One of the popular arguments against making abortion illegal is that doing so will force women into having to take dangerous measures to get an abortion. These so-called “back-alley abortions” or “rusty coat hanger abortions” are actually irrelevant and misleading to the discussion of the legality and morality of abortion.
First, there have been many claims about countless women dying or sustaining serious injuries from unsafe illegal abortions prior to the legalization of abortion in the United States, however, there is serious debate about the statistics that have been thrown around in regard to how many illegal abortions occurred and the percentage of women who died from them. After all, compiling reliable data about off-the-record and illegal abortions is next to impossible. How can we have a realistic figure as to how many of these occurred given that the vast majority would never have beeb reported at all? So we should not be quick to believe Planned Parenthood or other pro-abortion groups who throw around such statistics in the first place.
Second, abortion isn’t always “safe” even when it is done legally by a licensed clinic and a real doctor. There have been numerous cases of healthy women dying in a real clinic with a real doctor performing the “operation.” Just recently a woman who was having a late term abortion, 33 weeks into her pregnancy, died under the hand of an abortion doctor.
Thirdly, and most importantly, there is a much bigger issue that is being ignored when this argument about “women’s safety if abortion is made illegal” is used. The issue is that which is central to the entire abortion debate, namely, is the unborn baby a person? If the answer is yes, then it is obvious that abortion should be illegal. If abortion should be made illegal because the unborn are human persons, then the fact that obtaining illegal abortions is unsafe is not a good reason to allow abortion to be legal.
Consider this, if an unborn baby is a person, then abortion is the termination of an innocent life. If abortion is the termination of an innocent life, then abortion is indeed murder. So the argument in regard to the danger of unsafe abortions is tantamount to a murderer complaining that if his/her right to murder an innocent person under federal law is revoked then it will be much less safe for him/her to murder without the proper safety conditions currently provided by the law! But clearly this is absurd, and yet it is indeed the actual case that we are dealing with.
There is only one matter to be settled in the abortion debate, is the life that begins at conception a human person from the very beginning? If the answer is “yes” then abortion is never permissible because it is the murder of an innocent person (with, perhaps, the exception of tubular pregnancies or other conditions which insure the death of both mother and child if the pregnancy is not terminated). If the answer is “no” then clearly abortion is permissible up to the point a zygote, embryo, fetus, newborn, etc., becomes a person (and who gets to decide when that happens?).
There is no other issue that matters in this debate. If at conception a human person comes into being then abortion is never justified and arguments like how dangerous illegal abortions are become totally irrelevant. Those who would seek out such dangerous operations would be doing so in violation of the law and with the intent of murder and should have no special considerations afforded them.
This is a red herring in the abortion debate, now you know why.
