This is what they want American women to endure

Funny how none of the fetophile zealots will ever say that they think a woman should be prosecuted for having an abortion. They know that none but the most rabid zealots will want to see women put in jail, or executed, for wanting to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. And that is where their logic cracks. Because if abortion is murder, then it is the woman who first decides to have one long before the doctor who performs the procedure is ever contacted, who premeditates the crime. So why the squishiness about prosecution?

That should be enough to expose these people for the misogynist hypocrites they are. But perhaps they don't need to endorse prosecution. Perhaps the wages of sin being mutilation or death will suffice for them.

Denise Grady writes in today's New York Times about the very real results of botched abortions where the procedure is not available -- in Tanzania:

Abortion is illegal in Tanzania (except to save the mother’s life or health), so women and girls turn to amateurs, who may dose them with herbs or other concoctions, pummel their bellies or insert objects vaginally. Infections, bleeding and punctures of the uterus or bowel can result, and can be fatal. Doctors treating women after these bungled attempts sometimes have no choice but to remove the uterus.

Worldwide, there are 19 million unsafe abortions a year, and they kill 70,000 women (accounting for 13 percent of maternal deaths), mostly in poor countries like Tanzania where abortion is illegal, according to the World Health Organization. More than two million women a year suffer serious complications. According to Unicef, unsafe abortions cause 4 percent of deaths among pregnant women in Africa, 6 percent in Asia and 12 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Reliable figures on abortion in Tanzania are hard to come by, but the World Health Organization reports that its region, Eastern Africa, has the world’s second-highest rate of unsafe abortions (only South America is higher). And Africa as a whole has the highest proportion of teenagers — 25 percent — among women having unsafe abortions.

The 120-bed hospital in Berega depends on solar panels and a generator, which is run for only a few hours a day. Short on staff members, supplies and even water, the hospital puts a lot of its scarce resources into cleaning up after failed abortions.

The medical director, Dr. Paschal Mdoe, 30, said many patients who had had the unsafe abortions were 16 to 20 years old, and four months pregnant. He said there was a steady stream of cases, much as he had seen in hospitals in other parts of the country.

“It’s the same everywhere,” he said.

On a Friday in January, 6 of 20 patients in the women’s ward were recovering from attempted abortions. One, a 25-year-old schoolteacher, lay in bed moaning and writhing. She had been treated at the hospital a week earlier for an incomplete abortion and now was back, bleeding and in severe pain. She was taken to the operating room once again and anesthetized, and Emmanuel Makanza, who had treated her the first time, discovered that he had failed to remove all the membranes formed during the pregnancy. Once again, he scraped the inside of her womb with a curet, a metal instrument. It was a vigorous, bloody procedure. This time, he said, it was complete.

This is what the anti-sex zealots of the right want for American women. This is their agenda for women here in the U.S. Do they think that making abortion illegal will stop the practice? It never has before, anywhere in the world. Why do they think the U.S. will be different?

We can therefore only assume that the real agenda, once you get past their phony rhetoric about human life, is punishing women who are unchaste. And it's high time we called them on it. Because there is no common ground with such people.