By Dave Andrusko
Last night as I was finishing up the May digital edition of National Right to Life News, I ran across a post a friend had forwarded to me sometime back but which I had inadvertently placed in the proverbial circular file.
“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.
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 statements so un-nuanced that they require a post three times as long as this one to rebut.
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. And there is no reason to believe the percentage hasn’t increased.
How could it be otherwise? The abortion industry has invested an enormous amount of time, 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.
Why does Scherker cite these particular bogus “myths”?
Clearly because these true statements must be discredited less they chip away at the foundational myths of the pro-abortion movement! Those genuine myths include (1) that the impact of abortions is, at worse, neutral, and, in most cases, beneficial to women; (2) that the victim in a chemical abortion is painlessly disposed of “much like a miscarriage,” to borrow a pro-abortion talking point; and (3) that the American public is with them.
To oppose abortion is to engage in a civic debate over the most fundamental of all questions: who deserves the protection of the law and why?
Pro-abortionists must continue to peddle the line that opposition to abortion is much ado about nothing. Why?
Because facing the truth is not an option for pro-abortionists, and can never be.