Abortion

In order to make an accurate approach to the question of abortion, we should start by a definition of it and its kinds. According to the Oxford’s Advanced Learner Dictionary, abortion is “the deliberate ending of a pregnancy at an early stage”. This means we are talking about the interruption of the developing of a potential human being when it is still inside its mother’s womb.

Takingthis into account, we can distinguish between two main kinds of abortion: natural, when it happens because of unintentional causes and usually happens in the third month of gestation; caused or induced, called so when it’s the result of an intentional effort (handling, surgery, drug use . . .) made in order to end the pregnancy. At the same time, this last kind can be divided into two: therapeuticabortion, which is done either when the mother’s life is at risk or in order to prevent the birth of a child with defects or serious incurable diseases that could prevent him from maintaining a normal life; and clandestine or criminal abortion, performed with the sole intention of removing an unwanted child because of social or economic reasons, such a single mother, poor families without enoughresources to maintain a kid . . .

There are different kinds of inducted abortion, more or less used depending on how many weeks of gestation the mother has gone through. To understand all of them, at first we have to focus on the baby’s development along time.

From zero to twelve weeks, the baby has developed all his arteries, including the coronary vessels. Therefore, thebaby’s body already has blood circulation and has a heart that beats from 110 to 160 times per minute. All blood cells are produced mainly in the liver and spleen, task that will soon be taken over by the bone marrow. As well, vocal chords are perfectly developed, and the child has already got crying reflexes. The brain is fully formed, and the child can feel pain. The fetus may even suck his thumb asa way of practicing. The thin eyelids cover the eyes, and will remain shut until the seventh month to protect the delicate optical nerve fibers.

In this range of time, the methods are as follows. The first one, suction (or aspiration) is the most common method of abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. General or local anesthesia is given to the mother and her cervix is quicklydilated. A suction hollow tube is inserted into the womb. This instrument is then connected to a vacuum machine by a transparent tube. The vacuum suction tears the fetus and placenta into small pieces, which are sucked through the tube into a bottle and discarded. The other way is called dilation and curettage (D&C). The basic difference is that in this case, the person in charge of doing itinserts a hook shaped knife (called curette) inside the vagina of the woman, cutting the baby into pieces. The pieces are scraped out through the cervix and discarded.

At eighteen weeks muscles lengthen and there comes to be an organization, the mother will soon start feeling the baby moving. As well, the fetus has the taste buds and may be able to savor. It has eyelashes and eyebrows, andit’s able to kick and grasp with his hands, as well as blinking, yawning . . .

In this range of twelve to eighteen weeks, the most used methods are dilation and evacuation (D&E); and salt poisoning. The first one is used up to eighteen weeks of gestation. Consists in, by introducing the forceps inside the vagina, dismember the child, making it a tangle and later taking it out of the womb.Most of the times, the skull has to be crushed and the spine snapped in order to be able to remove it. About salt poisoning, consist in, after more or less sixteen weeks, the doctor uses a needle to inject a strong salt solution through the mother’s abdomen into the sac, solution that is later swallowed by the baby who gets poisoned. The salt acts as a corrosive as well, burning the baby’s...