Abortion ban brings bad memories.

Byline: GUEST VIEWPOINT By Edgar Peara For The Register-Guard

South Dakota's new law, which bans abortions except for pregnancies that threaten the life of the mother, calls to mind the days before the U.S. Supreme Court's Roe vs. Wade decision in 1973, when women were denied the right to control their bodies.

Such memories are easy for me. As a clergyman and counselor in a major American city, I was aware that 4,000 women a year entered our large public hospital after illegal, bungled abortions. Unable to find physicians to perform the procedure, women turned to incompetents who left them infected, mutilated and hemorrhaging.

Some were near death when they were admitted. Some had to have their reproductive organs removed. Others suffered infections that left them sterile. And some died as the result of botched or self-administered abortions.

The American Medical Association and seven other medical groups say that today's legal abortions do not cause either physical or psychological harm. An abortion is safer than having tonsils removed.

In those pre-Roe vs. Wade days, high school girls were expelled when they were found to be pregnant. If they returned after their babies were born they were on permanent probation, prohibited from participating in any extracurricular activities and barred from graduation ceremonies.

Many dropped out because of being ostracized, embarrassed, lonely and unhappy. They were thereafter handicapped in seeking employment and relegated to lives of poverty.

Abortion is a serious moral concern, not to be regarded as a form of birth control. Women don't choose abortion lightly. But their concern for the lifelong welfare and nurture of children leads them to abort. They have such a strong sense of love and responsibility for their potential baby that they want it to be raised with loving concern and promising opportunities for a good life.

They seek an abortion if they feel too young, too sick or too poor; if they are single or unable to be an adequate parent; or if they have too many children already or are in an unstable or unloving relationship; or if medical tests reveal the fetus to be abnormal.

Before Roe, doctors refused to perform abortions. One physician said a patient asked for the procedure and committed suicide when he refused. Later, he knew he could have easily helped this promising, beautiful woman and was angry with himself for being such a coward.

Before 1973, women with unwanted pregnancies were a segment of our society who suffered punishing discrimination. They were deprived of the fundamental right of owning their bodies and deciding if a pregnancy should continue or not.

Further, they were exposed to the dangers of losing their lives in an illegal abortion. The medical community was fully able to provide the help requested, but archaic and cruel laws prohibited doctors from doing so.

If the law before Roe vs. Wade, or the new South Dakota law, received strict interpretation, a woman could have RH blood factor, venereal disease, be a drug addict with a dozen children, be on relief, or be pregnant because she was raped by an idiot father and still be unable to have a legal abortion.

Opponents of abortion said the process is the murder of a baby. But a fetus until the seventh month of gestation does not have the brain activity our society judges to be a measurable sign of human life. If a healthy young man suffers a head injury in an accident that destroys his brain activity, his body is allowed to die - even though he could survive on a life-support system for years. Similarly, a fetus is not a person, or a baby, before it has developed the thinking capacity our society equates with personhood.

Do we have the humanity to sympathize with pregnant schoolgirls, rape and incest victims, drug addicts and other threatened women? Will we ensure that safe abortions remain available to those who choose to have them?

The Rev. Edgar Peara of Eugene was the co-founder, with the Rev. Spencer Parsons, dean of Rockefeller Chapel of the University of Chicago, of the Chicago Area Clergy Consultation Service for Problem Pregnancies in 1970.