By Dave Andrusko
Just before I started writing this story, I forced myself to watch “Medication abortion battle could embolden right-wing war on science”. The gist of pro-abortion Alex Wagner interview with even more pro-abortion Michelle Goldberg is—as the headline makes clear—if you give anyone who does not subscribe to “science” an inch, they’ll take the entire track and field.
From Wagner’s and Goldberg’s perspective, this is just the latest phase of the “war on science.” Conservatives and pro-lifers will go on and on attacking “settled science” because they operate in an “alternative reality,” fueled, Wagner laments, by “Christian doctrine.” (By the way, I wonder how long it took Goldberg to come up with “library of lies”?)
No doubt if they had a few extra minutes they would have bashed APR–-abortion pill reversal. That’s okay because filling the gap is Michael Belmonte, M.D. who announced in an opinion piece for the Colorado Sun that “There is no such thing as abortion ‘reversal’.”
Anything besides the same tired old tropes? Actually, no. He trots out the medical establishment—ACOG and the AMA—tireless proponents of anything related to abortion, to tell us such laws “undermines this relationship by requiring physicians to mislead and misinform their patients with messages that contradict reality and science,” to quote AMA President Patrice A. Harris, M.D., M.A.
Then for good measure, Belmonte bashes Pregnancy Help Centers which he refers to “anti-abortion centers, sometimes known as crisis pregnancy centers.”
The anti-abortion centers pushing abortion “reversal” do not empower pregnant people but rather shame them about their sexual and reproductive health care decisions. They target vulnerable people who are looking for trusted and sound medical advice to steer them away from having an abortion. They use deceptive tactics to discourage people from making fully-informed decisions about their health.
What an attack, heavy on scorn and light on facts. These women come to Pregnancy Help Centers, not because they are “targeted” but because they deeply regret a decision made in haste.
The success rate for abortion reversal is in the 60%-68% range and uses a technique that is an update application of a treatment used since the 1950s to combat miscarriage.
And so it goes—mischaracterizations on top of distortions on top of lies, the standard pro-abortion handling of “science.” No surprise.