MUSASHINO, Japan, December 8, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – Police may file charges after the death of a 23-year-old newlywed mother against a hospital that allowed an unqualified doctor to perform an abortion.
The abortion took place two days after the woman was married July 6.
According to the Japan Times, the “fetus was diagnosed as abortive,” and on July 8 the unborn baby was terminated. The woman died at home on July 14, reportedly of heart failure.
Abortions are legal in Japan when the pregnancy risks the physical, mental or economic health of the mother, has the father’s approval, and is performed by a doctor approved professionally by the regional medical association.
The husband, who is unidentified (though he appeared and spoke at a health ministry press conference on Tuesday) found out that the doctor who aborted his wife’s baby was not approved. But he was permitted by the Mizuguchi Hospital to do abortions and in fact continued to do them after the woman’s death, performing 12 between May and September, until he left the hospital in October.
“I have no words to express my anger,” the husband said at the news conference. “I hope they will be severely punished. We were supposed to live happily together and this happened in less than two weeks.”
The hospital has issued an apology while maintaining that the woman’s heart condition and not the operation was responsible for her death. It read in part: “We admit and take into our hearts our lack of awareness. … We reflect on how our conduct has resulted in a fatal incident and we will do our utmost to prevent any reoccurrence of similar incidents.”
The hospital initially explained the abortionist was filling in for another doctor on sick leave. The husband’s lawyer told the news media that “there was no urgency in this abortion surgery” and so no reason for an unqualified doctor to perform it.
While it is a repeated claim by the abortion lobby that illegal abortions are less safe than legal abortions and kill mothers, according to studies of the downstream impacts of legal abortions, they lead to marked increases in maternal mortality.
One such study, published in 2000 by Finland's National Research and Development Center for Welfare and Health, examined the health records of more than 9,000 women of reproductive age who died between 1987 and 1994. Women who had had abortions in the year before their death were 3.5 times more likely to die of any cause than women who bore their children live, 60 percent more likely to die of natural causes, seven times more likely to commit suicide, four times more likely to die accidentally, and 14 times more likely to be murdered.
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