Whitney MacDonald: Defunding won’t end abortions

Regarding the Sept. 16 news article “Budget cuts out Planned Parenthood funding”: The effort to defund Planned Parenthood made for simple-minded political fodder and ignored the complexities of the abortion issue.

The truth is that as long as women can get pregnant, there will be unwanted pregnancies. If there are unwanted pregnancies, there will be women trying to terminate them. Like it or not, this is the world we live in.

Abortion is legal in our country because poor women were dying and being mutilated by back-alley abortionists while rich women were quietly paying lots of money for theirs.

I was recently in Brazil where abortion is illegal. This does not stop abortion. It has created a very lucrative business for doctors who provide private abortions and for back-alley abortionists who mutilate and kill poor women.

For these reasons, I am pro-choice. I also want to end abortions. I want every child to be consciously conceived and brought into the world by a family who can love and support him or her.

The process of reducing abortion is an educational, spiritual, economic, emotional and psychological one. Working together will reduce abortion more than divisive rhetoric. Ultimately, Planned Parenthood prevents far more abortions than it performs. Defunding will only make the situation worse.

This story was originally published September 25, 2015 at 4:31 PM with the headline "Whitney MacDonald: Defunding won’t end abortions."