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Pro-life supporters come from various moral and religious backgrounds, but they all want to see the unborn child or fetus given some recognition and status so it cannot be eliminated simply because it's not wanted. They see a small, defenseless human individual, which at seven weeks has a heart beat and brain activity, and by 14 weeks is fully developed. By 20 to 24 weeks these babies become viable, as in rare cases they can survive outside the womb. About this time, before birth, they can have intrauterine surgery on the heart and other organs, at which point they become patients. Of course, they have no legal status until a miraculous passage through the birth canal, when it is recognized by everyone as a legal human being. However, since abortion supporters choose to ignore these facts, they should be concerned about complications following abortions that are increasingly reported in scientific literature: 1) A study of 41,000 women who had abortions had five times the number of hospital admissions for psychiatric problems, compared to a similar number of women who had no abortion. 2) A study of 600,000 women showed a six-fold increase in suicides in post-abortion women compared to those with a live birth. The pro-choice counseling service, Healing Choice, estimates at least
10 per
cent of post-abortion women have severe psychological problems, and
that many
others who appear to have "moved forward with their lives"
suffer various
degrees of guilt, grief and ambivalence, sometimes for the rest of
their lives.
There are documented cases of women expressing grief, guilt and
spiritual pain
on their death beds many decades after an abortion. |