A recent study alleges that pro-life laws which ban abortion will force women to face a 44-70 times higher mortality risk by delivering their child.
While this study relies on poor data and methodology, which we will address in a moment, lets first address it as if it were true.
For the sake of conversation let’s say abortion really is seventy times safer for a woman than delivering her child. What would we do with this information? Would that mean that abortion is justified, and the child in the womb loses her right to life?
No, this would not alter the status of the abortion debate in any meaningful way.
As we outlined in our apologetics article responding to the claim that abortion is an act of self-defense in all circumstances:
Between 2007-2016 Centers for Disease Control (CDC) studied the Pregnancy Related Morality Ratios (PRMR) in the United States and found that, “Over the period analyzed, the U.S. overall PRMR was 16.7 pregnancy-related deaths per 100,000 births.” That is around a 0.017% chance of dying because of a pregnancy-related complication.
Even if it were true that abortion is somehow safer than childbirth, we know that statistically the risk of death in pregnancy is still very low. One thing being more dangerous than another does not automatically mean that either is dangerous enough to justify a claim of self-defense.
For example, if you attend a 1-year-old’s birthday party and the child grabs the cake knife, the risk of that child stabbing you to death just increased exponentially compared to the risk before he had the knife. However, that would not be a justification to kill the 1-year-old at his birthday party. The actual risk of him stabbing you to death is still incredibly low.
The use of violence to justify self-defense must be proportional.
To make one more example, let’s say that a study is conducted with robust methodology which concludes that raising a child in your home puts you as a parent at a one-hundred times greater risk of death than not raising a child in your home. Perhaps the presence of the child increases the likelihood of accidents, fires, heart attacks, etc.
Would the results of that study somehow mean that killing your born children is justified to prevent the increased risk? No.
With that said, we do recognize that there may arise by medical necessity, emergency circumstances in which the child must be separated from his or her mother to save the life of the mother.
In such cases both mother and child should be treated as patients, and all reasonable measures should be taken to save both lives. If unfortunately, a situation arises where we do not yet have the medical advancements necessary to sustain the life of the child outside of the mother, the child should be provided with all available palliative care. The child’s death upon separation should be considered a medical tragedy, not an abortion as the intention was not to kill the child but to treat both patients.
We should be intentional about how we respond to these claims by abortion advocates. We do not want to act as though a study like this one being true would somehow revoke the unborn baby’s right to life. Even if childbirth was 100x more dangerous than an abortion, that would not mean that we must support abortion.
Now, as promised, let’s look at the reason that this study cannot be taken seriously. The study compares reliable and well documented pregnancy related deaths to abortion related deaths which are NOT systematically tracked, recorded, or investigated. In other words, we know how many women die due to pregnancy, we do not know how many women die from abortions. The abortion industry works very hard to hide the damage they do to women, including deaths.
We know that women who take the chemical abortion pill face serious medical complications like:
- Sepsis
- Infection
- Hemorrhaging
- Transfusion
- Hospitalization
- ER Visit
- Ectopic Pregnancy
- Other life-threatening adverse events
- Required surgical abortion
There is no such thing as a “safe” abortion as every successful abortion kills an innocent human being.
In Defense of Life,
Victor Nieves.
President, Life Issues Institute
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