By Dave Andrusko
Mary Ziegler, a professor of law at the University of California, Davis, is the Abortion Industry’s primary go-to source for an articulate pro-abortion response. Her writings appear in academic publications such as JAMA as well as the leading pro-abortion newspapers, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and, most recently, the Boston Globe. And that is in addition to her books, such as Reproductive Rights, Health, and Justice: Law and Policy and Roe: The History of a National Obsession.
Her argument in “Women’s stories may change the abortion narrative” is that American pro-abortionists are using the strategy employed by the pro-abortion movement in Ireland, a gameplan that won for them the complete elimination of protection for unborn babies. Ziegler writes
Irish activists experimented with a wide variety of strategies to test the sweeping interpretation of fetal rights associated with the Eighth Amendment: They went to the nation’s supreme court to establish a right to abortion in cases of extreme threats to health and life, and they litigated before the European Court of Human Rights, advocating for a right to information about abortion access and arguing that the state had a duty to make safe abortion available in the situations in which it was legal under Irish law. But these legal efforts made only a modest difference on the ground, and when pressed by international bodies, Irish political leaders argued that voters had never repealed the Eighth Amendment and still agreed with its basic message.
So, if these were contributing factors, what tipped the scales allowing the Abortion Movement to carry the day—the elimination of the pro-life Eighth Amendment– for pro-abortionists? “Storytelling, at the grassroots level and otherwise, was ultimately what made the biggest difference.”
Well…. Vehement anti-Catholicism was woven into many of the rabid attacks on the Catholic Church; it was an ugly sight. Also, the impact of the near-universal support of the Irish media cannot be stressed enough.
Back to the United States. There are other abortion “stories,” but these are told by pro-lifers. For example, the reality of coerced abortion is finally beginning to make a dent in the dominate (and tiresome) narrative about women freely exercising “choice.” Moreover, the high incidence of complication associated with chemical abortions, compared to surgical abortion, is acknowledged even by some pro-abortionists.
“Less widely publicized is the fact that, in other parts of the world, even pro-choice medical authorities have raised concerns about the safety threats to women of unsupervised abortions using mifepristone and misoprostol,” writes Dr. Calum Miller. “These risks include, for example, undetected ectopic pregnancies rupturing and causing major hemorrhages, or even legal risks – in the United Kingdom (UK), a woman was recently jailed after taking the pills to kill her unborn child at eight months of gestation. These threats include the risk of abuse and trafficking victims being subjected to abortions without their consent – or remaining unidentified as victims even in consensual abortions.”
And there are endless stories of women deeply regretting their abortions. That, by the way, explains the Abortion Industry’s full bore attacks on Abortion Pill Reversal. “Choice” is wonderful if the woman has no second thoughts, it’s terrible if she quickly begins to take progesterone to try to offset the impact of the mifepristone, the first of two drugs.
Prof. Ziegler ends on optimistic note (for the abortion camp):
Over the years, the antiabortion movement dealt Roe a death by a thousand cuts by pushing restrictions and carving out exceptions to abortion rights, all while telling a story about fetal protection that resonated on the right. But what happened to Roe could happen to Dobbs, and the Texas case is just the beginning.
By that she means [hopes] is that Dobbs—the decision that overturned Roe v. Wade—may in turn be overturned. But we didn’t work 49 years to save unborn babies and their mothers to allow that to happen.