Abortion Ban Kills a Young Mother

In Poland, a woman is dead, a child is motherless, and a husband is widowed. In Bolivia, an 11-year-old rape victim may be forced to give birth. This is the reality of "pro-life" laws.

“Sofia,” 12, sits on a mattress in the bedroom she shares her with family in Tegucigalpa, just weeks before she gave birth to a baby girl after being raped. | Nichole Sobecki/VII

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Here are the universal truths about abortion bans: They kill women. They orphan children. They force little girls into motherhood. They turn every miscarriage into a crime scene. They threaten women’s lives and they curtail all of our freedoms.

The latest woman to die for absolutely no reason was a 30-year-old being identified only as Izabela, a Polish mother of a little girl. She was 22 weeks pregnant and, it seems, wanted to have a second child. But her fetus that lacked amniotic fluid, dooming the pregnancy.

The hospital refused to give her an abortion. She died of sepsis — a lethal infection that can occur when an embryo or fetus dies and isn’t expelled or removed from the body.

Poland is currently under the control of conservative Catholic authoritarians, and they changed the nation’s already-restrictive abortion law last year to be even stricter, deeming unconstitutional abortions in the case of severe fetal abnormality (abortion was already only legal for fetal abnormality and in cases where the pregnant woman was raped or her life was at risk). And it’s not just abortion. Because the Catholic Church does not condone IVF, a conservative Catholic party in Poland also tried to ban an array of fertility procedures. They succeeded in brokering a cruel compromise: Only married or cohabitating heterosexual couples are legally allowed to get IVF procedures in Poland. Single women who want full custody of and responsibility for any child they might have through IVF aren’t just barred from starting the process — they are not entitled to their own frozen embryos.

The claim of both the Catholic Church and the global anti-abortion movement is that abortion is never necessary to save a pregnant woman’s life. That’s true because, well, they say it’s true — even in the face of mountains of evidence of women dying from pregnancy complications whose lives could have been saved with safe abortion, the Catholic Church and other drivers of anti-abortion laws, including members of the Republican Party, simply deny reality. Women who die preventable deaths may be politically inconvenient for the anti-abortion movement, but women’s lives were already acceptable collateral damage.