If you had made a statement in the form of "the stats show A or B to be true" then you would be correct
A and B were both asserted on at least 3 of the statistics pages I made available to you! All I did was paraphrase them. In the absence of any overriding data from elsewhere they are true for our discussion. Those pages had bibliographies! I don't consider endless, I don't agrees to have ben mindlessly repeated enough times to constitute a significant compromize of the Alan--Guttmacher's reputation!! But you are welcome to SAY IT AGAIN, SAM!! Your mulish insistence that the stats are wrong because they don't meet your standard is just hypocritical blather!
Outside of developed countries, the stats are very poorly kept, but the painstaking work done by experts in the field to put a statistical face to this human misery caused by illegal abortions ought not to be mocked by someone stuck in a mean spirited mission to block the truth.
In the same fashion, I see that you have now made the ridiculous pronouncement (again, in opposition to the web sites I made available to you, and again, without one shred of supportive evidence) that the African countries are mostly legalized! I won't even bother quoting your exact words. I read it as I was going to bed, and I remember the gist of it. You, of course will give your usual mindless refrain that they have no proof, and I have no proof, and where is the proof--but you won't contribute any facts that question what they have diligently offered to assist our understanding of a serious health problem. You will do as I have just said you will do. I won't therefore miss agreat deal for the time being, as I will be at work. Carry on, Tim. I am pressed for time and runing from pillar to post, but I will GUARANTEE you one thing: Eventually, I am going to teach you the ABC's!
The Plight of Unwanted Children
The anti-choice suffer from what I call the "fetus focus fallacy." They put fetuses ahead of just about everything else, including women's lives and rights, the alleviation of human suffering, freedom of conscience and religion, and truth itself. But let's take a look at these "unborn children", the ones who end up being aborted, but who should, according to anti-abortionists, be forced to live.
Unwanted childbearing has long been linked with adverse consequences to children. Several studies, conducted in countries like the U.S., Czechoslovakia, and Sweden, have documented the long-term developmental problems suffered by children whose mothers did not want to bear them. The findings point to various emotional, educational, and functional disorders that get worse as children become adults. These difficulties happen even to children born to healthy, adult women who have stable marriages and adequate economic resources. The problems are compounded for the majority of unwanted children who are born to poor, unhealthy, unmarried, or teenage mothers.
The studies focused on women who tried to get abortions and were denied them by law or by circumstance. Some used control groups of wanted children and compared them to groups of unwanted children. The studies found that when compared to wanted children, unwanted children are more likely to suffer from:
crippling emotional handicaps
stunted intellectual and educational development
patterns of anti-social behaviour
troubled home and family life
abuse or neglect by parents
dissatisfaction and dysfunction in adult life
For example, unwanted children are:
significantly more likely to have mental handicaps at birth
more likely to dislike school and perform significantly worse academically
more than twice as likely to have a record of juvenile delinquency, up to four times more likely to have an adult criminal record, and three times more likely to be repeat offenders
more likely to abuse alcohol and drugs in youth and early adulthood
up to six times more likely to receive welfare between ages 16 and 21
twice as likely to be less adaptive to frustration and stress, a handicap that continues into adulthood
nearly three times more likely to describe themselves as unhappy and unable to cope with their problems
The findings of these studies of unwanted children paint a clear and disturbing picture of what happens to children when abortion and family planning services are restricted. Forced motherhood and a lack of social support mean that unplanned children too often become victims of life, simply through an accident of birth. And an unwanted child may become an unwanted adult. A recent study in the United States concluded that the legalization of abortion there in 1973 may account for half of the 30-40% reduction in crime that America has experienced since 1991. Legal abortion allows women and men to plan their families and provide for wanted children adequately. The result is more confident, happier, healthier children, who will be more likely to lead fulfilling and constructive lives than their unwanted counterparts.
Legal abortion benefits the health and well-being of children in other ways, too. Children are no longer orphaned when their mothers die from dangerous, illegal abortions, leaving their families without the critical economic and social contributions of a mother. And safe abortions enable women to bear wanted children later, instead of never, because of infertility due to botched abortions.
I don't care how resistent you are to honest fact finding and being taught!!
prochoiceconnection.com
Africa
In Africa, very few countries allow abortion, and problems related to pregnancy are the leading cause of death for women of child-bearing age, with complications from abortion consistently ranking at the top of the list. For every 100,000 abortions in Africa, 680 women die. That's over twice the average for developing nations, and about 680 times the number of developed countries. 58 women are known to die each day from trying to end their pregnancies with homemade cures or in unsafe underground clinics. Many public health experts say these figures likely represent a tiny tip of the iceberg.
In Ethiopia, 55 percent of maternal mortality stems from illegal abortion. In Nigeria, half of maternal deaths can be traced to this cause. Forty percent of the women who come to some public hospitals are there because of abortion complications and about a third of those die without leaving the hospital. |
