Abortion and life of the mother.

I suppose it was inevitable this week on the 35th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade that the scenarios where the life of the mother is in jeopardy would come up as a major reason to support abortion. I have blogged about that before, particularly here and it seems timely to bring this to the front page again. Here is an exchange I had on the topic last year

To me from another blogger:

Blogger: compassion can’t be abstract. Can you say, sight unseen, that every woman getting to the hospital in severe HELLP is stable enough for c-section or induction?

Me: I can’t say that any more than you can say that every woman getting into the hospital is stable enough to have their cervix surgically dilated and then their pregnancy either evacuated or extracted. When you are that critical there are no guarantees.

Blogger: I am glad to see you run smack into the thing most of us have been trying very hard to get through– when there are no guarantees and a woman’s life in the balance, or even the quality of her life, or, say, the likelihood she will be able to have children in the future, the only people I want making recommendations are the doctors. And I sure don’t want the decision to be pre-made by any number of lawyers and politicians. And yes, I do think it’s a crime and it’s unconscionable even if one woman gets hurt as a result of this law. Unfortunately, I am pretty sure it will be a lot more than one.

Me: Which kind of brings me back to my original questions on the partial birth abortion. If there are no guarantees, then how can all of these pro-abortion pronponants keep saying that the partial birth abortion (D&E) is lifesaving? Where is the guarantee that it absolutely will save the life of the mother each and every time it is used, especially when by their own statistics it is used so rarely that I wonder how anyone could have developed anywhere near the proficiency at it that average OB/GYN has with C-section! What about the associated risks of infection, damage to the cervix, uterus or other structures! The way they make it sound we have finally reached panacea folks- a risk free, infection free, blood-loss free procedure with no side effects, risks or potential complications!

I also don’t get this complete trust of the medical community where standard of care in just regular childbirth has been driven by fear of malpractice and compensation rates! Which brings me to another question, if the D&E is coded and reimbursed at a lesser rate than the Cesarean, I wonder how that will affect the recommendations of the doctors?

Also some questions I had about the partial birth abortion ban that were never answered by a PBA proponant:

Some say that Cesarean sections are not a good choice in these type of life or death situations where only a partial birth abortion would suffice, because C-sections are more invasive and may interfere with the womans’ ability to have more children.

But if that is true, why are C-sections the one of the most commonly performed surgery in the United States? Why are some doctor’s even promoting the idea of women only have C-sections instead of vaginal birth under the umbrella of being “better” for the mother? And isn’t there also a risk with the D and X procedure in forcibly dilating the cervix? Isn’t there also the risk of infection, or harming the cervix and/or uterus with surgical instruments?

And if the D&E is so rarely performed anyway as many pro-abortion proponants have said, then wouldn’t the C-section be a safer option anyway since so many more physicians know how to do it and perform it hundreds of times a year?

I have heard some say that women will die if this procedure is unavailable. How many women died before this procedure was available? Do we know that these women would have been saved by a D&E instead? What are the statistics to prove that after the D&E procedure was developed and implemented that the maternal mortality improved?

Lots of inflammatory rhetoric, but not a lot of factual answers!

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