A 14-year-old girl and her unborn baby are both dead in Malawi after police said the girl took herbs to induce an abortion.
Malawi 24 reports the 14-year-old student from Dedza, Malawi was five months pregnant.
Dedza Police Sergeant Cassim Manda said the girl lived with her grandmother, but she never told her family about the pregnancy. Police said the girl had a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old boy in the town.
An initial report from the hospital says the girl died of pregnancy complications caused by the herbs, according to the report.
Police said they are looking for the person who sold the herbs to the girl.
Legal or not, abortions are not safe for mothers or unborn babies. The purpose of an abortion is to kill a baby in the womb, but sometimes mothers die, too. Abortion activists often down-play the risks of legal abortions and claim they are extremely safe; but research suggests otherwise.
In 2008, the Centers for Disease Control reported more than 400 women died from legal abortions in the United States, including 12 that year.
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However, the numbers likely are much higher. Some states do not report their abortion data to the CDC, and the abortion industry does not always report complications to the state, even when required to do so.
World-wide, it is not known how many women die along with their unborn babies in abortions.
Recently, medical groups representing more than 30,000 doctors in America emphasized that abortions are not “essential” medicine. Abortion complications include infections, blood clots, hemorrhaging and an incomplete abortion. Abortion risks include future preterm births, suicide, anxiety/depression and death.
It also is not true that legal abortions are safer than childbirth. Studies from Finland, Norway and Denmark have found the opposite. A large-scale 2012 study out of Denmark found a significantly higher maternal death rate after abortion compared to childbirth.
Growing research indicates that access to basic health care, not legal abortions, is what really helps improve women’s lives. For example, in 2018, Michelle Oberman, a Santa Clara University law professor, told the Atlantic that she was surprised when she began doing research on abortion in El Salvador. Because abortions are illegal there, she said she expected to find hospitals full of women dying from botched abortions, but she did not. According to Oberman’s research, better medical care is one of the main things leading to fewer maternal abortion deaths.
A Washington Post fact check also found what pro-life advocates have been saying for years: that, in the United States, few women died from abortions in the decade prior to Roe v. Wade, and a rise in the use of antibiotics appears to be the biggest factor in the drop in maternal deaths, not legalized abortions.
LifeNews Note: File photo.
