By Maureen Ferguson
Editor’s note. This appeared in the February issue of National Right to Life News. Please share this with your family and friends.
On the 50th anniversary of Roe v Wade, Joe Biden issued a proclamation parroting the abortion lobby’s disinformation surrounding the Dobbs case.
Let’s examine the Top Ten Falsehoods:
First: Thousands of women will die without access to abortion.
Earning “Four Pinocchios” from the Washington Post fact-checker, this claim is as false today as when it was manufactured pre-Roe. It is based on flimsy data from the early 1900’s, predating antibiotics and modern contraception.
Every pro-life law ever enacted contains a life-of-the-mother exception. Pro-lifers treasure the lives of both mother and child, and pro-life laws provide exceptions for medical emergencies.
Finally, if anyone is endangering women’s lives, it is the abortion industry with its relentless push for largely unregulated mail-order abortion pills for women and girls to take at home by themselves.
Two: Women will die from ectopic pregnancy.
This is the same as Lie Number One – and equally false.
Ectopic pregnancies are textbook examples of what life-of-the-mother provisions in pro-life laws contemplate. However tragic, they are nonetheless navigated by parents and physicians every day. Care necessary to save mothers’ lives is morally uncontroversial – and no pro-life legislation will change that.
Three: Pro-life laws will endanger women suffering miscarriages.
Doctors know the difference between miscarriage and abortion. This is deliberate misinformation.
Laws against abortion do not affect miscarriage management, just as laws against euthanasia do not preclude end-of-life hospice care. Laws against homicide do not preclude organ-donation. Any potential ambiguity about this is due to the abortion lobby’sirresponsible spreading of doubt and deception.
Four: Women will be thrown in jail.
Completely false. The pro-life movement has always viewed women as the second victims of abortion. Pro-life legislation has always protected both victims from the violence of abortion. Penalties in pro-life laws apply to abortionists, not women.
Five: After Dobbs, states will ban contraception and IVF.
This is the political lie of the hour. The abortion industry knows its preferred policy of unrestricted abortion until birth is extremely unpopular. So, post-Dobbs, they are desperately trying to hide behind more popular causes.
But the Supreme Court’s Dobbs majority anticipated this tactic and specifically stated that the ruling only applies to abortion, not contraception, not same-sex marriage, not anything else, because, their opinion said, abortion is different in that it destroys an unborn human being.
Neither Congress nor any state is considering such bans.
Six: We don’t really know when life begins.
This is silly. We knowexactly when human life begins. Biology textbooks are clear: a new human life begins at the moment of sperm-egg fusion. The distinct, biological identity of an unborn human from the moment of conception is as settled a scientific fact as gravity.
Preborn humans are incontrovertibly alive, but dependent – just as all of us are at some time in our lives – needing the love and care of others.
Seven: “Heartbeat laws” are deceptive – there is no heartbeat in early pregnancy.
This is where otherwise intelligent, educated people pretend not to understand modern technology.
Since the rise of the Texas Heartbeat Law, the abortion lobby and the media have tried to attack the “heartbeat” law without using the word “heartbeat.” We have witnessed a series of progressively sillier euphemisms – “electrical pulsing,” “fluttering,” “jumble of cells.”
Calling the law a “six-week ban” only reminds people that babies have discernible heartbeats at six weeks. In fact, at six weeks, the embryonic heart is beating about 100 times per minute.
Every pregnant mother in the last 30 years has heard her baby’s heartbeat. Pretending otherwise denies science, technology, and the lived experience of tens of millions of women.
Eight: Restricting abortion discriminates against women on the basis of sex.
This argument is superficially compelling until you realize it assumes that the male body is normative and, therefore, the female body and femininity itself are abnormalities or disabilities. It wrongly equates male-specific medical procedures like treatment for prostate cancer with female-specific abortion procedures, as if removing cancer is the same as removing an unborn child.
Nine: Pro-lifers don’t care about the mother or baby after birth.
This is projection. The same Texas legislature that passed the Heartbeat Law appropriated $100 million in assistance for mothers and babies.
Thanks to the pro-life movement, any woman in need can find help at 2,700 pregnancy centers and maternity homes by going to OptionLine.org, CareNet.org, LoveLine.com, StandingWithYou.org, or Aid and Support After Pregnancy.
Any woman suffering after an abortion can go to HopeAfterAbortion.com, HurtAfterAbortion.com, PostAbortionHelp.org, or Sisters of Life Post-Abortion healing retreats.
This charge is a lie anda slander. Pro-lifers offer pregnant mothers hope and care; abortion advocates offer violence and despair.
Ten: Women need abortion to be equal members of society.
It’s the reliance argument: without abortion, women cannot obtain educational success, achieve career goals, climb out of poverty, or build a successful family in the future.
This is empirically and plainly false. A Dobbs brief written by 240 women scholars provides mountains of evidence that women’s social and economic advancement over the past decades has not been dependent upon abortion access. The data show the expansion of women’s opportunities is attributable to changes in the education, equal pay, equal employment and civil rights laws, not the ability to abort.
We all know women who have overcome crisis pregnancies. Stories of hope abound. Sonya Curry writes movingly that she was in college, unmarried, pregnant and scared. She scheduled an abortion, but bravely cancelled at the last minute. That baby grew up to be Steph Curry, the NBA’s greatest shooter, who was at the White House last week celebrating his team’s championship.
Fortunately, the truths of science, the beauty of ultrasound images, the care of pregnancy resource centers, and the strength and resilience of women are counterweights to these falsehoods.
Editor’s note, Maureen Ferguson is a Senior Fellow for The Catholic Association. This appeared at Real Clear Politics and is reposted with the author’s permission.