thinking scientifically about abortion
Did you know that....
Abortion stops a beating heart? A baby's heart is beating at 21 days after conception and she already has her own blood type that is often different from her mother's. Almost without exception, by the time a woman chooses to abort, her child has a beating heart. By the time she has missed her period, her baby has a beating heart.
Today’s ultrasound technology allows us to see all the body parts of a fully formed tiny human being in the womb, including a beating heart, at 10 weeks after fertilization.
Leading embryology books explain that at the moment the male sperm unites with the female egg a single cell called a zygote is formed. This cell marks the beginning of each of us as a unique individual with our own complex genetic makeup which gives us our own unique eye color, height, gifts, and personality.
In the FIRST month after fertilization, the brain, spinal cord, and nervous system are already established. Muscles legs, arms eyes, and ears are forming and showing.
At 9 WEEKS after conception, more than 90% of the body structures found in a full-grown human being present.
In the 2nd MONTH, a baby begins to make swimming strokes in the mother's fluid. The baby’s chest, jaw, teeth, and taste buds are formed. The infant has brain wave activity and 40 sets of muscles are working.
By the 3rd month, the gender of an infant in the womb is evident. Sleeping, waking, and stretching muscles in the head and toes for exercise happens regularly. All of the organs of the baby are functioning by week 12.
By the 4th month, when a mother can begin to feel her baby's movement, the baby is 8-10 inches long and can hear outside the womb.
In month 6, the infant in the womb is developing lung function and sweat glands. 70% of babies born during this period live outside the womb.
At 7 months an infant can hear, touch, taste, and open his/her eyes in the womb.
Science of Abortion
If a woman decides to abort her child in the first three months in the womb, a vacuum is used to suction the child's parts through her body and into a hose to be thrown away.
After 14 weeks Dilation and Suction Cutterage or Dilation and Evacuation may be used to abort a child. After suctioning tools or forceps are used to pull body parts and crush bones since by now they have calcified in an infant in the womb. Baby parts are put in a basin and counted to make sure the baby is out of his/ her mother.
If an abortion is conducted in months 4-9, labor is induced in the mother with drugs and she will deliver the dead baby. To insure that an infant is delivered dead, he/she is injected with a potassium chloride directly into the heart. This is called an Induction or Prostaglandin Abortion. If the child is not dead upon delivery, it is left to die without medical intervention.
During Dilation and Extraction, forceps and scissors are used to grasp the infant's legs and enter the skull to crush and force the delivery of an infant's brain. A vacuum 29 times stronger than a household vacuum is then used to suction a child out of his/ her mother's womb.
The Positives of Pregnancy
Having a child often causes a woman to grow as a woman. It is common to begin to see herself, the world, and others with more love and femininity after she has had and loved her own child. Often women grow spiritually as well when they realize the beauty and mystery of pregnancy. The fragility and the resilience of life is seen simultaneously in pregnancy. Many women find that it is easy to become awed and humbled by the reality that just by being pregnant she is taking part in the miracle of creation; she knows that she could never create or knit together her baby's life on her own, someone greater than herself has created the new life within her. That mysterious loving Creator has willed her baby to come to be and is sustaining the life within her through mechanisms and processes she could not have dreamed up on her own. No matter how planned or unexpected her pregnancy, a mother senses that her baby exists as part of a greater plan and greater love than she ever imagined.
Pregnancy is a hidden blessing to a woman's body in many ways. The brain changes of pregnancy increase a woman's motivation, ability to multitask, cope with stress, handle fear, emotional intelligence, resilience, and efficiency.
Symptoms of illness often lessen and disappear during pregnancy never to return. One of the Co-Founders of Heartbeats Matter had cervical cancer cells during pregnancy that disappeared after pregnancy and have not returned.
Oxytocin released during breastfeeding and pregnancy is now seen as promoting calmness and sociability in mothers.
Fetal cells passed to the mother during pregnancy are now believed to have amazing effects on a woman during pregnancy and for her entire life! In a process called microchimerism, fetal cells become part of a mother's various bodily cells and promote defense against infection and disease including some cancers. Many fetal cells stay in a woman's body and form new blood cells and repair damaged ones.
There is a evidence of lower incidence of Alzheimer's, Rheumatoid Arthritis, and Multiple Sclerosis in women with high fetal cell count.
The Mental and Emotional Pain of Abortion on Women
Abortion hurts women. Sometimes immediately and sometimes later in life. Physical problems caused by abortion may include shock, serious infection, death, cervical laceration, severe bleeding, perforation of the uterus or cervix, and intestinal or surrounding tissue damage. Often complications of abortions or deaths women from abortion are not reported by women, families, or hospitals because of the shame and horrors that arise once complications or an awareness of the many horrors happening from abortion to the woman and her loved ones. Often, events surrounding abortion clinics and patients are sad and dark and covered up so all can hide from the evil of abortion. Truth and goodness are attracted to light and honesty. Darkness and evil are not. Evil needs darkness and silence to hide.
There is a 60% higher chance of miscarriage to women who have had an abortion.
There is a 6x higher rate of suicide in women who have had an abortion than women who have carried their child to term.
There is also a very high incidence of relationship problems, PTSD, eating disorders, drug and alcohol problems, and sexual dysfunction in women who have had an abortion.
Teens are 6 times more likely to commit suicide after having an abortion but this does not have to be.
A woman can not undo the death of her own child from abortion, the world will never know the small and large acts of love and joy and hope that one child may bring to the world. What peace, cure, encouragement, and love might the one unborn child you know about bring to the world that if you choose abortion, you and the world will never know?