Abortion
Definition:
The medical termination of a pregnancy at any point before the full delivery of the baby.
Statistics:- approximately 46 million abortions take place each year worldwide – 126,000 abortions per day, 87 each minute, almost 2 every 3 seconds
- the average is 1 abortion per woman worldwide
- in many developing countries, abortion is accepted as a primary method of birth control
- careless abortions account for 80,000 maternal deaths globally per year
- approximatley 6.4 million aborutions occur anually in the U.S
Resource:
Personal Impact Story
Tears fill Jenny’s eyes. My hand is on her stomach. She lies on the bed, bent over in pain. I ask her to describe her dream:
“Put your ear to the earth. Listen. Do you hear how they cry out?”
The woman who says this stands in front of me on the hill, she is dressed in white and a veil covers her face. I hesitate at first. Slowly, I move onto my knees, and place both hands on the ground. When I put my ear to the ground, the earth goes cold.
I hear a sound, faint and frightening, like voices screaming underwater. I close my eyes, trying to make out the words. When I hear what the voices say, I push away from the ground, terrified. I open my eyes and look toward the woman, but she is gone.
A strong wind blows my hair into my face. Disoriented, I look at the ground, fight the wind so that I don’t fall over. I scream when I realize that tiny little bodies cover the ground. Babies. Soon I realize that the bodies are the ground: fingers, limbs, discarded body parts as far as I can see. Mounds of little, dead bodies, an entire landscape of human remains.
I want to run, but can’t move. I want to scream, but have no voice. The wind howls, cuts into my skin, dries my eyes so that I squint. Suddenly the wind stops. I look to the ground again, and in unison, thousands of little heads turn toward me. Some heads are not fully formed, lack eyes sockets, others have bleeding, open wounds like someone has cut open their skulls. Then they speak. Their words stop my breath – the voices I heard deep inside the earth:
“Give us our souls. Return our stolen years.”
I faint into dark dreams, and when I wake, the woman stands in front of me again. There is a gaping hole where her stomach used to be, empty and dark like a cave. Blood flows out from the wound and down her legs. She removes her veil and my heart stops. I’m looking into my own face. The woman, somehow, is me. She smiles weakly and says, “We have added to the dead.” I move to help her as she falls into my arms. She closes her eyes, whispers, “There are so many.”
Jenny turns in the bed and looks at me. It is the first time she has looked at me since she told me she had the nightmare again.
“Don’t worry, Jenny,” I say, “it was only a dream.”
*the above story is based on facts but is fictional, for actual statistics order 30 Days of Prayer for the Voiceless today
