From The Irish Times:

Some day abortion will be universally recognised as harmful to women, writes BREDA O’BRIEN

None of the women who took a case to the European Court of Human Rights is a particularly wonderful advertisement for abortion. All three suffered medical complications resulting from the procedure.

One bled so much afterwards that an ambulance had to meet the train she was travelling on. Another passed clots for months. The third suffered complications of an incomplete abortion, including prolonged bleeding and infection.

So much for safe, legal and rare. And that is just the physical side of things. The counselling that they received in Britain was obviously lacking, too. One of the women, simply called “A”, wanted an abortion because she already had four children in care, but was getting her life together and recovering from alcoholism.

She was afraid that having the baby would jeopardise her chances of getting custody of her children again, by triggering a relapse into alcoholism and depression.

What kind of an indictment of our society is it that an impoverished, struggling woman thinks that the best possible option available to her is to end the life of her child in the womb? Obviously, no one in the clinic told her that while any woman can suffer from post-abortion depression, the risks are much higher for people with a previous history of depression.

She went on to have another child after the abortion, and while depression has been a factor, she still managed to regain custody of three of the children. How wonderful it would have been if someone had said to her that abortion was not the only way, that supports would be there to help her to cope.

The Irish Government’s position was that “her suggestions that a social worker would have denied or reduced her access to her children and that she did not consult her doctor as he or she might disapprove, were unsubstantiated and, indeed, such alleged acts would have been unlawful.”

However, the woman did not know that, and no one in the clinic seemed to think it worthwhile to explore her options. The clinic had no difficulty, though, in relieving her of the money she borrowed from a moneylender, or indeed, in carrying out an abortion in a way that left her needing an ambulance.

As a woman who still calls herself a feminist, it makes me furious that feminists seem to think that abortion is such a good thing for women, an absolutely necessary “right”, when so often it is a somewhat brutal substitute for what they really need.

[…]

Some day abortion will be universally recognised as harmful to women and lethal to the smallest members of the human race.

Until then, let us not add to the numbers of countries that have hardened their hearts and legislated for it.

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