By Dave Andrusko
The National Catholic Reporter is not a news source to which I direct NRL News Today readers very often. But remindful of the adage that even a broken clock is right twice a day, here are a few words about a piece written by Phyllis Zagano: “The Pro-Abortion United Nation.”
Zagano weaves together (in a mere 685 words) a number of important themes. For example,
- That you and I foot an unknowable but large fraction of the UN’s budget. Which to single-issue pro-lifers would be neither here nor there if the UN didn’t seem
- “to hire writers from the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984. The UN’s scary pro-abortion doublespeak pushes access to ‘medical abortion’ as a health issue worldwide.” By medical abortions what’s meant, of course, are chemical abortions—the two-drug RU486 abortion technique. What examples does Zagano offer? Glad you asked.
- She quotes the World Health Organization which puts it this way: “Recognizing the important role that medical abortion can play in women’s reproductive health, the WHO launched a research initiative to first understand the barriers to its use, and then to develop ways to overcome them and expand its provision with these goals as its focus of research, the initiative emphasized issues of high relevance in the local contexts where the different studies were to be conducted.” Zagano zeroes in on we taxpayers paying to “understand the barriers to [abortion], and then to develop ways to overcome them” and asks, “Give you a queasy feeling in the pit of your stomach?” This attitude toward women in the developing world, Zagano writes, represents
- “Two prongs of the pro-abortion fork” which “are stuck in the public’s eye: 1) All those poor people in developing countries need access to abortion; 2) Developed countries are backward in their ideas about abortion” (aka “often saddled with antiquated laws”). Neither is true. As we have written on numerous occasions, the claim that legalized (elective) abortion is necessary to prevent maternal deaths is a giant non sequitur. In fact, legalizing abortion in countries with underdeveloped medical facilities greatly increases the chance that women will die as a result of having an abortion.
The article is not perfect; this is the National Catholic Reporter that we’re talking about. But the thrust is right on the money.
Pregnancy is not a “disease,” abortion is not “health care” and “It’s just plain nuts” for “so much of the human race [to be] so bent on killing its young.”