In an op-ed by Lila Rose, the President of Live Action, she addresses the situation in Paraguay where a 10-year-old girl is pregnant as a result of rape. As LifeNews previously reported, in April the girl’s mother requested that the child be granted an exception from the pro-life country’s abortion law, which bans the procedure unless the mother’s life is in danger.
But after the tragic incident, the Health Minister of Paraguay, Dr. Antonio Barrios, said that abortion was out of the question since the girl is in her 23rd week of pregnancy. He said, “If there needed to be an abortion, it had to be before the 20th week.” Now the girl is actually in her 26th week of pregnancy but abortion proponents are still demanding that she receive a late-abortion.
Rose explains, “…Amnesty International has gone so far as to produce an “Urgent Action” report, calling on people to write Paraguayan authorities to “save her life” by aborting her now six-month baby. Meanwhile, powerful pro-abortion groups like the International Planned Parenthood Federation are already beginning to advance their radical agenda to liberalize abortion in nations like Paraguay by using this young girl’s tragic plight.”
These abortion groups argue that the procedure is safer than childbirth and that it is necessary to save the child’s life. However, the truth is the girl’s life is not in danger and a late-abortion would be damaging to the child. In fact, statistics show that the first year following a late abortion (after 12 weeks) a woman has over three times the risk of death compared to giving birth. Additionally, this doesn’t take into account the psychological danger of abortion. A study in The British Medical Journal reveals that girls who’ve had one or more abortions are ten times more likely to commit suicide than those who never aborted.
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Additionally, Rose points out another reality that many pro-abortion supporters conveniently overlook. She said, “Even if her young body cannot sustain maintaining pregnancy to 40 weeks, delivering this now-viable fetus via inducing labor or a C-section can result in a live birth; no abortion is needed. And that’s the reality: abortion is never medically necessary to save a mother’s life.”
Rose concludes by sharing the testimony of former abortionist, Dr. Anthony Levatino, who reiterates that abortion is never necessary to save a woman’s life.
Read more from her op-ed below.
…Abortion is never medically necessary to save a mother’s life. The Dublin Declaration makes this clear, with more than 1,000 signatures from obstetricians, neonatologists, pediatricians, midwives, and other medical professionals claiming that fact.” This is reinforced by the testimony of Dr. Anthony Levatino, a reformed abortionist, who described a typical “life of the mother” case as he saw it:
“During my time at Albany Medical Center I managed hundreds of such cases by ‘terminating’ pregnancies [via live delivery by C-section] to save mothers’ lives. In all those hundreds of cases, the number of unborn children that I had to deliberately kill was zero.”
In other words, when a life-in-danger medical condition arises, the solution is not to kill the baby, but to address what’s wrong with the woman. Granted, if we’re talking before viability, this may not always result in the preborn child surviving.
For example, removing the woman’s fallopian tube via salpingectomy in the case of an ectopic pregnancy, or inducing labor to remove infected membranes in the case of chorioamnionitis, means the preborn child won’t be able to sustain life. Not being able to save someone because we lack the technology to do so, however, is entirely different from directly killing them; the latter is what abortion is, and that is always a grave injustice against a helpless human life.
Moreover, there are other situations where the child is likely to survive thanks to advancing incubator technology and viability generally being at 24 weeks (with some preborn children surviving earlier).
