A follow-up to:
Vision Forum, Samaritan Ministries Take Extreme “Pro-Life” Position on Ectopic Pregnancies
Following the previous post about Vision Forum’s plans to advance their thesis regarding surgical treatment for tubal pregnancy before confirmed death of an unborn baby as the ethical equivalent of elective abortion, several insightful questions have been presented in different areas around the blogosphere including the NLQ Forum. They are worth noting.
The discussion raised some interesting questions about the actual risk (morbidity and mortality) related to ectopic pregnancy as weighed against the chance of a non-tubal ectopic pregnancy producing a live birth. Refer to this HERE at Under Much Grace which includes some great diagrams and statistics from sources including the CDC and Lancet.
Most notably, ectopic pregnancy accounts for 6-9% of all maternal deaths in the US. Assuming that these statistics also apply to other developed countries and those countries that do not provide state-of-the-art care to their citizens, this translates to a rough single year death rate of 25,000 worldwide (in 2008 based on Lancet’s estimate) due to ectopic pregnancy.
And the odds of a baby from non-tubal ectopic pregnancy surviving the pregnancy? One in 60 million. That means that worldwide (assuming a general birthrate of 134 million annually for the past 30 years), only one such birth occurs every 6.7 years, based on a now current and somewhat stable global birth rate.
Vision Forum will laud one baby every 7 years while 25,000 mothers die in one year? Hmmm.
This information out of Lancet and from the CDC paints quite a different picture than Samaritan Ministry’s publications when they reproduced Vision Forum’s new dogma.(I think Vyckie’s karma ran over their dogma!)
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In the name of “Right to Life” Quiverfull moms could lose their lives
In June of 2008, Vision Forum posed the following question from their Witherspoon School of Law and Public Policy on its website: “If abortion is the murder of a human being, is it biblical to oppose all abortions?” The organization addressed this topic in a series of blog posts on the matter, determining definitively that tubal ectopic pregnancy did not justify surgery to remove the fatally compromised fetus along with a pregnant woman’s fallopian tube.
Despite the medical fact that tubal pregnancies prove to be fatal to the fetus in all cases, the Vision Forum group determined that any surgery which ends any ectopic pregnancy to rescue the mother constitutes an elective abortion, unequivocally qualifying as a utilitarian decision which amounts to the murder of the already terminal fetus. The group also improperly downplayed the incidence, morbidity, and mortality associated with tubal pregnancy.
Though the Catholic Pro-Life position supports surgical intervention in the case of tubal pregnancy to save the mother, Vision Forum’s dangerous position continues to spread throughout sectors within the Evangelical Christian community.
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Shrouded in darkness, clothed in a veil and punctured by hints of light. This would adequately describe my childhood if all that had happened to me were the effects of a typically abusive home life. It was however, not a normal childhood that I had lived.
Think of the darkest corner of your mind…that place where all else ceases to exist but pain. Couple that place, in your heart, with feeling like you were in a dank prison cell that has cold cement walls and minimal light fills your day. Perhaps you may witness a flicker of light through the window high overhead, or maybe a friendly word from the guard outside of the iron bars. A visitor would come once in a blue moon, a warm and nourishing meal but seldom. This is the place where my childhood and adolescent years especially, left me. And I wasn’t put in this prison from actions of my own choosing; I was placed there by a lapse in the judicial system, for it wasn’t I who had committed that crime. This is what my life as a child raised in the Homeschooling/Quiverfull Movement felt like and regretfully, its painfully true.
I was considered to be a part of the “Pioneer” homeschooling movement that began in the early 1980’s. My mother had decided to keep me at home after she had come into contact with another homeschooling mother from the rural town that we had moved from. We moved to St. Louis, MO in the fall of 1986, and the main motivator on the part of my mother to homeschool me was fear (you will hear me mostly refer to my mother, because the home in which I came from was mainly a matriarchal one). Fear of ungodly influences, fear of the unknown, and fear of “losing” her daughter to a world that she trusted so very little.
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