Unsafe Abortion Quotes

Contraceptives save the lives of mothers and newborns. Contraceptives also reduce abortion. As a result of contraceptive use, there were 26 million fewer unsafe abortions in the world’s poorest countries in just one year, according to the most recent data.

When ACOG (American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists) claims that home birth and midwives are unsafe, they imply that the women who choose it and the midwives that provide it are acting irresponsibly and selfishly. They stigmatize normal birth just as the political right has stigmatized abortion. And they stigmatize women. "Our country has created a mythology of women who are irresponsible and don't care," says Paltrow. "We talk about welfare queens, crack moms, and murderous women who have abortions." A culture that allows such language to permeate our national subconscious inevitably dehumanizes all women, including mothers. Lyon argues that this thinking perpetuates a phrase often invoked in exam rooms and delivery rooms: The goal is to have a healthy baby. "This phrase is used over and over and over to shut down women's requests," she says. "The context needs to be that the goal is a healthy mom. Because mothers never make decisions without thinking about that healthy baby. And to suggest otherwise is insulting and degrading and disrespectful." What's best for women is best for babies. ... The goal is to have a healthy family.

According to estimates from the World Health Organization, of the estimated 20 million desperate women who risk their lives through unsafe abortion each year, about 47,000 die. Stated alternatively, about 1 woman in 425 dies trying to control her fertility, her body, and her destiny this way.

137 million women who want to space or limit their pregnancies use no contraception, usually because they have no access to family planning services; 68,000 women a year die from unsafe abortions. Preventing unplanned pregnancies would save a quarter of maternal deaths.18

It was reported the new president Richard Nixon was concerned that some overly ambitious Apollo commander, thinking this was his one and only shot at landing on the moon, might take unwise chances. Mr. Nixon, a space program supporter, asked the NASA administrator to tell Neil Armstrong if conditions became unsafe for the landing he was to abort, and the new president promised him he would get another mission—he would get another attempt to land on the moon. Neil liked that, but knew he would never take chances with the lives of his crew. I asked Neil if the story was true. “Yep,” he said, adding, “I was also told he made the same commitment to later crews.

One in three African women experiences physical or sexual violence. Because many African countries prohibit abortion on any grounds, even if the mother’s life is at risk, almost one third of all the unsafe abortions that occur in the world each year occur in Africa. Most of the 130 million women alive today who have undergone female genital mutilation live in Africa, and 125 million of the current population of African women were married before the age of eighteen.

Even in the worst case, if Roe is overruled, there’s no woman of means who could not get a safe abortion someplace in the United States. There will be a core of states that will never go back to the days of unsafe, back alley abortions. So, poor women have no choice, women of means will be able to decide for themselves.