.JPG) THE ARIZONA CONSERVATIVE |
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LIFE
“If there are any self-evident and universal truths that can act for the
human race as a Report of the South Dakota Task Force to Study Abortion, December 2005 VIDEO: No, Mr. President! By John Piper
VIDEO: Life Week in Arizona 2010
FACTS
According to a
Harvard University study, the number of Planned Parenthood affiliates
fell from 163 in 1994 to 91 in late 2009. More affiliates are expected
to consolidate in the future. In 2007, Planned Parenthood affiliates
killed 305,310 pre-born children, charging $400 for each and generating
$122 million.
The following stages of human development have been scientifically documented: Day 1: fertilization unites all chromosomes and a unique human life begins. Day 6: embryo begins implantation in the uterus; the heart begins to beat with the child’s own blood. Week 3: the child’s backbone, spinal column and nervous system are forming; the liver, kidneys and intestines begin to take shape. Week 5: eyes, legs and hands begin to develop. Week 6: brain waves are detectable; mouth and lips are present; fingernails are forming. Week 7: eyelids and toes form, nose is distinct; the baby is kicking and swimming. Week 8: every organ is in place, bones begin to replace cartilage, fingerprints begin to form, the baby can hear sounds. Weeks 9-10: teeth and fingernails are forming, the baby can turn his/her head, frown and hiccup. Week 11: the baby can “breathe” amniotic fluid, urinate, grasp objects placed in its hand, all organ systems are functioning; the baby has a skeletal structure, nerves and operating circulation system. Week 12: the baby can feel pain, has nerves, spinal cord and thalamus, vocal cords are complete; the baby can suck its thumb. Month 4: bone Marrow is forming; the baby is 8-10 inches in length and half of its birth weight. Week 17: the baby can dream. Week 20: the baby recognizes its mother’s voice. G. Flanagan, Beginning Life: The Marvelous Journey from Conception to Birth (New York: DK Publishing Inc., 1996). Janet Hopson, “Fetal Psychology,” Psychology Today 31(5) (September/October 1998
Dr. Dianne Irving, a biomedical
researcher and bioethicist, said: “When the 23 chromosomes of the
sperm and the 23 chromosomes of the ovum are combined, a new, unique
living individual with 46 chromosomes (the number and quantity
specific for the human species) is formed. The chromosomal (genetic)
make-up of the human embryo and fetus is different from the genetic
identity of the mother or the father. Thus the human embryo or fetus
is not only a human being, it is clearly not, scientifically, just a
‘blob’ of the mother’s tissues.”
Human
development is a continuous process that begins when an oocyte (ovum)
from a female is fertilized by a spermatozoon (sperm) and ends at
death. It is a process of growth and differentiation which transforms
the zygote, a single cell, into a multi-cellular adult human being.
Dr. Hymie
Gordon, co-founder and co-chair of the Program in Human Rights and
Medicine at the University of Minnesota and founder and director of
the Mayo Clinic’s world renowned program in medical genetics, said:
“By all criteria of modern molecular biology, life is present from the
moment of conception.”
Dr. Landrum
Shettles, who discovered male and female-producing sperm, said: “… I
accept what is biologically manifest – that human life commences at
the time of conception …”
The United
States Congress was told by Harvard University Medical School’s
Professor Micheline Matthews-Roth, “In biology and in medicine, it is
an accepted fact that the life of any individual organism reproducing
by sexual reproduction begins at conception....” She supported her
evidence with references from more than 20 embryology and other
medical textbooks that human life began at conception.
Human embryo
defined: “An organism in the earliest stage of development; in a man,
from the time of conception to the end of the second month in the
uterus.”
Dr. Hanna
Söderberg, the lead author of a study, conducted interviews with women
one year after their abortions. Her research team found that
approximately 60 percent of the women in their sample of 854 women had
experienced emotional distress after their abortions. This distress
was classified as “severe,” warranting professional psychiatric
attention, among 16 percent of the women. The research team noted that
over 70 percent of the women stated that they would never consider an
abortion again if they faced an unwanted pregnancy.
A 17-year
study of women’s mortality in Finland determined that post-abortive
women suffered significantly higher rates of death, accidents,
suicides and homicides.
Dr. Anne Speckhard, of the University of Minnesota, published a study on women who had abortions. These women reported:
Preoccupation
with the aborted child 81% A. Speckhard, Psycho-social Stress Following Abortion (Kansas City: Sheed & Ward, 1987).
Doctors have treated or
reviewed records from the following complications resulting from
abortions: retained products (parts of human fetus) with infection
resulting in hysterectomy (surgical removal of female organs),
retained products requiring D&C and antibiotic therapy (due to
infection), late second trimester or early third trimester rupture of
membranes due to instrumentation at an abortion center resulting in
intrauterine fetal demise secondary to infection, hepatitis contracted
after abortion, ectopic pregnancy after abortion resulting in
adolescent’s death, retained products of conception resulting in
passage of fetus several days after the attempted abortion procedure
(i.e. the mother had to deliver her aborted child at home), uterine
perforation (tearing) resulting in bowel injury requiring major
surgery, bowel resection and long term gastro-intestinal debility in
the patient, an RH negative patient who failed to be given rhogam
prophylaxis after the abortion procedure due to error in their blood
typing. (Subsequent children, if RH +, would be in serious danger),
post-abortion infection resulting from the patient being put out on
the street without transportation who was sexually assaulted the day
of her abortion procedure, amputation of fetal limb with survival and
delivery of fetus at term (this case was presented at the Armed Forces
division of the American College of OB/GYN in 1973).
The leading causes of
abortion-related maternal deaths within a week of the surgery are
hemorrhage, infection, embolism, anesthesia and undiagnosed ectopic
pregnancies.
A significant elevation of
risk of breast cancer was associated with a history of induced
abortion.
Women with one abortion
face a 2.3 relative risk of cervical cancer, compared to non-aborted
women, and women with two or more abortions face a 4.92 relative risk.
Similar elevated risks of ovarian and liver cancer have also been
linked to single and multiple abortions. These increased cancer rates
for post-aborted women are apparently linked to the unnatural
disruption of the hormonal changes which accompany pregnancy and
untreated cervical damage.
“
Young
teenagers undergoing abortions appeared to be more susceptible than
older women to cervical injury.
A study
showed the occurrence of low birth rate was 1.4 times higher among the
women whose first pregnancy had ended in abortion than among those who
had delivered their first pregnancy. The rate of low birth rate weight
was 1.6 times higher in the abortion group than among the women whose
first pregnancy had ended in a live birth and who were seeking to
carry their second pregnancy to term. Women whose first pregnancy had
been terminated were 3.4 times more likely than were those whose first
pregnancy had resulted in a live birth to have a mid-trimester
spontaneous abortion during their second pregnancy.
Approximately
10 percent of women undergoing elective abortion will suffer immediate
complications, of which approximately one-fifth are considered life
threatening. The nine most common major complications which can occur
at the time of an abortion are: infection, excessive bleeding,
embolism, ripping or perforation of the uterus, anesthesia
complications, convulsions, hemorrhage, cervical injury, and endo-toxic
shock. The most common “minor” complications include: infection,
bleeding, fever, second degree burns, chronic abdominal pain,
vomiting, gastrointestinal disturbances and Rh sensitization.
Among the
sanitation hazards found in California abortion clinics were:
instruments that were not sterilized, untrained people assisting in
operations, a refusal to employ registered nurses or trained
assistants, improper disposal of dead baby parts.
Actress
Jennifer O’Neill said: “Millions of men and women regret abortion. …
Abortion hurts women and it hurts families. … They still say abortion
is as simple as a trip to the dentist’s office. That’s when I say it’s
my experience over their theory. … There is a good risk of depression,
cancer, drug abuse, relational difficulties; abortion is not safe.
Each year, there are 140,000 immediate medical needs after abortions.
… Women have been pitted against their own babies. We’ve been sold a
bill of goods that choice is an inalienable right.”
Prior to her
conversion to the pro-life position, Norma “Jane Roe” McCorvey worked
at abortion clinics. She described the typical clinic as having
plaster and light fixtures falling from the ceiling, rat droppings in
the sinks, backed up sinks and blood splattered on the walls. Worst of
all were the dead baby parts room where dismembered fetuses were
stacked up for a week at a time, and the rooms were never cleaned up.
Sanitary conditions were so bad that one abortionist worked shirtless
and shoeless. Neither the procedures nor the risks were ever explained
to the women. She said, “Veterinary clinics I have seen are cleaner
and more regulated than the abortion clinics I worked in.”
Carol
Everett, former owner of an abortion clinic, said: “I’ve never been
able to come up with the words to describe the abortion procedure.
There are no words to describe how bad it really is. It kills the
baby. I’ve seen sonograms with the baby pulling away from the
instruments that are introduced into the vagina. And I’ve seen D&Es
through 32 weeks done without the mother being put to sleep. Yes, they
are very painful to the baby. But, yes they are very, very painful to
the woman. I’ve seen six people hold a woman on the table while they
did the abortion.”
A 39-year-old
woman in Phoenix, Arizona was hospitalized with complications from an
abortion and had an emergency hysterectomy at St. Luke’s Medical
Center.
At a 2001
pro-life rally in Arizona, a post-abortive woman explained the
circumstances of her abortion: “I had my abortion in 1974. When I
went, I don’t remember anyone counseling me or asking me about my
decision. I don’t remember anyone explaining to me what was about to
happen. My recovery was very bad; I had a lot of pain and bleeding. I
was hallucinating; regret was immediate. I wanted to die, and in a way
I had. I exercised my right to choose, and I chose a dead baby. Now I
get to live with that secret. I ended up in an abusive marriage. I
tried drinking and drugs to numb the pain. I cried a lot, I was angry.
My life had no value, no worth. Silence and secrecy kept me bound in
shame for 25 years. Abortion hurts.”
An
abortionist was convicted of manslaughter for botching the legal
abortion of a 33-yearold who died in 1998 at the A-Z Women’s Center in
Phoenix, Arizona. The woman hemorrhaged to death, becoming the second
woman in three years to die at this doctor’s hands. The doctor had
previously been censured for the first death. The clinic administrator
refused to call 911 for four hours while the woman lie bleeding to
death in the clinic. The owner/abortionist of the Women’s A to Z
Center had previously been investigated for the deaths of two women,
one only 15-years-old.
In the year
2000, 11 American women died as a result of complications from known
legal induced abortion. No deaths were associated with known illegal
abortion.
A Florida
woman had both her legs amputated to stop gangrene related to her
botched abortion. She died soon after.
An Alabama
mother of five was killed by an abortionist who knew before the legal
abortion that she was at risk because of low hemoglobin levels.
LIBERALS' EVALUATION OF ROE V. WADE Kermit Roosevelt, of the University of
Pennsylvania Law School, said: “[I]t is time to admit in public that,
as an example of the practice of constitutional opinion writing,
Roe is a serious
disappointment. You will be hard-pressed to find a constitutional law
professor, even among those who support the idea of constitutional
protection for the right to choose, who will embrace the opinion
itself rather than the result. This is not surprising. As
constitutional argument, Roe is barely coherent. The court
pulled its fundamental right to choose more or less from the
constitutional ether. It supported that right via a lengthy, but
purposeless, cross-cultural historical review of abortion restrictions
and a tidy but irrelevant refutation of the straw-man argument that a
fetus is a constitutional ‘person’ entitled to the protection of the
14th Amendment.
Jeffrey Rosen, legal affairs editor of The
New Republic, said:
“Thirty years after
Roe, the finest
constitutional minds in the country still have not been able to
produce a constitutional justification for striking down restrictions
on early-term abortions that is substantially more convincing than
Justice Harry Blackmun’s famously artless opinion itself.” Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law School professor,
said, “One of the most curious things about
Roe
is that, behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive
judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found.”
In 1985, eventual U.S.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said: “Roe,
I believe, would have been more acceptable as a judicial decision if
it had not gone beyond a ruling on the extreme statute before the
court. … Heavy-handed judicial intervention was difficult to justify
and appears to have provoked, not resolved, conflict.”
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