By Dave Andrusko
This past weekend I ran across a post a friend had forwarded to me sometime back but I had overlooked. “10 Abortion Myths That Need To Be Busted” was the headline of the story that appeared on the pro-abortion Huffington Post and Amanda Scherker was the author.
While we don’t have time to go through all ten, what’s interesting is that the “myths” are either, in fact, true statements that pro-abortionists pretend are otherwise, statements pro-lifers have not disagreed with for years, and/or are statements so un-nuanced that they require more than a sound bite to understand.
To take the middle characterization first, nobody who follows the issue thinks “Medical abortions — those performed using pills — are still fringe.” (By “medical abortions” they mean chemical abortions—RU486.)
Their numbers are growing, as NRLC’s Dr. Randall K. O’Bannon has written about repeatedly. Guttmacher reported (for 2014) that chemical abortions accounted for about 29.4% of the total. This represented an increase of 13.8% in just the three years since Guttmacher’s last study.
How could it be otherwise? The abortion industry has invested an enormous amount of time and energy and political muscle to legalizing and popularizing and encouraging the use of chemical abortions. That they are dangerous and often agonizingly painful to women is just sloughed off, just as the unborn baby’s body is sloughed off.
The ‘myths” that are, in fact, true statements are the usual tiresome assertions—that “Women who get abortions will regret it, and are more likely to suffer mental health issues”; “Fetuses experience pain during abortions”; and “The majority of Americans don’t think abortion should be legal.”
The truth is, as we have documented countless times, that a significant percentage of women suffer from any of a number of after-shocks (psychological and physical) from their abortions; that there is an abundance of evidence that by 20 weeks the unborn child would experience excruciating pain during the abortion; and that a majority of the public disagrees with the reasons almost all abortions are performed—and find them morally objectionable.
Are the common denominators to these “myth”? Put another way, why does Scherker cite these particular bogus “myths”?
Clearly because these true statements chip away at the foundational myths of the pro-abortion movement! Those are (1) that the impact of abortions is, at worse, neutral, and, in most cases, beneficial to women; (2) that the victim is painlessly disposed of “much like a miscarriage,” to borrow a pro-abortion talking point; and (3) that the American public is with them.
They must continue to peddle the line that opposition to abortion is much ado about nothing. Facing the truth is not an option for pro-abortionists.
In fact, to oppose abortion is to engage in a civic debate over the most fundamental of all question: who deserves the protection of the law and why?