Komen and Abortion: The Real Question Isn't Choice. It's Safe Choice


February 8, 2012
By Joe Rothstein
Editor, EINNEWS.com

This may come as a surprise to many people:

Women didn’t begin having abortions because the U.S. Supreme Court said it was permissible.

In fact, women have been terminating pregnancies for at least as far back as recorded history will take us. The ancient Egyptians did it. The Greeks and Romans did it. Abortions were common in ancient China, and they still are in modern China and more than 125 other countries. Worldwide, more than 40 million abortions are reported each year.

Roe v Wade did not trigger all of this. Repeal of Roe v Wade would hardly dent the overall numbers. According to the Guttmacher Institute, which collects such data, there were 1.2 million abortions performed in the U.S. in 2008. Adjusted for population growth, that’s about the same number as in pre-Roe days.

If a woman is determined to have an abortion most likely she will have it. The real question is whether that abortion will be medically safe. Abortion is a health issue, not a political issue.

The abortion procedure, when performed by those who are medically trained, working in sterile environments, poses little risk to the woman. But if medically safe conditions are not available, maternal mortality skyrockets. Case in point: South Africa legalized abortion in the early 1990s. Its maternal mortality rate dropped by 91 percent in just five years.

That’s why the Komen Foundation’s decision to withdraw funding from Planned Parenthood was so stunning. Komen is a health organization. It exists solely to advance the cause of women’s health. That’s Planned Parenthood’s reason for being as well. So when Komen bowed to political pressure disguised as a congressional “investigation” of Planned Parenthood the shock waves totally rattled the health community.

And it should continue to rattle the health community---the entire community, not just women.

Those who would return to the days when abortion was illegal in the U.S. march under the banner of “pro-life.” But if they ever do overturn Roe v Wade or succeed with other strategies that shut off medically safe abortions to American women and girls they will be condemning tens of thousands of those women and girls to death. Before Roe v Wade there was a thriving black market abortion industry in the U.S. Take away access to safe abortions and there surely will be again.

Women and girls who can afford to go Sweden or Spain or Canada or other nations where abortion remains legal would pay only the price of the time and travel. Those without those resources would be condemned to brutal choices, unnecessarily risking their lives and sterility with whomever they might find available around the corner.

There are legitimate political questions related to abortion rights. Over the years opponents of safe and legal abortions have blocked the use of public money to pay for abortions, banned military hospitals from providing abortion services, set up stringent health requirements for abortion providers and so on. While safe-choice advocates may disagree with many of these decisions, they are proper topics for political debate and decision as long as they don’t defeat the constitutionally protected right to abortion itself.

In the Komen episode the triggering event was a sham “investigation” into whether Planned Parenthood was properly using federal money that helps pay for a wide range of women’s health services. In fact, the entire right wing attack on Planned Parenthood seems to have migrated from a tight focus on abortion rights to a wider effort to restrict contraception itself.

Opponents have used a cloud of unwarranted criminal suspicion to politicize issues that by any reasonable standard are questions of health, not politics.

While Komen retreated from its original decision to cut off support for Planned Parenthood, its follow-on policy statements have been ambiguous about future support. They also provide what appears to be an open invitation for opponents of safe abortion and contraception to take over local Komen chapters and do locally what Komen tried to do from its national headquarters.

For a major health organization like Komen to succumb to these political pressures is an ominous development that should ring alarm bells for those in the medical community, and for the rest of us who believe medical issues are health issues, not fodder for political agendas.

(Joe Rothstein can be contacted at joe@einnews.com)