A Chilean abortion advocacy group, Miles Chile, has released three satirical videos encouraging pregnant women to commit violence against themselves to effect “accidental” abortions if they do not wish to be pregnant. The disturbing campaign is a reaction to Chile’s Life-affirming laws (Chile is one of seven countries that does not allow children to be killed in abortion for any reason). In spite of the astounding maternal health statistics that have been linked to Chile’s eradication of abortion, which took place in 1989, abortion advocates have enlisted extreme tactics to promote their anti-Life (and plainly anti-woman) agenda.
One video, below, encourages women to throw themselves down a flight of stairs to abort their babies, while other “tutorials” teach women how to inconspicuously throw themselves into a fire hydrant or walk into oncoming traffic to achieve the same morbid result. Miles Chile is using the abortion-tutorial tactic to underscore the notion that, “an accidental abortion is the only kind of abortion that is not considered a crime” in Chile.
Although the tutorials are propaganda intended to raise positive sentiment toward the potential legalization of abortion in Chile, even like-minded abortion supporters have criticized the videos for appearing to be real, dangerous advice. The videos, they note, could pose a threat to pregnant women who may take the tutorials seriously and attempt to self-abort, doing irreversible harm to themselves in the process.
But, because Miles Chile is not really concerned with women’s health at all, criticism from their comrades may fall on deaf ears. As a matter of fact, the abortion-free nature of Chile so staunchly opposed by Miles has been strongly associated with the country’s outstanding women’s health statistics. According to a 2014 report from the Chile-based MELISA Institute (emphasis added):
[…]Chile displays a continuous decreasing trend of hospital discharges due to complications of abortions suspected to be illegally induced –represented by specific codes of the World Health Organisation classification– at a rate of 2% per year since 2001. In contrast, a decreasing trend was not observed in hospital discharges due to other types of abortion, such as spontaneous abortion or ectopic pregnancies, which have remained constant during the same period. The high quality of Chilean vital statistics indicates these findings are unlikely to be the result of an artifact of the registry system. Rather, a decrease in hospital discharges due to complications from illegal abortion appears to explain virtually all the reduction in hospital discharges due to any type of abortion in Chile during the last decade.
The Chilean experience represents a paradox in our times: even under a less permissive abortion legislation, maternal health indicators can be significantly improved by other factors, including a noteworthy reduction in mortality and morbidity associated to abortion.
Simply stated, Chile has seen only a positive uptick in maternal health indicators since implementing full protection to the preborn from abortion. So, who is really out-of-touch? The leaders who protect preborn Life, and maternal health by extension? Or, the anti-Life lobby groups who would sacrifice both on the altar of “abortion rights”?