Abortion Blog by Rachel Lagodka

Before I used to let my students write about abortion I made them look at this website: http://www.visembryo.com/baby/hp.html

The site shows the gradual progression of the embryo, with very clear pictures up to the third trimester. I think that this is very important, because if a person is going to make a decision about an issue they should have all the available information, including visuals. There is also this site which shows a short film of the embryo developing into a baby.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/odyssey/clips/movhum.html 

It shows the progression of a fertilized egg to a baby. At the beginning, it is no more than a divided cell; at the end it is undeniably a baby. The progression happens gradually, inexorably. Embryo, fetus, baby, where do you draw the line? At two weeks it looks like an eyeball and is less than 2mm in diameter. At four weeks it looks like a penis or a dented light bulb and is less than 3mm long. It has a neural fold and a heart tube. At eight weeks it is 5mm long and looks like a lizard weirdly knobbed with limb buds and “sublunar valves of the heart.”  Organs form, especially the brain, and eventually there are fingers and the little fetus sucks its thumb. Where do you draw the line? On one end you have birth control, on the other: infanticide.  When is abortion a private choice for an unwanted pregnancy and when is it the murder of a little tyke with rights?  When is a potential human being close enough to actuality to be treated as someone who deserves protection? The topic makes a perfect example for explaining reductio ad absurdum. If all pregnancies must be preserved because they are a potential human life, then must all a woman’s eggs and all a man’s sperm be saved? Oh that’s right, women are supposed to get married and remain perpetually pregnant, and men aren’t supposed to masturbate. Those people who chose to live in that world can go ahead, but as an American who believes in the separation of church and state, I can not abide by someone imposing their religious beliefs on the rest of humanity. On the other end, if the woman has total say over whatever is still in her body, is it OK to for her to change her mind at the last minute and have a “partial birth” abortion where a fetus, viable, and nearly to term, is killed? Infanticide was not always frowned upon, but now, it is certainly considered a crime.

A May 2005 Guttmacher institute study shows that 49% of pregnancies among American women are unintended; 1/2 of these are terminated by abortion.[1] 24% of all pregnancies (excluding miscarriages) end in abortion.[2] http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fb_induced_abortion.html

Since women should never be obligated to be pregnant against their will, nor allowed to kill their babies, the argument should rest on a definition of abortion as birth control rather than infanticide. The legal issue really should be the length of the term where an abortion should be available and legal as a means of birth control for women with unwanted pregnancies. Since most late term abortions are caused by the unavailability of abortion services then the best way to prevent late term abortions is to make abortion widely available to women in the early stages of pregnancy. Other means should always be available to women so that they have a much better chance of not having to resort to abortion to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. According to the Guttmacher study, 43% of the decline in abortion between 1994 and 2000 came from the use of emergency contraception.[15] There are several kinds available but only 6 in 10 women have even heard of emergency contraceptives according to a study conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Louis Harris & Associates. Only 20 percent of the ones who had heard of the  morning-after pill knew it could be taken effectively up to 72 hours after intercourse. This is because doctors are not allowed to tell their patients that the pill is available because the FDA won’t allow them to sell the drug as “postcoital contraception" even though it is a “safe effective method that has been around for over 20 years." http://www.sexuality.org/l/incoming/emercont.html

Roe v. Wade protects a woman’s right to have an abortion in the first trimester, before the fetus is viable as a baby under current technology. At twelve weeks there are clear signs of a visible baby with advanced movements of head, mouth and lips, arms, wrists, hands, legs, foot, and toes. Although 51% of all abortions occur within the first nine weeks after conception, 19% occur between nine and ten weeks. Nine weeks is the point where the embryo is really becoming a fetus. The tail has disappeared, the webbing between the fingers and toes are gone, and the intestines have begun to migrate from the umbilical chord into the stomach. The head, however, is still the same size as the body it looks like a macabre Casper the Ghost. The whole thing is only 23-26mm long.

Fewer than 2 percent of abortions are done after the twenty weeks, according to a 1999 report by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and fewer than two-tenths of 1 percent are partial-birth abortions, according to a 2000 report by the Guttmacher Institute . http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/abortion_poll030122.html

This puts most abortions closer to the birth control side of things than the infanticide side.

Legally there are custody battles over embryos and religious arguments about stem cell tissue and whether a man has any say about the content of a woman’s womb.

Abstinence would be a great solution to the problem if people didn’t enjoy having sex so much.

Now I come to the part where I give you some personal anecdotes about abortion. Like some people who care about an issue, I shall share with you the stories of people I know well who have by their life experiences influenced my opinion on a current topic of interest. Of course I shall change their names to protect their reputations, if indeed they are still alive. Let’s call them Sally and Suzie.

I met Sally when I was in college and living in a basement apartment. She knocked on the door and asked me to disentangle a curling iron from her hair. Sally had been in a terrible accident and broken her neck so she was partly paralyzed on her left side. She was waiting for a settlement that never came and promising to buy stuff for everyone. Sally had the apartment that would have been for the custodian, but he didn’t want to live there. It was barely big enough for her bed and there was a “galley kitchen” put together with a dorm fridge, a sink, and a stove with two burners.

Sally was a weekend warrior. Her boyfriend, let’s call him “Dreck” would stay at her apartment on the weekends. He would buy her crabs, crack, and beer. They would feast and smoke until she kicked him out or had him arrested for fighting with the alcoholics across the hall. We could hear him fuming and bellowing.  He was a roofer who, unemployed in the winter, would engage in petty crime until he got caught and spend the winter in jail for “3 hots and a cot.” Sally became pregnant by this “Dreck,” and the nuns who were bringing her food encouraged her to have the baby. Sally wanted to give up her crack habit for the baby but that only lasted two weeks. To her credit, she did less of it, and she made a real effort to eat. When she went into labor after only 20 weeks, we all knew that it was not going to be able to survive. The baby really looked like a cross between a human and a rat baby. The eyes were like blotches under water. It was a raw angry red and covered with fine white hair. It was a girl who lived for six hours. Some doctors like to “push the envelope.” The bill for that six hours was over forty thousand dollars. A photographer came into the room to sell Sally a baby picture. The nuns dressed her in a white dress, and she was put into a coffin. The church gave a funeral with a nice meal. Sally was given plenty of oxycontin with dulled all the pain and provided her with a small income. It’s extremely difficult to suggest to someone that they get an abortion, which I did one morning after a crack and alcohol binge that left plenty of both neighbors’ blood in the hallway, but the nuns scared Sally with visions of hell, and urged her to marry Dreck. Even Sally knew better than that.

My friend Suzie got drunk after work and had unprotected sex. She got a test the next day that showed she was pregnant. She got drunk again. She felt horrible because she wanted to have a baby some day, but she wasn’t ready. She needed to dry up and have a relationship first. She knew she had made some bad choices that led to her choosing to have an abortion, but she had no doubt that abortion was the right choice given the circumstances. She had the abortion less than three weeks after becoming pregnant. Whatever they removed from her was undoubtedly pickled. She did not enjoy the experience, but would never want this option denied to anyone else. I’ve had more than one friend who had an abortion because their boyfriends did not want to be fathers.

What galls me in particular are women who have had abortions and then come out against it. They cite their circumstances as “unique” and now others have to comply and not terminate their unwanted pregnancies. They have websites filled with their tortured guilt. And about how faith is when you “just decide to believe it.” http://www.atcmag.com/v2n4/article7.asp

Of course there are many women who don’t drink or smoke crack, and are simply using abortion when their contraceptive fails. It is clear that women get pregnant far more often than they wish to. This means that a more effective means of birth control is necessary if we are to reduce the number of abortions. Making abortion and contraceptive services more widely available would mean a reduction in all abortions but especially the number of late abortions, since the major reason for the late abortion is the unavailability of services. It is also necessary for peace and economic stability in society to provide this basic service to women. According to the Guttmacher study, “without publicly funded family planning services, an estimated 1.3 million additional unplanned pregnancies would occur annually; about 632,300 would end in abortion.”

Once the fetus becomes a baby, we are obligated as a humane society to protect it from harm at the hands of its parents as well as anybody else. The voluntary removal of a human embryo is the least harmful way to terminate an unwanted pregnancy before it becomes a fetus, and therefore should be widely available to our mothers, daughters, and sisters, as early as possible, so they can be as safe and well as possible.

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