As a Christian, I believe that abortion is a sin, but so is lying. Have you ever eaten so many Girl Scout cookies, Chic-fil-A nuggets, chips, pieces of pizza, or anything else that you really love to eat at 2 a.m. in Edmon Low on midterms week? Yeah, me too, but gluttony is also a sin. Do you ever check your ex’s new bae’s Insta/Twitter/Facebook? Me too, but hey, guess what? Jealousy is a sin, too. You know what else? God sees all sins as equal. Which means abortion is no more of a sin in God’s eyes than when you tell your roommate her shirt isn’t too wrinkly when it actually is.
Personally, abortion is something that I would never choose for myself, but not everyone has the same set of beliefs as I do, and that’s okay.
I used to think if we made abortion illegal, it would protect unborn babies from getting their choice of life taken away from them. Unfortunately, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that isn’t really what happens.
The way I’ve been looking at it recently is “if someone wants to do something, they’re going to figure out a way to do it”. Think of it in the same way with abortion. If a young girl gets pregnant and doesn’t want to tell her parents and doesn’t want to be pregnant- she’s going to figure out a way to terminate her pregnancy. I wish the things I’m about to describe weren’t common, but they are. According to the US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health, the most common methods of unsafe abortions are drinking toxic fluids, like bleach or turpentine, or “inflicting direct injury to the vagina or elsewhere—for example, inserting herbal preparations into the vagina or cervix; placing a foreign body such as a twig, coat hanger, or chicken bone into the uterus; or placing inappropriate medication into the vagina or rectum”.
As hard as that sentence was for me to read, I’ve heard these stories before. These things that girls will do to end a pregnancy not only kill the fetus, but oftentimes causes long-term medical conditions for these women. The number of women that are being hospitalized due to unsafe abortions is extremely high, like 5 million a year high. At some point I had to stop and ask myself, “What will making abortions illegal really do”? We hope that it will prevent abortions all together, but it won’t.
Think about it- if abortion is legal in some parts of the U.S. now, and there is still such a high number of injuries and deaths related to unsafe abortions, this number would just get bigger if it wasn’t legal anywhere in the U.S.. According to WHO (World Health Organization), a woman dies every 8 seconds from unsafe abortion methods. I wish women didn’t get abortions, I wish all babies got to live, but even if we make abortions illegal, babies are still going to die from home abortions.
If we make abortion legal everywhere in the U.S., I don’t believe the number of true abortions will really go up. Sure, we’ll see an influx in number of abortions, but we’ll probably see a decrease in the number of young girls that are being hospitalized from trying to do it themselves. I believe legalizing abortions will save the lives of girls who are so desperate to end their pregnancy that they’ll do anything to make it happen.
