ABORTION
by Voula Papas
The late,
great Carl Sagan had this to say: Animal
and human embryos at three stages of development. Image
of aborted foetus at 8 weeks. If the image was of a chimpanzee foetus
would the “pro-lifers” be at all concerned
for it’s welfare? (Images of developing embryos from: "By
the end of the eighth week, the face resembles that of a
primate but is still not quite human. Most of the human body
parts are present in their essentials. Some lower brain
anatomy is well developed. The foetus shows some reflex
response to delicate stimulation.
WARNING GRAPHIC PHOTO IN THIS
ARTICLE
“If they become tired or
even die, that does not matter. Let them die in
childbirth – that is why they are there.”
Martin Luther (Von Ebelichen Leben 1522)The above
quote defines the Catholic Church’s and the
“pro-life” movement’s view of women. In short
they see women as a means to an end, rather than ends in
themselves.
On May 16,
2004, Pope John Paul II, canonized Dr Gianna Beretta Molla, a
pediatrician/gyn. who died in 1962, aged 39, a week after
giving birth to her fourth child. Gianna was the tenth of 13
children and studied medicine and surgery at the University
of Pavia. Upon completing her studies she opened a clinic at
Mesero and specialised in treating pregnant women, babies and
the poor. She married Pietro Molla in 1955 and bore three
children in the next four years. When she became pregnant
with her fourth child in 1961, she was diagnosed with womb
cancer at the second month of pregnancy. Her doctor
recommended that she have surgery to save her life which
would have resulted in the termination of the pregnancy.
Gianna refused. She would only agree to an operation only if
did not endanger the foetus so she ended up having surgery to
remove the tumour and nothing else done. She knew that her
“choice” was likely to end her life and therefore
living her three already born children without a mother.
Although she suffered terrible abdominal pain, she refused
pain relief as she believed it was not proper to appear
before God without much suffering.
Gianna’s
view on abortion was in line with Catholic Church doctrine:
“The
doctor should not meddle. The right of the child to live is
equal to the right of the mother’s life. The doctor
cannot decide; it is a sin to kill in the womb.”
When she was
approached by someone wanting an abortion, she refused and
told them that this was a grave offence against God:
“If one
were to consider how much Jesus suffered, one would not
commit the smallest sin.”
Some people
have rightly criticized the choice Gianna made because it
suggests that the embryo/foetus has more value than the life
of a woman – a big issue in the US where George W. Bush
and the “pro life” Taliban are striving to ensure
full rights to fertilized eggs, embryos and foetuses at the
expense of women’s health and lives.
Let’s
stop and ponder if Gianna’s choice was truly her own.
Having been brought up as a strict Catholic and being
actively involved with Catholic organisations, would have
ensured that the doctrine of abortion and contraception as
grave sins were firmly embedded in her mind and constantly
reiterated with her closeness with the Catholic Church. The
indoctrination must have been so strong that she was willing
to leave orphaned her three children under the age of five,
rather than disobey Catholic doctrine. Had Gianna not been a
strict Catholic, would her choice have been different?
We must bear
in mind that anyone with extreme religiosity such as
Gianna’s would not dream of ever disobeying religious
absolutes, that of course applies to all religions, not just
Catholicism. E.g. the perpetrators of September 11 believed
they were doing their god’s work when they flew the
passenger planes into the twin towers – would they have
taken the same action had it not been for religious
indoctrination? I think not!
Let’s
look at the vast differences between the feminist pro-choice
view and the “pro-life” view:
PRO
CHOICE:
Women faced
with an unwanted pregnancy have two choices,
a) They can terminate the pregnancy.
b) Allow the pregnancy to continue, have the baby, keep it or
place it up for adoption which is an acceptable option for
some but not all women. Many people find the idea of forced
pregnancy and forced abortion equally abhorrent – we
only need to look at the situation of women in China and
India where women are forced by their families to abort
female foetuses. Therefore, whatever a woman’s decision
is, her wishes are respected. Indeed, many women choose
to continue unplanned pregnancies, I see nothing wrong with
that choice, and I believe that they should be given all the
support that they need.
“PRO-LIFE”:
Here a woman
has no option but to continue the pregnancy regardless of the
risks to health and life, financial difficulties, very young
age, family problems or inability to care for more children.
It makes no difference if the pregnancy resulted from
rape/incest, or whether the woman is living in poverty with
several children to look after. “Pro-lifers” also
oppose birth control, sex education and emergency
contraception, even for rape victims. They have total
disregard for women’s lives as the following account
clearly shows:
In 1984,
Angela Carder was struck with lung cancer while pregnant.
She was hospitalised and her doctor recommended radiation
and chemotherapy. Angela made it clear that she wanted
her health to come first. But the doctors at the hospital
had given Angela only days to live and would not
prescribe chemotherapy because they feared it would
endanger the foetus. The foetus was twenty-six weeks and
if they could prolong Angela's life for three more weeks
- instead of trying to save it - the foetus would have a
better chance. Instead of treating her cancer, they
inserted a tube down her throat and pumped her with
sedatives in order to delay her death. According to her
mother, Angela thrashed and twisted on the bed trying to
fend off the doctors but with the tube in her throat her
battle was in vain.
The
administration of the George Washington Hospital feared
that they might be taken to court by anti-abortionists
for failing to save the foetus. The administration
proposed that a caesarean section be performed in order
to save the foetus. The hospital's doctors opposed the
surgery since it would probably kill Angela. Angela was
unconscious from the sedatives and rather than waiting a
few hours for the drugs to wear off so they could ask her
permission, the hospital administration called in a
judge.
During the
hearing the foetus’s lawyer Barbara Mishkin said:
"Well I suppose it will hasten her death but Angela
is probably going to die in a few hours anyway. Her
rights should be put aside."
The judge
wanted to know how a caesarean would affect the health of
the foetus but not how it would affect Angela. At the end
he told the doctors to operate immediately.
The
doctors delivered a girl; repeated efforts to inflate her
lungs with a respirator were unsuccessful. Angela slipped
into a coma and died two days later.
For “pro-lifers” the
dividing cells in the picture above have far more
value than the woman on the right.
The woman in the photo is Gerri Santoro, dead
after a botched abortion. In 1964, at the time of
her lonely death, Gerri was a mother of two and
abortion was a criminal act.
The photo first appeared in MS Magazine in April
1973.
“If
you deliberately kill a human being, it’s called murder.
If you deliberately kill a chimpanzee – biologically,
our closest relative, sharing 99.6 percent of our active
genes – whatever else it is, it’s not murder. To
date, murder uniquely applies to killing human beings.
Therefore, the question of when personhood (or, if we like,
ensoulment)arises is key to the abortion debate. When does
the foetus become human? When do distinct and characteristic
human qualities emerge?
We
recognize that specifying a precise moment will overlook
individual difference. Therefore if we must draw a line, it
ought to be drawn conservatively – that is, on the early
side. There are people who object to having to set some
numerical limit, and we share their disquiet; but if there is
to be a law on the two absolutist positions, it must specify,
at least roughly, a time of transition to personhood.
Every one
of us began from a dot. A fertilized egg is roughly the size
of the period at the end of this sentence. The momentous
meeting of sperm and egg generally occurs in one of the two
fallopian tubes. One cell becomes two, two become four and so
on - an exponentiation of base-2 arithmetic. By the tenth day
the fertilized egg has become a kind of hollow sphere
wandering off to another realm: the womb. It destroys tissue
in its path. It sucks blood from capillaries. It bathes
itself in maternal blood, from which it extracts oxygen and
nutrients. It establishes itself as a kind of parasite on the
walls of the uterus.
By the
third week, around the time of the first missed menstrual
period, the forming embryo is about two millimeters long and
is developing various body parts. Only at this stage does it
begin to be dependent on a rudimentary placenta. It looks a
little like a segmented worm. (A number of right-wing and
Christian fundamentalist publications have criticized this
argument – on the grounds that it is based on an
obsolete doctrine, called recapitulation. The comparisons of
the human foetus with other animals is based on the
appearance of the foetus. Its non-human form, and nothing
about its evolutionary history, is the key to the argument of
these pages.)"
Source: “The Facts of Life”
Human embryo at 28 days
after conception
Rat embryo day 14
of gestation
Would the photo then be any less
graphic? The photos of foetuses on
“pro-life” sites are always of stages where
the foetus acquires human physical appearance. It
would not be surprising if they use photos of more
developed foetuses and pass them off as earlier ones.
Remember, these are the people who
insist that condoms have tiny holes in them which
allow the entry of the HIV virus.
"By
the end of the fourth week, it’s about five millimeters
(about a fifth on an inch) long. It’s recognisable now
as a vertebrate, its tube-shaped heart is beginning to beat,
something like the gill arches of a fish or an amphibian
become conspicuous, and there is a pronounced tail. It looks
rather like a newt or a tadpole. This is the end of the first
month after conception.
By the
fifth week, the gross divisions of the brain can be
distinguished. What will later develop into eyes are
apparent, and little buds appear – on their way to
becoming arms and legs.
By the
sixth week, the embryo is thirteen millimeters (about half an
inch) long. The eyes are still on the side of the head, as in
most animals, and the reptilian face has connected slits
where the mouth and nose eventually will be.
By the end
of the seventh week, the tail is almost gone, and sexual
characteristics can be discerned (although both sexes look
female). The face is mammalian but somewhat piglike."
Human embryo at about 40 days after
conception.
http://www.visembryo.com/baby/hp.html)
Approximately
48 days after conception.
By the
tenth week, the face has an unmistakably human cast. It is
beginning to be possible to distinguish males from females.
Nails and major bone structures are not apparent until the
third month.
By the
fourth month, you can tell the face of one foetus from that
of another. Quickening is most commonly felt in the fifth
month. The bronchioles of the lungs do not begin developing
until approximately the sixth month, the alveoli still later.
So, if only
a person can be murdered, when does the foetus attain
personhood?
When its
face becomes distinctly human, near the end of the first
trimester?
When the
foetus becomes responsive to stimuli – again, at the end
of the first trimester?
When it
becomes active enough to be felt as quickening, typically in
the middle of the second trimester?
When the
lungs have reached a stage of development sufficient that the
foetus might, just conceivably, be able to breathe on its own
in the outside air?
The trouble
with these particular developmental milestones is not just
that they’re arbitrary. More troubling is the FACT that
none of them involves uniquely human characteristics
– apart from the superficial matter of facial
appearance. All animals respond to stimuli and move of their
own volition. Large number are able to breathe. But that
doesn’t stop us from slaughtering them by the billions.
Reflexes and motion and respiration are not what make us
human.
Other
animals have advantages over us – in speed, strength,
endurance, climbing or burrowing skills, camouflage, sight,
smell or hearing, mastery of the air or water. Our one great
advantage, the secret of our success, is though –
characteristically human thought. We are able to think things
through, imagine events yet to occur, figure things out.
That’s how we invented agriculture and civilization.
Thought is our blessing and our curse, and it makes us who we
are.
Thinking
occurs, of course, in the brain – principally in the top
layers of the convoluted ‘grey matter’ called the
cerebral cortex. The roughly 100 billion neurons in the brain
constitute the material basis of thought. The neurons are
connected to each other, and their linkups play a major role
in what we experience as thinking. But large-scale linking up
of neurons doesn’t begin until the twenty-fourth to
twenty-seventh week of pregnancy – the sixth month.
By placing
harmless electrodes on a subject’s head, scientists can
measure the electrical activity produced by the network of
neurons inside the skull. Different kinds of mental activity
show different kind of brain waves. But brain waves with
regular patterns typical of adult human brains do not appear
in the foetus until about the thirtieth week of pregnancy
– near the beginning of the third trimester. Foetuses
younger than this – however alive and active they may be
– lack the necessary brain architecture. They cannot yet
think.”
Excerpt from:
“BILLIONS AND BILLIONS”, (pages 176 to 180)
by Carl Sagan, first published in 1997 by HEADLINE
BOOK PUBLISHING, ISBN0-7472-5792-2
FACT
Emergency contraceptives (morning after pills), hormonal
contraceptives and IUD’s are highly effective in
preventing pregnancy and therefore the need for abortion.
FACT
The vast majority
of abortions, approximately 90%, occur during the first
trimester.
FACT
Early chemical
abortions with RU486 can only be used within the first 6-7
weeks of pregnancy.
FACT
World Health
Organization estimates that around 550 women die every day
from attempts to end unwanted pregnancies.
FACT
CONDOMS ARE
PRO-LIFE: they prevent AIDS and unwanted pregnancies.
FACT
The
“pro-life” alliance also opposes modern birth
control methods, condoms for the prevention of AIDS,
emergency contraception, and accurate, comprehensive sex
education.
FACT
Anti-abortion
laws do not eliminate abortion, they merely make it unsafe.
Those of you who do not remember the days before ‘Roe vs
Wade’, should take note of the plight of women in
developing countries where abortion is illegal or
inaccessible.
The link below
is for a case where a woman was forced to bear an
anencephalic baby, that is a baby with no forebrain - the
main part of the cerebrum, responsible for thinking and
coordination. Anencephalic babies are born unconscious and
insensitive to pain. Without a functioning cerebrum, these
babies have no hope whatsoever of ever gaining consciousness.
Most are stillborn or die within hours of birth.
Woman forced
to bear anencephalic baby:
http://www.iwhc.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=page&pageID=752
Anencephalic
foetuses – information.
http://www.neurologychannel.com/cephalicdisorders/index.shtml
Images of Embryos Used by Anti-Abortion Activists
http://www.devbio.com/article.php?ch=21&id=164
Impact
of illegal abortion
http://www.abortionaccess.org/AAP/publica_resources/fact_sheets/illegalabortion.htm
Religious
Consultation for Reproductive Rights
http://www.religiousconsultation.org/index.html
When
does a foetus become Human?
http://www.religioustolerance.org/abo_when.htm
Why I
am an abortion doctor
http://atheism.about.com/library/books/full/aafprWhyAbortionDoctor.htm
Abortion,
Persons and the foetus
http://www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/103/abortion.htm
Religious
Consultation for Reproductive Choice
http://www.rcrc.org
The
Case for Legal Abortion
http://www.atheistfoundation.org.au/abort1.htm
World
Health Organization – Abortion and breast cancer
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs240/en/
Ancient
Christian beliefs on abortion
http://www.religioustolerance.org/abo_hist.htm
God’s
not Pro Life
http://www.evilbible.com/god%27s%20not%20pro-life.htm
Information
for Catholic Women
http://www.cath4choice.org/lowbandwidth/abortionfr.htm
Women’s
Health
http://www.ipas.org/english/
facts
on condoms
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs243/en/
Fetus
Alert
Satire on the hypocrisy of “pro-lifers” by Catholic
theologian Dan McGuire
http://www.religiousconsultation.org/fetus_alert.htm
Abortion Information
http://www.abortion.org.au
Recommended
Reading:
“Rethinking
Life and Death” by Peter Singer
“The
Facts of Life” by Harold J. Morowitz & James S.
Trefil
“Billions
and Billions” by Carl Sagan
“Breaking
the Silence: The Global Gag Rule’s Impact on Unsafe
Abortion” from http://www.reproductiverights.org/pub_bo_ggr.html
“The Worst of Times: Illegal Abortion Survirors, Practitioners, Coroners, Cops and Children of Women Who Died Talk About its Horrors” by Patricia G. Miller
“Mandatory Motherhood: The True Meaning of ‘Right to Life’ by Garret James Hardin
“Back Rooms: An Oral History of the Illegal Abortion Era” by Ellen Messer and Kathryn E. May, PsyD. women’s stories of surviving illegal abortion prior to Roe vs Wade.
“Moments on Maple Avenue: The Reality of Abortion” by Louse Kapp Howe, stories from an abortion clinic.
