Most patients were too afraid to tell the doctors how they had tried to abort. But Jonas remembers one woman opened up to him as she lay dying in the hospital. She was 23 and married, with three children, when she became pregnant with her fourth child.
"She told me that she couldn't bear the idea of having a fourth child so quickly, so soon, and that they just plain couldn't afford another child."
So the woman visited an abortionist who took a straightened wire coat hanger encased by a rubber tube, and inserted this inside the woman's vagina. The attempted abortion failed and the mother returned to the abortionist, who fished the contraption out of the trash pile in her yard and reattempted the procedure.
Infected with gas gangrene the woman lasted three days in the hospital. Her liver and kidneys were destroyed, and eventually she went into a coma. Jonas says he stayed up one night giving her blood transfusions, but the woman passed away early that morning.
This is a horrible way to die.
But the woman acted out of desperation. Obviously, she made a very irrational choice.
And inflicted injury on herself.
Should public policy and cultural norms be based on the irrational choices made in desperation? Like, if I decide to rob banks out of desperation to pay my mortgage, should we make sure I have a bullet-proof vest so that I don't get killed?
As recounted by the doctor, her problem was not the child. The lady obviously felt burdened and financially strapped.
She had an emotional problem.
She had a financial problem.
Killing a human is not a solution to those problems. Well, okay, if you kill a kid, that's one less kid to feed, but we don't do that for the born, so it shouldn't be an option for the unborn.
Rather than seek life-affirming options, feminists and their enablers made death THE solution to the problems.
Now compare the horror of that self-inflicted abortion to the horror of an imposed abortion, that is from the fetus' point of view.
Consider the testimony of Brenda Pratt Schafer (posted here), a nurse who witnessed a partial birth abortion performed by Dr. Martin Haskell, the man who popularized the procedure.
Dr. Haskell brought the ultrasound in and hooked it up so that he could see the baby," Shafer testified. "On the ultrasound screen, I could see the heart beating. As Dr. Haskell watched the baby on the ultrasound screen, the baby's heartbeat was clearly visible on the ultrasound screen."Dr. Haskell went in with forceps and grabbed the baby's legs and pulled them down into the birth canal. Then he delivered the baby's body and the arms -- everything but the head. The doctor kept the baby's head just inside the uterus."The baby's little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors through the back of his head, and the baby's arms jerked out in a flinch, a startle reaction, like a baby does when he thinks that he might fall."The abortion was nearly complete."The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening and sucked the baby's brains out," Shafer said. "Now the baby was completely limp.
This baby did not choose to have scissors stabbed in his head and his brain sucked.
But this kind of violence is what feminists attempt to justify.
Women die in coathanger abortions (like the one detailed above).
So babies have to suffer and die for their sakes.
Does that make sense?
So because desperate pregnant women shove coathangers up their crotches to solve their problems and kill themselves in the process, we have to accept the inevitability of that behaviour and legalize violence against babies?
Babies must be the sacrificial lambs for the irrational desperation of women?
There are many things that are inevitable in this world.
We don't necessarily accept them.
All form of crime is inevitable. We don't legalize it *purely* on the basis that we can't stop it.
The bottom line is that while feminists only acknowledge the woman's suffering in abortion, they do not acknowledge the unborn child's suffering.
It is often suggested that acknowledging rights for the unborn child would pit mother against child.
But it's feminists who pit mother against child, by siding with one and not the other.
Pro-lifers say both are important. Both sides of the issue must be addressed. Both lives must be respected.
And I know the next objection: that I chose the most graphic kind of abortion to make my point.
True.
But even if a baby that is too young to feel pain is aborted, he still loses out.
He loses out on his life. He is just as entitled to life as the woman.
That's why solutions that seek to respect both lives must be sought.
Not a solution that pits one against the other.
