THE LAW TEACHES!
In 1973, the Supreme court said state laws against abortion were illegal --that abortion was a woman's constitutional right --and thus "right." I've heard girls defend abortion by saying, "It's legal!" The whole case was based on a fraud --Jane Roe (pseudonym) was not pregnant by rape as the women's advocacy groups (NOW) claimed. She did go on to have the baby because the case wasn't settled until it was too late for her to have the abortion she wanted. Her daughter and she are both pro-life advocates today!
One defense given for legalizing abortion was that so many women died at the hands of back-alley abortionists before 1973. Is that a true statement? It is according to this liberal site: http://socialistworker.org/2005-2/562/562_06_Abortion.shtml:
One 1932 study estimated that illegal abortions or complications from them were the cause of death for 15,000 women each year. Current, more conservative, estimates of the death toll still stand at between 5,000 and 10,000 deaths per year.Some of these deaths were the result of the abortions themselves, but many more were from infection and hemorrhaging afterward. Because of the fear of being punished and socially ostracized, many women--and their doctors--kept their real condition a secret.The right wing has gone on an organized campaign to discredit such statistics, going as far to claim that deaths from illegal abortion were "just" a few dozen a year--and that the anecdotes of items such as coat hangers being inserted into women's bodies to cause an abortion are false. In reality, coat hangers were just one horror among many during the years of illegal abortion.So approx. 1.5 million babies killed a year on average since 1973 vs. 5 to 15,000 alleged deaths of unwed women (double the number for their babies killed with them) by illegal abortion attempts annually? before legal abortion. Someone once did a cemetary and death records study and couldn't find 5-15,000 unwed women of child-bearing age per year who could be presumed to have died by illegal abortions, even factoring in the secrecy. BTW, CA doesn't report their abortion records and they probably have many.
All I can tell you is that I went to a small town/rural township school --with 40 in my graduating class, we fulfilled the stats of 1 out of 40 unwed teen pregnancies for white girls --and this one ended in a marriage which did not last --but she was at least not a single mother without any child support or a father to her child. I never knew anyone who had to go to a home for unwed mothers from which many adoptions were made. I did know a lot of adopted children. I also didn't know anyone who had an illegal abortion --and usually such secrets weren't very secretive. We all knew who was rumored to be "going all the way," and it was considered immoral to do so --even by the unchurched. Sex ed. warned us about STD's and we all had heard of condoms as an attempt to prevent pregnancy and disease. Those were the options to unwed pregnancy in those days. Abortion was never a school debate or paper assignment --and no one I knew thought it was "right" or argued for that view.
In the 1970's, Planned Parenthood hit our schools with their Rocky Mtn. PP brochure about how "no longer was there a dichotomy between good girls and bad --no longer was there a double standard whereby "all boys did it" and "good girls didn't." The brochure told how grandma used to say, "Keep your knees together, " but this was no longer necessary. Because we have birth control --and abortion.
Even then, "Good girls didn't" and " immoral, weak-willed girls did" wasn't the standard that PP alleged. AFter all, the shot gun wedding was evidence that the males were held to account --though sometimes the parents preferred the girl go have the baby and give it up --seeing no future in the baby's father. There was more compassion then PP admits --and eventually a realization that the father shouldn't get to stay in school and keep playing football while the pregnant girlfriend got expelled. It was around that time that schools decided to help unwed mothers stay in school, even providing childcare in some cases. One school nearby was known for its pregnant girls on the Homecoming Court.
The sexual revolution started after the advent of The Pill, with legal abortion in '73 --and the hippie revolution with its free love emphasis. There were only a few real hippies in society in the 60's but by the 70's the culture was on its way to the free-love, drug-using culture it became --the sexual revolution.
There were not nearly so many fatherless youth or "broken homes," in our day. There was no trend to keep one's baby as a single unwed teen mother. Steadily dating couples were just as tempted then as now to have sex --but casual intercourse among relative strangers and new daters was very unlikely and uncommon. And before the pill, in the 50's, everyone was afraid of pregnancy, so much more time was spent on the preliminaries of intimacy --guys didn't expect to go all the way with casual dates, and as much as they pushed for the "foreplay" activities, they typically would stop themselves before they made a baby because society was likely to make them marry the girl. Many did marry their first loves-- or 2nd or 3rd at least. Promiscuity was not encouraged as normal, the way it is today. And divorce was not as easy to get --many would change their minds in the waiting period.
"God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance and have eternal life."--the Bible
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