Have you ever heard or read that “abortion is safer than childbirth”?
Turns out that isn’t so, but it remains not only conventional wisdom, but the basis for the law of the land allowing a woman to terminate her pregnancy for any reason through all nine months of pregnancy.
That’s just one fascinating fact uncovered by Clarke Forsythe and reported in his 2013 book, . He notes that the parties did not present evidence, there were no trials in the lower courts, the judges did not look at evidence, and there were no witnesses subject to cross-examination.
Forsythe has painstakingly combed through the papers of eight of the nine Supreme Court Justices who ruled on Roe vs. Wade and Doe vs. Bolton, the two laws which legalized abortion in the US in 1973. He examined everything from case files to personal papers, and his research brings to light the random and troubling history of the law.
Forsythe also points out how far outside the norm the US stands internationally. As the States in the US continue wrestling with the question of when abortion should be prohibited based on the child’s ability to survive outside the womb, America remains only one of four nations in the world to sanction abortion post-viability. We are in line with North Korea, China, and Canada on that score.
The reason this matters is that most women who find themselves considering abortion make the assumption that what is legal must be moral, must be safe and wouldn’t put them at undue risk. Those assumptions definitely played a part in my choice.
What can we do in the face of the evidence now that millions of women like me must wrestle with in dealing with the consequences?
