When the child has no choice

I want everyone to watch this video. I am focused on the part where the man without the microphone brings up the oppression from Christians by giving the example that women are taken of their rights to choose whether to give birth or not to save their lives. He is asked to give an example, where he could not. I will not doubt him that there are women who die from their pregnancy. But, the real question lies not with whether this happens, but whether abortion is justifiable by this statistic.




I have taken the liberty to go and find the statistics myself that the man could not provide. Here is the citation Pregnancy-Related Mortality Surveillance --- United States, 1991--1999 Jeani Chang, M.P.H., Laurie D. Elam-Evans, Ph.D., Cynthia J. Berg, M.D., Joy Herndon, M.S. Division of Reproductive Health National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. Here is the web link to it.

As we can see, "During 1991--1999, a total of 4,200 deaths were determined to be pregnancy-related. The overall pregnancy-related mortality ratio was 11.8 deaths per 100,000 live births and ranged from 10.3 in 1991 to 13.2 in 1999." So within a 9 year span or so only 1.18 out of 10,000 births that actually happen does a mother die from her pregnancy.

So does this statistic justify the number of abortions that are being administered? Here is the source for the next statistic. Abortion Surveillance --- United States, 2006. Karen Pazol, PhD, Sonya B. Gamble, MS, Wilda Y. Parker, Douglas A. Cook, MBIS, Suzanne B. Zane, DVM, Saeed Hamdan, MD, PhD. Division of Reproductive Health National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, CDC. Here is the link.

"For 2006, a total of 846,181 abortions were reported to CDC. Among the 46 areas that provided data consistently during 1996--2006, a total of 835,134 abortions (98.7% of the total) were reported; the abortion rate was 16.1 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15--44 years, and the abortion ratio was 236 abortions per 1,000 live births"

So compared to the total tally of just one year, there are about 850,000 abortions annually compared to the 4,200 childbearing caused deaths within one decade! And this statistic is only for the reported abortions. The numbers do not match up. The number of abortions are far greater than the number of deaths of mothers caused by childbirth. Now can we compare how many women die from giving birth to the number of women who die from having an abortion?

"One out of every 6,000 women who have an abortion after 21 weeks gestation die.
One out of every 166,000 abortions ends in death. Just under one out of every 100 abortions has a serious complication."
[Source: AGI, 1998. Note: These figures may be low due to under-reporting of deaths due to abortions.]

So now we see that there about as much or more death and complication due to having an abortion for the woman as naturally giving birth to the child, except in the case of naturally giving birth the child has a shot at living while in the other, both the mother and the child die.

Should we use the excuse that women are just protecting their lives by aborting their child? Or, is this just an excuse to justify the many women who a selfishly irresponsible and do not wish to suffer their consequence? Granted I don't even believe it to be a consequence but a gracious gift to have a child. Also I know there are some who argue for "what if the woman was raped, etc." I still hold that having a child is a blessing, and that though it is unexpected and a burden un asked for in the womans life, there are other ways of handling the situation rather taking the unborn childs opprotunity to live. To take the childs life for that childs sake also is a completely illogical reason also. To claim to know the horrible life the child may suffer by being given life is opperating upon your personal sovereignty that you do not have and so would be irresponsible to even say what is good for the child when you cannot opperate on the basis of knowing what kind of life that child may live.

So here are some statistics to see and to remember when you think that women are the ones who need to be protected, as Todd Freil states in the video above, that the one not being considered here is the child.