No one wants to help her raise the baby, they all look down on her for getting pregnant at such a young age. The seventeen-year old was forced to drop out of school and will most likely live on welfare for the majority of her and the child's life. This baby now grows up poor, in a bad neighborhood, has no father, and has a bad relationship with its mother. If abortion was legal, the young girl would have her life handed back to her in five minutes, she could learn from her mistakes, finish school, get a good job, and wait until she is mentally, emotionally, and financially able to raise a family. .
In the early sixties, a sixteen-year old girl had gotten pregnant when gang-raped at her prom. She was forced to deliver the baby because abortions were illegal. While in labor, she kept screaming about how the perpetrators had gone to jail for only six months. What about her sentence? For nine months, she was forced to carry a child against her will. .
Two thirds of Americans are in favor of abortions. 43 percent of women will have had an abortion by age 45, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Today, the procedure is so safe that of the more then one million abortions performed each year, only a handful result in death. In fact, abortion now has a far lower incidence of maternal mortality then pregnancy. About thirty-years ago, when abortion was illegal, an estimated 200,000 to 1.2 million illegal abortions were performed annually. Out of that, up to 10,000 women died from them each year. Illegal abortions were also tremendously expensive. In the 1950's, the going rate in New York City was about $500, the equivalent of about $4,000 today. Some women were so desperate that they"d starve themselves just to save the money. Those who could scrape together the cash found that it bought them substandard care. .
Illegal abortion doctors (and sometimes even the women themselves) were known to use knitting needles, crochet hooks, parts of coat hangers, and other crude materials that did awful damage to the women's bodies.