Myth: Many women resorted to household items for self-given abortion.
Fact: ”Mary Claderone (then Medical Director of Planned Parenthood) and Nancy Howell Lee (a pro choice researcher) both investigated the practice of criminal abortion in the pre-legalization era. Calderone estimated that “90% of all illegal abortions are presently (1960 - ed) being done by physicians.” Calderone further estimated that 8% were self-induced and that 2% were induced by someone other than the woman or a doctor. Lee estimated that 89% of pre-legalization abortions were done by physicians, an additional 5% by nurses or others with some medical training, and 6% were done by non-medical persons or the woman herself. Calderone’s numbers came from “43 men and women from the various disciplines of obstetrics, psychiatry, public health, sociology, forensic medicine, and law and demography.” Lee interviewed women who had undergone pre-legalization abortions. The discrepancy between Lee’s and Calderone’s breakdowns of non-physician abortions is probably due to sampling errors.”
And on the 5% of amature and self-induced abortions: “Lee’s interviews with women who had self-aborted found a different picture from the women who had sought professional (however illegal) abortions. These self-aborting women tended to be less rational, and more self-destructive, than the women seeking competent abortionists. Lee also found that the women attempting self-abortion were likely to have had a death wish at the time of the abortion.
This finding is in keeping with psychiatric literature of the time, which treats self-induced abortion as a peculiar manifestation of the self-mutilating behavior common in patients with certain psychiatric disorders. Self-mutilation in patients with these disorders can range from superficial cuts and cigarette burns to self-trepanning (drilling holes in the skull), enoculation (gouging the eyes out), and amputation of limbs.
Mutilation of the genitals is not rare in these patients, and self-induced abortion was often regarded as an extreme form of genital mutilation aimed at attacking the patient’s own femininity. It was in the political context, not the psychiatric or psychological context, that self-induced abortions were considered to be the expected behavior of normal women. This politicized view of self-aborting women eclipsed the reality, and case studies stopped showing up in the literature, although occasional stories still do make it into the newspaper.
This is not to say that all women who self-induce abortions are mentally ill. Investigators of post-Roe self-induced abortion injuries and deaths found other factors, such as distrust of the medical profession, a perception of home herbal abortion as more “natural,” cultural preferences, and “ideosyncratic” factors nobody could readily explain. These women, however, carefully research abortion methods and use common sense and intelligence to select a method likely to be efficacious and comparatively safe.” [x]
Myth: An unborn child is a clump of cells, the same as the cells “that come off your feet or body.”
Fact: The cells “that come off your feet or body” are somatic cells. They are the result of mitosis, the daughter cells of even more somatic cells, and they will never develop into a full human being. You, however, are a full human being. You are probably considered either an “adult” or a teenager” right now, but you used to be a “child,” and before that you were a “baby,” and before that you were a “fetus,” and at the very very beginning, you were a “zygote.” A zygote is the result of two gamete cells (AKA the sperm cell and the egg) joining during sexual reproduction, a process known as conception. From that very moment, zygote-you was a distinct, living human being, with your own unique DNA. You started growing and your cells starting multiplying, and you never stopped. While you have skin cells and blood cells and brain cells, you are not any of those things. You are a human being, and you have been one since the very beginning. That’s science, not opinion. As Secular Pro-Life says, “This I know, for the embryology textbook tells me so.”
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