Oddly, some lawmakers seem to treat a woman's desire to protect her health and sometimes even her life in the face of the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth as trivial or selfish. Several state legislatures have recently passed laws banning safe medical procedures used for abortions without allowing exceptions to protect the health of the pregnant woman. These legislatures have made clear that a woman's safety is less important than her role as a vessel for the embryo or fetus. The U.S. Supreme Court, in Stenberg v. Carhart , intervened and countermanded this kind of law in Nebraska, but only by a bare minority, 5-4 vote. In other words, the highest court of the land is poised to swing, with one new appointment, to a balance in which women from some areas of the country may be forced to carry an embryo or fetus to term regardless of the serious damage that pregnancy and delivery might do to their health.
Abortion is far safer than carrying a pregnancy to term.
Death occurs in 1 of 100,000 abortions performed during the first 20 weeks of pregnancy, but 88 percent of abortions occur within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. Only 1.5 percent of abortions occur after 20 weeks. So the risk of maternal mortality is at least seven times greater than the risk of death resulting from safe and legal abortion. Obviously, maternal mortality isn't the only issue determining reproductive rights and behavior. If women were determined to be completely safe and risk-free, we would probably be better off, statistically speaking, never having children, let alone getting pregnant.