Grey Wolf 2009: the 'put it up for adoption' arguement is not compelling and ignores the health risks of pregnancies, costs, the fact that MOST unwannted children NEVER get adopted and bouncing around through the foster care system
I HIGHLY recommend you read the following excerpts
Marjorie Bell Chambers "argued that in the conflict between saving the fetus or the life of the woman, the phrase, 'cannot be infringed' meant 'that men and fetuses have a right to life at all timse, but women lose that right when they become pregnant'"
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... the World Health Organization reports "585,00 women die each year during childbirth and pregnancy." And "for every maternal death," it is reported "as many as thirty women sustain often times crippling and lifelong health problems related to pregnancy""
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The antiabortion movement poses another health risk to women as well. Acorrding to Flora Davis, in Moving the Mountain: The Women's Movement in America since 1960, abortion was legal in the country until around 1900. By that time, male physicians desiring to increase business by taking on child birthing, had gained the support of chruches and theclergy in condemning the practice. Previously, women saw midwives and others for their reproductive health. Churches had origionally not opposed abortion, until the business-cause of the male physicians took hold. Regardless of the illegalization of abortion, by the 1960s, more than a million abortions were performed anually in the United States...
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Since the legalization of abortion, a survey administered by Reproductive Health Services in St. Louis has been given to patients at their three-week medical check-up after abortion. It found every woman would have sought an illegal and unsafe way to end her pregnancy if legalized abortion were not available or else they would have considered suicide.
Perhaps the most disturbing part of this whole right-to-life effort is that fundamentalists and the religious right refuse to take part in the prevention of pregnancy. This could easily be done by advocation for appropriate sex education and contraceptive use or for improving the economic conditions for low-incoming women to support a baby. Yet, they have gone to great lengths to prevent appropraite and adequate sex and family planning educate. And they have worked to make birth control difficult, if not impossible, to obtain. This has been especially so with the most effective contraceptives, and not only for youth, but for many adults, especially the poor.
While fundamentalists insist on abstinence-only or celibacy as an answer to pegnancy prevention, it has proven an unrealistic method of birth control for a majority of the population. As a result, girls and women become pregnant. Abortion then becomes the only suitable solution for the many who are unable, at the time, to take on the responsibility of having a baby and who are emotionally unable to go give up a baby for adoption. In turn, the funamentalists who prevented these women frmo obtaining and, therefore using contraceptives, accuse these women of using abortion as their method of choice for birth control. The, in contrast, when unamrried women choose not to have an abortion, they're accused of having many children to take advantage of the welfare system. In reality, having more children was the last thing they wanted. Either way, pregnant women are punished.
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Furthermore, 14 million American children go to bed hungry every night. And in the United States, the infant mortality rate ranks twentieth among industrialized nations. In 1984, according to The New York Times, the United States had more than 50,000 children available for adoption. Many have multi[ple handicaps, requiring lifetime medical care. So how will our nation care for the more unwanted children should Roe v Wade be overturned? It is clear that concern for the unborn is not the issue at hand. The anti-abortion campaign is, largely, just one more way for patriarchs to keep women under their control.
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The dangers fundamentalism poses to women are many. Women raised in Christian fundamentalist homes suffer emotinoally, sexually, and physically as adults. This is because of the beliefs with which they have been indoctrinated and, ultimately, from their acceptance of male domination in the marriage. ... Finally, they are hindred by a wide range of acts meant to keep women barefoot, pregnant, and in their "proper" role."
PG 108-114 The Fundamentals of Extremism
