How many “pregnancies” actually put a teenage mother’s life at risk in New Hampshire? To hear liberals and their rent-seeking pro-abortion courtiers talk, creating life is so dangerous to the youngest and healthiest breeders in particular (underage girls) that no law suggesting that their parents have some clue their kids are having major surgery shall ever pass in this state because their young lives would be at risk.
They are, of course, not referring to their actual life, just their social life. But then, that might be part of the reason they are pregnant, no?
I mention it because HB 329, the latest “parental notification” law, just came out a State Senate committee OTP on a vote of 3-1. Passage by the full NH Senate seems likely which means Governor Lynch would have to revisit his promise to include parents in “the decision” of their minor age daughters to have an abortion as long as health and safety issues were addressed.
They have been addressed, even though there is very little evidence that this was ever actually an issue.
In the 20th century, deaths from complications of pregnancy have dropped from 850 per 100,000 pregnancies in 1900 all the way down to 7.5. That’s quite impressive. What has to annoy liberals is that most of that improvement occurred by 1982 without unlimited access to “life-saving abortions,” and without the state or federal pro-abortion democrats hindering parental consent before they were performed on minors.
The rate has hardly budged since 1982 so you can’t seriously claim that increased access to abortion is even a driving factor. Well, you can, but then you’d probably have some other motive.
Improved reporting initiatives in the 1990s did move the average figure up as high as 11.5/100,000 pregnancies but a significant portion of that was actually from deaths among older women who are more likely to die from complications of pregnancy. At age 35 the rate jumps to 21.6/100,000 pregnancies and for women over 45 it increases to 45.1/100,000.
In what has to be a proud moment for liberals, insisting that women’s lives are pointless and empty without a career, and the wholesale scorn heaped upon housewives and stay at home moms, (” what was I supposed to do, stay home and bake cookies?”) has pushed childbearing into the later years of a woman’s life. To a time where it is in fact, three to five times more likely to kill her.
That has got to be another win for progressive social engineering.
And it should also be of no concern to them that the leading causes of pregnancy-related deaths were embolisms or pregnancy-induced hypertension, with lack of prenatal care being a primary driver of most or all complications for pregnant women.
Read that again unless you are a liberal democrat. (They really don’t care.) Failing to identify complications early on was more likely to result in pregnancy-related death in those most likely to suffer it. Early notification equals more healthy moms and babies because they seek, are encouraged, or get treatment sooner.
And the CDC, I must point out, just happens to rate New Hampshire as one of the best states for prenatal care. So put together, if teenage girls were even at high risk (which they are not) hiding a teenage pregnancy could actually increase the risk of death given what little risk there may actually be, particularly here in New Hampshire.
More good news for the Granite State; according to the CDC, from 2000 to 2007, (2007 is the last year data was available) among the top ten causes of death for girls aged 13-17 in New Hampshire–those ages that would be affected by that horrible parental notification requirement–there are no recorded deaths due to pregnancy or complications from it.
While CDC data is not perfect, I’m left wondering why we never heard that before? It seems relevant. Is there some unreported in-state epidemic of pregnancy-related deaths that have gone unreported?
No? So where’s the fire? Why are we wasting years of legislative resources to prevent a non-problem for what seems statistically to be a non-issue? I’ll tell you why. Abortion-lobby money for state democrats.
Given the liberal democrat obsession with abortion and abortion services, and the large money trails from abortion advocates into the political campaigns of pro-abortion candidates in the state, this becomes less an issue about the health of the mother and more about left-wing politics for big money, out of state special interests who demand all abortions all the time.
The takeaway seems obvious. The biggest danger in this scenario continues to be to the life of the unborn baby, and the risk to democrats is that Parental notification might result in fewer abortions by providers like planned parenthood who, while they may not get most of their revenue from womb scraping still manage to turn 98% of all pregnant clients into abortion recipients. Must be one hell of a sales pitch.
Whatever the case, Parental notification puts no one at increased risk. And with all the added exceptions for “health and safety” included in the current bill, the ones democrats keep saying we have to have, any objection or even a veto of this bill guarantees that I am correct. This has nothing at all to do with safety or life and everything to do with pandering to a deep-pocketed, special interest democrat donors.
All data sourced at CDC.gov
