Safe, legal, and rare? Actions speak louder
One of the main arguments that abortion advocates use is that making abortion legal will make it safe. Otherwise, they say, women will just be led into home abortions, which are unsafe. But is that really what they believe? Or are they committed to abortion even when it increases danger to women?
For Australian pro-abortion zealot Adrienne Freeman, it’s the latter. She’s setting up a website which instructs mothers to self-abort at home with misoprostol, which she claims can safely terminate a pregnancy “at any gestation.”
1) What utter crap. In the United States, abortions by pill use misoprostol in combination with mifepristone (RU-486). Its effectiveness at killing the embryo dramatically declines as the embryo grows older.
The American clinical trials demonstrated that this regimen, which the FDA would later approve, was only “successful” in 92% of pregnancies within 49 days LMP, 83% at 56 days LMP, and 77% at 63 days LMP. Because of this high failure rate and concomitant need for surgical follow-up, the FDA only approved the mifepristone-misoprostol regimen for use out to 49 days LMP.
Even these early abortions by pill have considerable risks. But of course, misoprostol must be a great way to terminate late-term pregnancies, because some pro-abortion “doctor” is saying so on the internet.
2) How is this legal? If (when?) a woman dies because of this careless website, Freeman should be criminally charged.
3) The article ends with one throwaway sentence to reason: “Right-to-life groups have dubbed the website a hazard to women.” Understatement of the year.
Weren't illegal abortions generally done by doctors too? Do you have those statistics and the source?
Sometimes. Not always. Back in the day, illegal abortions were often performed by physicians seeking a little extra pocket cash, nurses who really felt the women just needed some help, and sometimes even mechanics, who also just wanted a little extra pocket cash.
If you are interested, there's a pretty good book on the subject, "The Worst of Times: Illegal Abortion – Survivors, Practitioners, Coroners, Cops, and Children of Women Who Died Talk About Its Horrors," by Patricia G. Miller. I mean, a lot of it is anecdotal, but I think it still provides a pretty good snapshot of what abortion was like in the days before Roe v. Wade.
I personally liken it to buying cannabis today. There are plenty of dealers and growers who are legit and will sell you a good product at a good price, but it's hard to weed out the bad ones (pun intended) because it's all underground.
And I, by the way, am an advocate of both legal abortion and legal marijuana. 🙂