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Abortion does not preserve a woman's life — it preserves her lifestyle
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Abortion does not preserve a woman's life — it preserves her lifestyle

Abortion fans have been pretty outraged this week.

They're always outraged about something, of course, but it seems their outrage has been manifesting itself in increasingly deranged ways. The derangement reached a crescendo these past few days when feminists across the state of Texas mailed their bloody tampons to the governor. For the record, it's against the law to mail bodily fluids unless you've stored the sample safely (I'm assuming a used tampon does not qualify as safe storage), but aside from being illegal it's also a fantastically stupid and unspeakably vile act. Even more so when you consider why, exactly, they've turned their feminine hygiene products into postcards: to protest a law requiring abortion clinics to bury or cremate the remains of aborted children.

One must truly despise human life to become outraged that dead bodies are being treated with some semblance of dignity. It's one thing to throw the murdered children in the dumpster like soiled diapers after harvesting them for parts -- it's another thing to actually feel offended if they aren't disposed of in this manner. To tolerate such an atrocity just makes you a narcissist and a moral coward, but to be personally and emotionally invested in the desecration of human remains makes you something closer to a sociopath or a satanist.

Then again, what choice to pro-aborts have? If they agree that human children ought to be treated with dignity after death, they must then entertain the notion that human children ought perhaps to be treated with dignity before death. They can't even consider the latter, so they must be hostile to the former. This is what supporting abject evil does to you. It essentially forces you to be a sociopath and satanist, because if you let even the faintest glimmer of respect and decency shine from your soul the whole house of cards will come crashing down. You must plunge ever deeper into the darkness if you want to escape the light.

That brings us to the latest news out of Ohio. Governor Kasich signed a ban on abortions after 20 weeks, but vetoed a law that would outlaw prenatal child murder once a heartbeat is detectable (around the sixth week, although the baby will have developed a functioning heart before that point). If the pro-abortion crowd were made up of more cheerful and optimistic types, they might have seen this as a win. After all, women in Ohio still have five months to decide whether they want to kill their children. A 20 week return policy on a human being is still 20 weeks longer than it should be, and, one would think, plenty of time for the abortion-inclined to make up their minds.

In the realm of abortion fanaticism, however, any restriction whatsoever on baby murder must be greeted with hysteria. Liberals did not disappoint, screaming that Ohio's moderate abortion restriction is "extremely anti-women," a profound "threat to reproductive rights," and so on. One common theme amidst the leftist freak-out is that this law is "dangerous" because it might force a woman in a high risk pregnancy to carry a child to term, killing her in the process.

This is the fabled "life of the mother" abortion excuse that we're sure to hear ad nauseum anytime any state attempts to pass even the most meager regulations on the abortion industry. According to pro-abortion radicals, even the Texas law requiring humane treatment of dead babies might somehow result in the deaths of countless women. In Abortion World, abortion saves more lives than it takes. Pregnancy is more fatal than pancreatic cancer and the only thing preventing millions of women from dying from it is abortion. Pregnancy is a disease and abortion is the cure, they believe.

Here's how one reader put it to me through email last night:

Matt, many women would be DEAD without abortion. Is that what you want? I thought you're "pro-life"???? What if a woman needs to get an abortion to save her life. Are YOU going to tell her she has to DIE for the sake of a fetus? Is the GOVERNMENT going to tell her that? You're not "pro-life".... you're pro-birth. You don't give a sh*t about the women who will now die in Ohio because you think you should have a say over what they do with their bodies.

I have often hesitated to engage this particular argument because it's nothing but a naked and shameless diversion tactic. The fact is that far less than one percent of all abortions have anything at all to do with the life of the mother. Same can be said for rape and incest. The vast, vast, vast majority of abortions are performed on healthy women who chose to have consensual sex. The pro-abortion camp does not want to talk about the vast, vast, vast majority of cases because that would require them to actually come up with an argument. Citing a hard case is not an argument. Hypotheticals are not arguments. Anecdotes are not arguments.

Be that as it may -- and even though the Ohio law and most other abortion restrictions do in fact make "life of the mother" allowances -- I will say something on this subject. And what I'll say is this: abortion has never saved a life. It has only destroyed lives. Abortion is, by definition, the destruction of human life. Despite the propaganda you hear from the abortion industry, Abortion is never necessary to save a woman's life.

Abortion is the direct killing of an unborn child. There is never a scenario, and never could be a scenario, where a woman's life will be saved by directly killing her child. In an abortion, a child is stabbed, poisoned, decapitated, or ripped to shreds. No mother has ever derived a physical benefit from her unborn son or daughter being torn apart or stabbed in the skull. Many women -- in fact, all -- have suffered physical, emotional, or psychological trauma because of abortion, but none have ever been spared such trauma through it.

As the over 1,000 obstetricians, neonatologists, pediatricians, and midwives who signed the Dublin Declaration have testified, there is never any medical justification for abortion. Now, it may indeed be necessary in some rare circumstances to deliver a baby early in order to save the mother. But the additional step of killing the child is not necessary, even if the child ultimately does not survive outside the womb.

Dr. Anthony Levatino, a former abortionist, explains that none of the abortions he performed "to save the life of the mother" were actually necessary to achieve that end. In fact, the abortion adds extra steps that can only put the mother in further danger. He gives the example of a woman who came into his hospital with severe pre-eclampsia at 28 weeks. The baby needed to come out or she could suffer a stroke at any moment. They quickly "terminated her pregnancy" by performing a c-section and delivering the child. Both the child and the mother survived.

Cutting the child to pieces would only have incurred more risk for the mother. It wasn't a necessary step. It never is. How could it be? If the baby has to come out, why would you ever need to kill it ahead of time? That's like driving to someone's house and shooting him in the head because you can't figure out any other way to get off the phone with him. The most direct and safest route would have been to simply hang up the phone. The most direct and safest route to end a dangerous pregnancy is to simply deliver the child. Indeed, the child has to come out of the mother either way. Why must it come out dead? How does the mother benefit from having a dead child removed from her womb as opposed to a living one? She doesn't benefit. Of course she doesn't.

Unfortunately, there are cases where an unborn child has to be delivered so early that he most likely will not survive. This is tragic and terrible, but it's not an abortion. If labor is induced because both mother and child will die otherwise, and the child dies anyway despite every effort to save him, an abortion has not occurred. The intention was not to directly take life but to save it. If those efforts fail, the doctors no more "aborted" the child than they abort a patient who dies during emergency heart surgery.

Abortion has never saved a life. It is not designed to. It is designed, instead, to preserve the lifestyle of the mother. A baby's life and her mother's life are never in competition. We are never required to "choose between the two," as abortion advocates often claim. What may be in conflict, however, is the baby's life and the mother's preferred lifestyle. Again, the vast, vast, vast majority of abortions are performed for reasons no more complicated than this. Ultimately, this is why all abortions are performed, even if the mother is tricked into thinking that there are nobler reasons behind it.

And, in that case -- in the case where a baby's life must be weighed against the convenience, comfort, and financial security of her parents -- I side with the baby. I put the life over the lifestyle every time. As should we all.

To see more from Matt Walsh, visit his channel on TheBlaze.

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