Induced abortion

Abortion may harm a woman's health, consequent complications including perforation of the uterus, peritonitis and septicaemia, sometimes resulting in death. Although legalizing abortion where illegal abortion was highly prevalent may decrease the incidence of these complications, the reverse is true where the initial abortion frequency was low. Abortion, because of coercion or over-persuasion by authorities or by those on whom the pregnant woman depends, offends most moral and religious codes. A more positive approach might be to provide moral, social and material assistance to the woman and to her baby when it arrives. Induced abortion can be described as murder (in particular, this is the stance taken by the Roman Catholic Church); it is also considered by many to be the result of immorality and irresponsibility on the part of those performing the abortion, and on the part of the woman on whom it is performed, since it may be argued that she should take the consequences of her immoral or adulterous conduct. Induced abortion, either legal or illegal, tends towards breakdown of society, of morality and of the family and marriage, and leads to promiscuity.

The acceptance of abortion in the popular mind, in behaviour and even in law itself, is a telling sign of an extremely dangerous crisis of the moral sense, which is becoming more and more incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, even when the fundamental right to life is at stake. Given such a grave situation, we need now more than ever to have the courage to look the truth in the eye and to call things by their proper name, without yielding to convenient compromises or to the temptation of self-deception. In this regard the reproach of the Prophet is extremely straightforward: "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness" (Isiah 5:20). Especially in the case of abortion there is a widespread use of ambiguous terminology, such as "interruption of pregnancy", which tends to hide abortion's true nature and to attenuate its seriousness in public opinion. Perhaps this linguistic phenomenon is itself a symptom of an uneasiness of conscience. But no word has the power to change the reality of things: procured abortion is the deliberate and direct killing, by whatever means it is carried out, of a human being in the initial phase of his or her existence, extending from conception to birth. (Papal Encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, 25 March 1995).

Every 24 hours there are approximately one million conceptions throughout the world. Of these, nature aborts about 500,000, roughly 150,000 are deliberately terminated and the remaining 350,000 conceptions result in live births. As these figures so powerfully indicate, for every three live births one pregnancy is deliberately terminated. The fact that so many women are prepared to face the mental anguish, physical pain, and danger which often accompany an induced abortion, many without even the benefit of anaesthetic, indicates how common, and how passionate, can be the wish to avoid an unwanted birth. In contrast, the risk to the woman's health inherent in carrying out a legal abortion is considerably less than if the pregnancy were allowed to proceed to term. Those who deny a place for programmes to control the number and spacing of children are denying the right of the mother to control her own fertility, the right of the father to restrict the number of children he begets, and the right of the child to be wanted.