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‘Premature Birth’
By Scott Harrup | November 6, 2009
National Public Radio broadcast a news story the other day on the impact of premature births on the U.S. infant death rate. A related Associated Press article at npr.org notes that “about 1 in 8 U.S. births are premature” and “the U.S. infant mortality rate is higher than in most European countries.”
Thinking back to the broadcast and reading through the online article, I’m glad to see the concern of medical professionals and government agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the health of our nation’s babies. But here’s a disturbing reality.
America still aborts more than 1 million babies a year. According to the Guttmacher Institute, “nearly half of pregnancies among American women are unintended, and four in 10 of these are terminated by abortion. … In 2005, 1.21 million abortions were performed, down from 1.31 million in 2000. From 1973 through 2005, more than 45 million legal abortions occurred.”
What would the U.S. infant mortality rate look like if these numbers were part of the equation?
But that’s just the point. Babies who are blessed to inhabit the wombs of mothers who want to carry them to term have the support of a U.S. medical professional network dedicated to ensuring their survival. Should they not survive, they are considered “babies,” and everyone expresses regret for their deaths. Those babies who are tragically aborted, however, are relegated to the status of “fetus,” and their mortality is not even a footnote in the national infant mortality rate.
The CDC’s Marion MacDorman notes in the AP article above, “Once the baby [emphasis added] is born too early, we do a good job of saving it. What we have trouble with is preventing the preterm birth in the first place.”
All pro-life Americans would agree, there are at least another million “preterm births” each year not even being considered that we’d like to prevent in the first place.
Topics: News |
