No organization that promotes or even condones abortion can justly claim either to represent the best interests of women, or to protect them from violence or discrimination.  Abortion is violence against women, and any culture, government or policy that tolerates it discriminates against them.

That abortion is bad for women - physically, emotionally or socially - is not the best reason to oppose the vile practice.  To argue this case may be seen to be sacrificing the moral high ground.  Abortion is properly rejected as a moral rather than a practical issue.  It is wrong because of what it does to the baby, irrespective of its effects on the mother.

Nevertheless, there are two good reasons to make this argument.  The first is pragmatic:  If practical considerations can save more lives than moral arguments, then the only moral course is to further the practical one. It would be criminal to allow more babies to be killed because they weren’t to be saved for the “right” reasons.

The second is political:  the inherent corruption of the progressive agenda should be highlighted whenever possible in order to undermine it.  The hypocrisy of the left is nowhere more evident than in its relentless promotion of abortion at all costs – costs borne primarily by women.

By routinely rejecting or simply ignoring studies that suggest links between abortion and negative health consequences for the mother, many supposed advocates for women reveal that their true advocacy is for abortion itself, not for the women affected by it.

There is reasonable medical data to implicate abortion in physical heath risks to women including:  pain; hemorrhage and infection; complications related to anesthesia; infertility or difficulty in carrying later pregnancies to term; higher rates of heart disease; increased incidence of breast cancer; and septic shock.

Women’s mental health is at issue as well.  Numerous studies have connected abortion with subsequent guilt and depression, anxiety, substance abuse, suicidal thoughts, and post-traumatic-stress disorder (PTSD). 

Yet, the abortion community rejects all of these links out of hand.  Pro-abortion voices argue that all such studies are flawed. But try as they may to ignore the issue, some cases of individual harm are irrefutable, like the recent suicide of a young British artist (specifically over her guilt at having succumbed to outside pressure to abort her twins) and the latest septic shock deaths attributed to the abortion pill RU-486. 

When forced to acknowledge these cases, abortion lobbyists will claim that far more women are harmed by clandestine, “unsafe” abortions than by the supposedly risk-free, sterile, modern medical procedure they advocate.

But this is not the case. An abortion by its very nature cannot be inconsequential to a woman’s body. The usual method of achieving one involves the violation of her body by a surgical instrument.  And a chemical abortion throws the body into a violent upheaval.  In even the easiest cases, mifeprex (the Plan B abortion pill) causes side effects like nausea, abdominal pain, fatigue, headaches, dizziness, breast tenderness, vomiting and diarrhea. In many places where abortion is legal, like in Russia, women carrying viable fetuses are routinely aborted by injecting them with prostaglandins that provoke a painful miscarriage.

And even if the percentage of immediate or dramatic complications to the mother is reduced by the legality of abortion, the vastly increased number of procedures being performed under the shelter of legality increases the total number of women suffering harm.

In any case, people who advocate the taking of human life are by definition not the most reliable judges of harm.  Does no one question the wisdom of entrusting women’s health to people who regard human life as a mass of disposable tissue?

At the very least, when they argue that policy should not be made on a few potential extreme cases, pro-abortion forces are trying to have it both ways.  The percentage of abortions “necessary” for rape or incest is minute, yet this worst-case scenario is habitually used to deflect any attempt to limit the availability of abortion.

Even if we accepted that only a small percentage of women who have abortions suffer mental or physical harm from doing so, there are so many abortions that this is quite a number of women. 

Again, they will have it both ways.  The actual number of women harmed by so-called “back-alley abortions” is infinitesimal compared to the millions of young lives sacrificed to protect against this possibility.

In any case, whether those harmed are many or few, all of them are women.

Women suffer at both ends of the procedure, as far more than half of the babies aborted around the world are female, particularly in certain regions.

Female babies are singled out for abortion.  This harsh truth puts women’s groups in an uncomfortable position.  They must condemn sex-selection by abortion, but on what grounds can they do so? It is the height of hypocrisy to demand that women be able to do anything they want with “their bodies” and then complain when they abort girls.  Are they girls, or are they the mother’s body?  Fortunately for them, liberals specialize in eating their cake and having it too.

Of course, female fetuses are girls, often targeted for destruction specifically because they are girls.  UNICEF calculates that India alone loses around 7,000 girls every day by abortion. 

It seems that women are not the issue.  Abortion is the issue.

When abortion on demand is the goal, the psychological state of the mother with regard to her pregnancy is an important factor to consider.  By including mental health in the “health of the mother” exception to limits by gestational age of the fetus, abortion advocates succeed in getting viable fetuses aborted at the mother’s request. If protecting women were the real goal, the mother’s psychological state related to an abortion would also be taken into account.

When abortion on demand is the goal, abortion rights groups push the bounds of legality and common sense to protect women from “pressure” to give birth – pressure from parents, from men, from pro-life groups.  If protecting women were the goal, studies showing that most women who undergo abortion feel pressured to do so would demand action.

If protecting women were the goal, policies that relieve men of all responsibility for the pregnancies that they contribute to creating would never be considered. 

Feminists insist that the right to decide whether or not to abort increases women’s power in society.  But it is precisely the abortion culture that turns pregnancy into “a woman’s problem.”  The existence of abortion as a “choice” puts de facto pressure on a pregnant woman to become – by an often painful, wrenching and even dangerous procedure - something other than what she is: a woman who is carrying a child inside her body as a result of sexual intercourse with a man. 

Whose interests are really being furthered?