Worldwide, there are 19 million unsafe abortions a year, and they kill 70,000 women (accounting for 13 percent of maternal deaths), mostly in poor countries like Tanzania where abortion is illegal, according to the World Health Organization. More than two million women a year suffer serious complications. According to Unicef, unsafe abortions cause 4 percent of deaths among pregnant women in Africa, 6 percent in Asia and 12 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean.
If you're going to advocate against legal abortion you should have spend some time thinking about the consequences of illegal abortion - lots of dead women, doctors and nurses forced underground and made into criminals. Beyond that if you really believe that abortion is murder are you willing to prosecute any women who undergo (and survive) the procedure with murder? How about the doctors? The nurses? The husband who drives his wife to the hospital? Are you willing to put those people in prison for the rest of their lives? How about capital punishment?
What's really at issue is the access of poor women to health care. The wealthy and middle-class will always be able to find a way to get the procedure done. If it's illegal in their home state then they'll travel to another. If it's illegal in the U.S. then they'll fly overseas. Working class women will not have that luxury, they'll be denied access to safe medical care and forced underground and quite literally into back alleys.
I've often said, and still do believe, that many men who are vehemently anti-choice are motivated by a desire to control women. It's more than that though, it's also an opportunity for the relatively wealthy to assert dominance over the working class and assert their presumed moral superiority.
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