by Kelli
In countries where abortion is currently illegal, abortion advocates tend to exploit the “hard cases” (rape, incest, life of the mother) to use as weapons in their battle to liberalize abortion law.
The “women’s health” movement’s end goal isn’t really the betterment of women in general – it’s the removal of all roadblocks to abortion. And countries who resist the worldwide death march are often under immense international pressure to change their stance on the sanctity of human life.
Case in point: El Salvador, where, as Fox News reports, “girls aged 10 to 19 account[ed] for nearly a third of all pregnancies in the country last year.”
Read that again. Ages 10 to 19.
More from Fox:
Under Salvadoran law, it is a crime to have sex with a child under the age of 15, but activists say the law is frequently flouted, citing official figures that show 1,540 girls under 15 became pregnant in El Salvador last year.
The offense carries a prison sentence of between 14 and 20 years, but few perpetrators are sent to jail.
[Mario] Soriano [of the country’s health ministry] said a 1998 total ban on abortion has led many pregnant girls to contemplate suicide or a backstreet termination rather than risk rejection from their families, friends and teachers.
“A pregnant girl is often discriminated against. She can find herself kicked out of the house and dumped by her boyfriend, so family is not seen as a source of help. She’s also expelled from school because she’s seen as setting a bad example to other pupils,” Soriano said.
Wow, sounds like the solution would be to actually enforce the laws and perhaps put forth some educational and outreach efforts to help these young women, who are obviously being victimized. But the “women’s health” movement has a different idea. Soriano continues:
El Salvador’s abortion law is one of the most restrictive in the world. At the health ministry, we’re aware of the need to modify the abortion law.
So let’s get this straight: the law is flouted, perpetrators are walking the streets freely, and pregnant girls – not their rapists – are the ones who are discriminated against and ostracized. And the solution is abortion?
How would killing innocent parties help these young women?
The article goes on to say – only as an afterthought to liberalizing abortion law – that perhaps the government should also try to address the rape issue with Salvadoran men. Well, there’s a thought.
So no, I would argue that after 16 years of an abortion ban, this is NOT what’s driving these pregnant teens to suicide.
What’s driving them to suicide is the culture that won’t allow them, as women, to stand against their rapists without fear of reprisal. It’s the culture that ostracizes pregnant teens instead of helping them. It’s the culture that treats rape victims as “bad examples” and second-class citizens. It’s the culture that calls a preborn child conceived in rape “the rapist’s baby” and “cursed” instead of viewing that baby as a person, wholly separate from his/her father and his crimes.
These are the factors that drive women to desperation.
Legalizing abortion would not save a single one of these young women from demoralizing abuse. In fact, it may subject them to it even further, as evidence of the crime can easily be “covered up,” as we’ve seen right here in America.
The liberal “wisdom” of the day insists that children are “sexual beings” (thanks, Alfred Kinsey) and that maybe pedophilia and incest aren’t as harmful as we once thought… and yet, these twisted “experts” have left and will continue to leave broken children in their wake – children whom they were supposed to protect and nurture, not treat as sexual objects.
Killing the children of these victimized children is not the solution. Death is not the solution to death.
[Photo, bottom left, via Orphan’s Promise, one organization helping to provide housing for teenage moms in El Salvador; top photo via archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com]
From Patheos, November 14:
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.