By Dave Andrusko
National Right to Life President and Pro-Life Perspective Host Carol Tobias continues her week of year-in-review episodes. Having previously examined state and federal legislative triumphs and pondered the loss of “pro-life angels,” today Mrs. Tobias examines three different reports released in 2011 which “shed some helpful light on our efforts to protect innocent human life from the moment of conception until natural death.”
“Why Legalized Abortion is Not Good for Women’s Health,” a joint partnership between MCCL Global Outreach (a project of our affiliate Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life) and NRLC, compares the impact of improved medical care versus legalized abortion on maternal mortality rates in several countries. It systematically dismantled the argument that access to abortion improves women’s health, using data from sources that no one would say are pro-life.
Jeanne Head, NRLC’s Vice President for International Affairs observed, “Women generally are at risk because they lack access to a doctor, hospital, or antibiotics before abortion’s legalization. They will face those same circumstances after legalization. And if legalization triggers a higher demand for abortion, as it has in most countries, more injured women will compete for those scarce medical resources. The number of abortion-related maternal deaths may actually increase.”
Also in May, the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute released a report claiming that abortion restrictions “disproportionately affect” poor women.
National Right to Life Director Education Dr. Randall K. O’Bannon analyzed the report and noted, “Guttmacher suggests that higher abortion rates among poorer woman and abortion restrictions are somehow connected, yet it’s a thesis that goes undefended. How common sense regulations such as ‘right-to-know laws’ [which tell women about abortion’s risks and alternatives] are supposed to hurt poor women is hard to fathom.”
Finally, just last month, a study was published in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet. “Bedside detection of awareness in the vegetative state” raises significant questions about the countless patients who may have been misdiagnosed as being in a so-called “vegetative state.” Moreover even some of those that were in a “vegetative state,” nevertheless “retain a level of covert awareness that cannot be detected by thorough behavioural assessment,” according to the study.
Key to those discussions that appeared both at Pro-Life Perspective and National Right to Life News Today is the observation made by Burke Balch, JD, who heads National Right to Life’s Powell Center for Medical Ethics: “Many patients, probably thousands, have had their food and fluids cut off, based on what we now know may well have been mistaken assumptions that they had lost all capacity for consciousness.”
Tomorrow Mrs. Tobias ends the year with “A Look Ahead to 2012.” You can listen to all episodes that aired this week at www.prolifeperspective.com.
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