The phrase "protecting Women's Health" has been thrown around a lot by the GOP led state assemblies who are rapidly closing abortion clinics around the country. The most obvious and best known case of this just played out in Texas where today the State Senate passed the law that Wendy Davis bravely filibustered just a few short weeks ago. That new law will soon be signed by Rick Perry and will close the vast majority of clinics that offer abortion services statewide. As usual the Lamestream media is failing to call the GOP on its hypocrisy and lies by actually breaking down the claim this will somehow improve women's health options statewide. So I did some Googling (hello NSA) to find out just exactly how dangerous legally provided abortions are.
I assume everyone reading this heard that they are extremely safe, but follow me below the orange Koslycue to take a look at the numbers...
Oh good you made it. I was concerned my instructions were too difficult. Sometimes I forget that I'm probably not reaching many GOP voters and thus my fears are probably unfounded.
But I digress...
Note: all emphasis in all quotes are added by yours truly.
The first question to be answered is "how safe is legal abortion under the current system?"
Serious complications arising from aspiration abortions provided before 13 weeks are quite unusual. About 88% of the women who obtain abortions are less than 13 weeks pregnant. Of these women, 97% report no complications; 2.5% have minor complications that can be handled at the medical office or abortion facility; and less than 0.5% have more serious complications that require some additional surgical procedure and/or hospitalization.
Early medical abortions are limited to the first 9 weeks of pregnancy. Medical abortions have an excellent safety profile, with serious complications occurring in less than 0.5% of cases. Over the last five years, six women in North America have died as a result of toxic shock secondary to a rare bacterial infection of the uterus following medical abortion with mifepristone and misoprostol. This type of fatal infection has also been observed to occur following miscarriage, childbirth and surgical abortion, as well as other contexts unrelated to pregnancy. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) continuing investigations have found no causal link between the medications and these incidents of infection. Although the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued an updated advisory for warning signs of infection following medical abortion, it has recommended that there be no changes in the current standards for provision of medical abortion.
Past 13 weeks abortions are performed surgically and then there is a slightly higher rate of complications, but not dramatically so.
Death occurs in 0.0006% of all legal surgical abortions (one in 160,000 cases). These rare deaths are usually the result of such things as adverse reactions to anesthesia, embolism, infection, or uncontrollable bleeding. In comparison, a woman's risk of death during pregnancy and childbirth is ten times greater.
In
Texas (warning PDF) there were a total of ~84,000 abortions in 2008, a number that has actually declined slightly since 2000. That means that about one woman dies every two years in Texas from complications from surgical abortion.
To put that in perspective, almost 200 women between the ages of 15-44 were killed in Texas because they were murdered in 2010 and over 400 more died in traffic accidents.
So call me a cynic, but this again seems like the GOP searching for a solution to a problem that doesn't exist or simply more of the same old "throw out some BS and hope it sticks to the wall and no one notices the stench."
Now let's look at what happens when abortions are performed illegally. Around there world there are roughly 40 million abortions every year.
In the United States, legal induced abortion results in 0.6 deaths per 100,000 procedures. Worldwide, unsafe abortion accounts for a death rate that is 350 times higher (220 per 100,000), and, in Sub-Saharan Africa, the rate is 800 times higher, at 460 per 100,000.
Women in Texas who don't have the means to afford a safe legal abortion are already relying on suspect drugs
sold over the counter at flea markets near the Mexican border. The drugs which are sold over the counter in Mexico are brought in and sold cheap, but the person selling the drugs isn't a medical professional and has no idea how the drugs should be administered. This is even true in Mexico where the drugs originate.
That’s not the regimen followed by women getting the drugs on the black market, who can be as ill informed as those selling them. During a recent visit to the Almost Free Pharmacy in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, a man behind the counter instructed an initial dose of two pills orally and one vaginally, followed by two pills every hour “until something happens.”
The women who do get their hands on these blackmarket drugs often have serious complications and need to see a doctor for treatment.
William West, a physician at Whole Woman’s Health in McAllen, said he sees patients daily who have taken black-market abortion drugs. Many are bleeding or still pregnant...
In the end it's easy to see that there is absolutely nothing about protecting women's health in the GOP agenda. Abortions aren't "unsafe" and making them illegal will have grave consequences for the women who do seek them out through illegal/black-market operations. Now if only the media would stop allowing this excuse to go unchallenged people have a right to know and the simple fact is abortion is one of the safest medical procedures performed in this country year in and year out. The simple fact is the GOP is lying and in so doing they are once again showing themselves to be hypocrites and extremists. #standwithwendy and one day we can hopefully end the lies and help women achieve true equality in our country.