictive than, say…the US. I’m not saying that abortion is the sole cause of this, but the US isn’t exactly lacking in medical advances. There has to be other reasons: perhaps men and women in Ireland tend to live healthier lifestyles than we tend to live in the US. And/or perhaps abortion raises the risk of childbirth, which raises the childbirth death statistics, which in turn gives abortion advocates their “proof” that childbirth is more dangerous than abortion…even though abortion advances those risks in the first place.

In any case, abortion is more dangerous than the official statistics and abortion advocates say. How much more remains to be seen, but it can’t be ignored.