{"id":221608,"date":"2020-04-20T08:40:29","date_gmt":"2020-04-20T13:40:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liveaction.org\/news\/?p=221608"},"modified":"2024-09-20T12:38:50","modified_gmt":"2024-09-20T17:38:50","slug":"emergencies-pregnancy-c-section-save-lives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/emergencies-pregnancy-c-section-save-lives\/","title":{"rendered":"In emergencies during pregnancy, C-sections save lives. Abortions don’t."},"content":{"rendered":"
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Abortion advocates argue that late-term abortions need to be legal because without them, women will die. Their reasoning is that, in a life-threatening emergency during pregnancy, a doctor needs to be able to commit an abortion<\/a> in order to save the mother’s life. But in the scenario of a life-threatening emergency for a pregnant woman late in pregnancy, a doctor is going to perform a C-section, not an abortion. C-sections<\/a>\u00a0save lives, and intentionally killing a child in the womb is never medically necessary<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I have firsthand experience with this. Early in my third trimester, during my first pregnancy, I had a typical screening when the nurse realized I had gained 10 pounds from my last appointment, just two weeks earlier. My blood pressure had also begun to spike. A couple of days later, I was diagnosed with pre-eclampsia. My husband, at the time in the Marine Corps, was deployed to Afghanistan and wasn’t scheduled to come home for over a month. Because my symptoms were mild at the time, we agreed to try to wait as long as we could, in the hopes that my husband would come home in time.<\/p>\n

READ:\u00a0Abortion textbook reveals why women get late-term abortions\u2026 and it\u2019s not for health<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

My husband made it — barely. He came home the day labor had to be induced. We greeted each other at the homecoming, went home, and then headed to the hospital that evening. By then, my vision had begun to get blurry, and I had pitting edema everywhere. My arms, my legs, even my hands and my face, were swollen and puffy. After being induced, my blood pressure was getting so high that I had to stay on my side, because laying on my back would make my pressure spike even higher.<\/p>\n

And yet, the entire time I was in labor, my son wasn’t tolerating the contractions well. His heart was continually decelerating, and he would not descend. After 16 hours, his heart rate plummeted to 60 beats per minute. We made the decision to do an emergency C-section — and it worked. I survived. My son, Benjamin, survived too, although he was born blue and not breathing. But that C-section saved our lives.<\/p>\n