Abortion Myth # 15

MYTH: "Pro-lifers are a bunch of religious fanatics trying to impose their faith on everyone else."

TRUTH:

-While it’s true that most pro-lifers are religious believers, so is the population as a whole, at least in the United States [see here].   Even if pro-lifers tend to be more observant than their fellow citizens, they adhere to a moral tradition that the vast majority shares.

-Also, the public arguments pro-lifers make against abortion are rooted in natural law and concrete scientific fact. The most fundamental pro-life argument is that science proves that unborn babies are both alive and human from the moment of conception, and so to destroy them is, by definition, the taking of a human life. The taking of innocent human life is always wrong in and of itself, and if we can declare some human lives expendable, then none of us has a clear right to exist.

-Since the pro-abortionists can’t produce any facts or scientific evidence that unborn babies are not living human beings, they need to create a philosophical definition such as “personhood” that is designed to exclude living humans who don’t meet certain subjective standards (brain activity, ability to feel pain, emotions, viability, etc.). Some also use quasi-theological arguments, such as that unborn babies do not yet have souls: I recall one “pro-choice” cleric, not a Catholic, who relied on the etymological connection in many languages between “breath” and “spirit” to argue that we don’t have souls until we are able to breathe (notice that the pro-life argument doesn’t use or need the concept of the soul). They also use emotional arguments to obscure the injustice done to aborted babies.

-Religious believers have the same right to try to persuade their fellow citizens as anyone else; if their fellow citizens don’t find their arguments persuasive, they don’t have to go along.  To paraphrase Saint John Paul II, we propose, we don’t impose.

-In the United States the purpose of the First Amendment to the Constitution is to protect religious believers from the state, not the other way around. Certain opinions are not prohibited simply because they have a religious basis.

-Just because a law corresponds to religious convictions does not make it an imposition of religion.  Murder, theft and all sorts of other crimes are condemned in the Bible and in Church teaching, but I don’t hear anyone calling for the revocation of those laws on that basis.

-The abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement, and many similar movements for social improvement were led by believing Christians; should we reject the laws that resulted from these as an “imposition of religious faith”?

-There are agnostics and atheists who nonetheless recognize the injustice of abortion, such as the atheist writer Nat Hentoff, or the abortionist and NARAL founder Bernard Nathanson, who was still an atheist when he changed to a pro-life position (only later did he embrace the Catholic Faith).

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Essential Pro-Life Resources:

Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments (link)  

The Elliot Institute (link)  

National Right To Life Committee (link)  

Care-Net (link)

The Nurturing Network (link)


To See The Entire Abortion Myths Series Click HERE 

Abortion Myth # 4

MYTH: "Most abortions are wrong, but exceptions should be made in cases of rape or incest."

TRUTH:

-The paramount argument against abortion is that intentionally taking the life of an innocent human being is an intrinsically evil act; if we say that it's permissible for a woman who has been raped to kill an innocent child, we have abandoned the very foundation of the case against abortion.

-Aborting a child conceived by rape does nothing to punish the perpetrator but sentences an innocent child to death.   Rebecca Kiessling says:

Did I deserve the death penalty? My “crime” was being conceived through rape.  So the next time you hear people talking about “exceptions” to abortion for rape or incest, think of me.  I am that exception. (Rebecca’s web site here)

Rebecca Kiessling 

 -Very often the abortion is arranged by the perpetrator of rape or incest, against the wishes of the pregnant girl or woman, to cover up his crimes and to allow him to continue them (see The Elliot Institute here, and theunchoice.com).

-Abortion does not bring healing to a rape victim.  “Studies that examine risk factors (here) for psychological problems after abortion show that women  with a history of sexual assault or abuse are more likely to have difficulty coping after abortion.” (The Elliot Institute)

-Other findings by the Elliot Institute:

-Nearly 80 percent of the women who aborted the pregnancy reported that abortion had been the wrong solution.

 -Most women who had abortions said that abortion only increased the trauma they were experiencing.

-In many cases, the victim faced strong pressures or demands to abort.  43 percent of rape victims who aborted said they felt pressured or were strongly directed by family members or health workers to abort.

-In almost every case where an incest victim had an abortion, it was the girls’s parents or the perpetrator who made the decision and arrangements for the abortion, not the girl herself.  In several cases, the abortion was carried out against her expressed wishes, and in a few cases, without her being aware that she was pregnant or that an abortion was taking place.

-None of the women in their study group who gave birth to a child conceived in sexual assault expressed regret or wished they had aborted instead.

-Compassion demands that family, friends, Church and society do all they possibly can to support a woman in this incredibly difficult situation.  Creating another innocent victim is never a solution.

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UPDATE: Just ran across this article on Lifesite News: "Priest conceived in rape: I forgave my father and heard his confession."

UPDATE: A recent post from Darlene Pawlik, another woman conceived in rape herself, and whose first child was also conceived through rape: "Kicking the Vulnerable to the Curb"

Essential Pro-Life Resources:

Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments (link)  

The Elliot Institute (link)  

National Right To Life Committee (link) 

Care-Net (link)

The Nurturing Network (link)

To See The Entire Abortion Myths Series Click HERE

Abortion Myth #13

MYTH: "Legalized abortion is necessary for the protection of women’s rights."

TRUTH: Abortion demeans and exploits women.

-Pregnancy is a natural, healthy state for women; it is the most significant difference between women and men.  Treating pregnancy like a disease implies that there’s something wrong with the nature of women's bodies and therefore with simply being a woman.  The group Feminists for Life says in their Debate Handbook:

When women feel that a pregnant body is a body out of control, deviant, diseased, they are internalizing attitudes of low self-esteem toward the female body.  These attitudes contradict the rightful feminist affirmation of pregnancy as a natural bodily function which deserves societal respect and accommodation.

-It is also natural for women to want to protect and nurture their children; to destroy their own children when they are most in need of protection violates an essential part of women's nature.

Mother and Child, by Frederic Leighton

-Abortion denies the most basic right, the right to life, to hundreds of thousands of unborn women every year.

-Most women who abort do so because they believe they have no choice: many are coerced, and they are often abused and threatened with violence, with loss of employment or educational opportunities, or with other adverse consequences if they don’t abort (see http://www.theunchoice.com/coerced.htm ). Shouldn't we protect a woman's right not to be forced to kill her own children?

-Legalized abortion empowers irresponsible men, because it enables them to exploit women sexually without having to accept the responsibilities of fatherhood.

-Pro-abortion activists fight strenuously at every turn against laws requiring women be given information about abortion and its alternatives.  What about women's right to make informed choices?

-The original feminists (Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul, for instance) opposed abortion on the grounds that abortion was a crime against women as well as their children.  Alice Paul said “Abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women.”

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Essential Pro-Life Resources:

Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments (link)  

The Elliot Institute (link)  

National Right To Life Committee (link)  

Care-Net (link)

The Nurturing Network (link)


To See The Entire Abortion Myths Series Click HERE 

Abortion Myth # 12

MYTH: "It’s not wrong to abort 'fetuses' because they are not yet persons"

TRUTH: “personhood” is a subjective criterion, dependent on the opinion (and often the convenience) of whomever has the power to decide who is a person and who is not; it has no objective or scientific basis.  Therefore:

Prof. Peter Singer: even newborns are not "persons"with a right to life

1)      A common pro-abortion argument is that the unborn are not technically persons under the law, and that it is therefore permissible to kill them.  This is a false argument because the law cannot make us human beings; that is an objective reality regardless of what the law says.  If it were true, then there was nothing wrong with the mistreatment and killing of African slaves in the United States before the Civil War, because they were not full persons under the law; likewise Jewish people killed in Nazi Germany.

2)      Criteria offered for philosophical definitions of personhood that exclude the unborn also apply to other people who have been born, and whom the proponents would not advocate killing.  For instance:

-          Consciousness – We all lack consciousness when we sleep; some people are unconscious for long periods in comas.  May we kill them?  Also, we don’t really know how early we acquire “consciousness”, but unborn babies do exhibit extensive mental activity well before birth.

-          Dependence on the mother’s body-  Newborns are not much less dependent than the unborn, and actually require much more conscious effort from their care-givers than unborn babies, a dependence that diminishes only gradually over a number of years.  If dependence renders someone a non-person, we should also be free to kill very young children or anyone else who is seriously disabled.

-          Viability – that is, the baby’s ability to survive outside the womb.  Viability, also, is a subjective term: it is a measure of our ability to care for newborn babies, not something inherent in the babies themselves.  We can keep much younger premature babies alive today than we could just a generation ago. And again, this is an argument for killing anyone who is unable to survive on their own.

-          Whether or not the baby is wanted -   It is a measure of how debased the arguments for abortion have become that some people seriously put forth the proposition that some other persons wanting you can determine whether or not you are a human being.  Shall we “abort” homeless adults if there is no family to claim them?

3)      The only objective, rational, and incontrovertible criteria for determining “personhood” are being A) alive and B) human.  From the moment of conception, whether we call them blastocysts, embryos, or fetuses, unborn babies meet both of these requirements.  They are indisputably alive (contrary to Roe vs. Wade, there is not, and has not been for the past two centuries, a scientific “debate about when life begins”); they are also genetically complete, and already have all the genetic material they will need, everything they will ever need, in fact, except food and protection.

4)      It follows that if we can declare living human beings in the womb non-persons, then we have the power to declare other people non-persons as well.  This is already happening in regard to people in the final stages of life, and in some places to the very seriously disabled, if not yet in law at least in practice.  We even see apparently respectable (!) “authorities” such as Princeton Professor Peter Singer argue for the right to kill newborn babies.  None of us are safe from a state that can declare entire categories of human being expendable.

(Randy Alcorn's Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments provided much of the material for this post)

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Essential Pro-Life Resources:

Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments (link)  

The Elliot Institute (link)  

National Right To Life Committee (link)  

Care-Net (link)

The Nurturing Network (link)


To See The Entire Abortion Myths Series Click HERE 

Abortion Myth #11

MYTH: “Pro-lifers don’t care about women, and do nothing to help babies after they are born.”

TRUTH: The reality is just the opposite – the abortion industry offers women little beyond destroying their children and taking their money, while pro-lifers actually do quite a lot for women before during, and after their pregnancies.  Consider the following:

Photo from cradlemyheart.org

-Abortion clinics (even “non-profits” such as Planned Parenthood, see here) charge women a fee to abort their babies, and make millions of dollars from abortion every year.  Pro-life pregnancy resource centers, in contrast, offer their services for free and are staffed by volunteers who donate their time and money.  There are thousands of pregnancy resource centers, both independent and affiliated with larger networks such as Care-Net [link], and they outnumber abortion clinics by a wide margin.

-From the Life Site summary of Planned Parenthood’s 2013-2013 annual report: “In 2012, abortions made up 93.8% of Planned Parenthood’s pregnancy services, while prenatal care and adoption referrals accounted for only 5.6% (19, 506 [as opposed to 327,166 abortions]) and 0.6% (2,197), respectively.  For every adoption referral, Planned Parenthood performed 149 abortions.”   

-Contrary to misleading statements from pro-abortion sources (including President Obama), Planned Parenthood performs NO mammograms.

-Pro-life volunteers provide numerous services both before AND after the baby is born, including free maternity and baby clothes, supplies, free or low cost medical and legal assistance, adoption referrals, parenting support and assistance, and child care.  An increasing number of pregnancy centers offer free ultrasounds. Some pro-life organizations, such as The Nurturing Network [link], even provide help finding employment, housing, and education opportunities for women.

-Pro-life volunteers have helped numerous women seeking peace after the trauma of abortion through programs such as Project Rachel and Rachel’s Vineyard.  Abortion providers offer nothing comparable.

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Essential Pro-Life Resources:

Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments (link)  

The Elliot Institute (link)  

National Right To Life Committee (link)  

Care-Net (link)

The Nurturing Network (link)


To See The Entire Abortion Myths Series Click HERE 

Abortion Myth # 10

MYTH: “Abortion doesn’t kill a child, it just terminates a pregnancy; after all, the unborn isn’t a human being, it’s just a clump of cells.”

TRUTH: The unborn is, by any objective measure, a human being from the moment of fertilization. Every abortion kills not just a "clump of cells", but a human being.

First, a “being”, that is, a living entity:

- Jerome LeJeune, the professor of genetics who discovered the chromosome pattern of Down Syndrome, was simply expressing the nearly unanimous scientific consensus when he said “After fertilization has taken place a new human being has come into being.”

-When the U.S. Senate judiciary committee invited pro-abortionists to present experts to testify about when life begins, they were unable to produce even one expert witness to specifically state that life begins at any point other than conception or implantation (from Pro-life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments).

Not only is the unborn indisputably alive, he or she is incontestably a human:

-The living entity in the womb has human DNA; were a lab to test a DNA sample, it would be indistinguishable from that of a newborn, a twelve year old or a sixty year old.

-From the first moment of fertilization, the entire genetic blueprint for a unique individual is already present; the child’s sex, hair and eye color, height  and skin tone are already determined.

-Before the earliest surgical abortions the unborn child already has every body part and organ he or she will ever have (females already have all their own eggs in their ovaries).

The unborn child is not a part of the mother’s body: no part of the mother’s body has different DNA or blood type, or its own heart lungs or liver.

The unborn child is simply a human being at a particular stage of development, as is toddler, an adolescent, or an adult.  The only objective, verifiable scientific conclusion is that human beings begin their lives at conception.

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Watch an amazing 3D ultrasound video of an unborn child at 14 weeks after conception posted by Dr. Rafael Ortega Munoz:

Essential Pro-Life Resources:

Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments (link)  

The Elliot Institute (link)  

National Right To Life Committee (link)  

Care-Net (link)

The Nurturing Network (link)


To See The Entire Abortion Myths Series Click HERE 

Abortion Myth # 9

 MYTH: “It is cruel to bring children into the world when they will be unwanted and abused.  Every child should be a wanted child.”

Ludwig von Beethoven

TRUTH:

There is no logical or moral argument for killing an unborn child to save him or her from potential abuse; there are actually quite a few fallacies in the statement above:

-          What is truly cruel, and always wrong, is to take an innocent human life.  Killing is the most extreme form of abuse.

-           We are all “brought into the world” when our life begins, at conception; it’s too late to prevent it well before the earliest abortions.

-          It is also wrong to place a value on someone’s life because of how much another person, even their mother, wants them.

-          Accordingly, it is no more “compassionate” to kill an unborn child than it is a two year old, or for that matter, a ten year old. If a parent truly doesn’t “want” their child, the child can be put up for adoption because . . .

-          Every child is “wanted” by somebody: there are over a million families waiting to adopt at any given time.  There are lists of families who will gladly adopt babies with any sort of medical condition and from any ethnic background.

-          “Everyone agrees that children should be wanted . . . When it comes to the unborn, the pro-choice position is captured in a different slogan: ‘Every unwanted child a dead child.’” (Randy Alcorn, Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments)

-          Countries that legalize abortion report sharp increases in child abuse.  In the first ten years after the legalization of abortion in America, child abuse increased over 500%.  (U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services Report, National Study on Child Abuse and Neglect Reporting, the American Humane Association, 1981 & 1991; 1977 Analysis of Child Abuse and Neglect Research, Us Dept. of H.E.W., 1978)

      

-          Moreover, it makes no sense to destroy someone now because of a lesser hurt that may never happen, or whose actual impact is impossible to predict.

-          Many people experience abuse or other forms of deprivation in childhood and still have happy and successful lives.  The above statement implies that only comfortable lives are worth living.

-          Do a Google search of “famous people not aborted” or a similar phrase and you will find lists of well-known people who were born into neglect, deprivation or abuse, such that many people would have considered it more prudent to abort them.  On these lists you will find names such as Beethoven, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jazz singer Ethel Waters, Steve Jobs, even, oddly enough, pro-abortion stalwarts such as Cher and Barack Obama.  Was it “cruel” to allow these people to live?

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Essential Pro-Life Resources:

Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments (link)  

The Elliot Institute (link)  

National Right To Life Committee (link) 

Care-Net (link)

The Nurturing Network (link)

To See The Entire Abortion Myths Series Click HERE

Abortion Myth # 8

MYTH: “A compassionate response to abortion that respects the diverse opinions on this issue is to be ‘personally opposed but pro-choice;”; after all, it’s wrong to try to impose my morality on others. (The "personally opposed but . . ." formulation was most famously expressed by Catholic governor of New York Mario Cuomo in a speech at the Catholic University of Notre Dame in 1984; since then numerous self-described Catholics in public life such as U.S. Secretary of State and former presidential candidate John Kerry and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi have adopted the same posture)

TRUTH:  Like many of the other Abortion Myths, the statement above is logically and morally incoherent; consider the following:  

Mario Cuomo: "personally opposed" BUT . . . not really

-There is nothing “compassionate” about allowing some people to hurt the innocent and defenseless.  Is it compassionate to be “pro-choice” on child abuse, or murder, or terrorism?

-If you are personally opposed, what is the reason? If it is because you know that abortion extinguishes an innocent life, how can you defend the “right” of others to perpetuate the killing?  If it’s not the taking of human life, why be opposed at all?

-As we have seen in other posts, all laws involve moral judgments.  Do we also refrain from imposing on others our judgments about rape, drunk driving, or even non-violent crimes like embezzlement and fraud?

-Those who opposed the constitutionally permitted practice of slavery in the pre-civil war United States were ridiculed at the time as religious zealots trying to impose their morality on everyone else.  Those people, such as Stephen A. Douglas, who were “personally opposed but pro-choice” about slavery applauded themselves for their tolerance and open-mindedness.  What do we think of these two groups today?

The bottom line is this: if abortion is wrong, it is because it involves the intentional taking of an innocent human life.  If it’s not, there’s no reason to be opposed; if it is, it is a terrible crime that we cannot in good conscience allow to go unchallenged.   “All that is necessary for the triumph of Evil is for good men to do nothing” (usually attributed to Edmund Burke).

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Essential Pro-Life Resources:

Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments (link)  

The Elliot Institute (link)  

National Right To Life Committee (link)  

Care-Net (link)

The Nurturing Network (link)

To See The Entire Abortion Myths Series Click HERE 

Abortion Myth # 7

MYTH:  “Women have a ‘right to choose’.  We have no right to tell a woman what she can do with her own body.”  

TRUTH: While this common pro-abortion pronouncement may sound good on the surface, it does not stand up to  examination on several grounds:

1)      Abortion is directed at, and kills, the body of the child, not the mother.  From the moment of conception the zygote, embryo, fetus, child, and so on is a separate body having its own process of growth, growing its own organs, and with its own DNA; no part of our bodies has its own organs, or different DNA.  Pro-life people are not trying to tell the mother what to do with her body: we are seeking to prevent others from doing deadly harm to the unborn baby’s body.

Mother and Child: two bodies

2)       A generic “right to choose”  is a non-sensical  proposition that even abortion rights supporters don’t really believe in. Any action at all can be expressed as a “choice”.   How many people, pro-life or pro-choice, support the choice to rape, murder, or steal?  Many people who call themselves  “pro-choice” don’t even want to permit the “choice” to hold a sign in front of an abortion clinic.  Choices can only be evaluated on the basis of what is being chosen, and people who go by the label “pro-choice” almost always mean no more than the choice of a mother to abort her unborn child.

3)      Likewise, even pro-choice advocates are in favor of laws restricting what people, including women, can do with their bodies.  There is no public clamor in favor of the right of women to use their bodies to drive drunk; nobody that I know of supports the right of women to use their bodies to beat their already-born children; I have never heard a pro-choice advocate support the right of women to strap explosives to their bodies and set them off in crowded marketplaces.

4)      Pro-choice supporters are inconsistently silent on the issue of women who feel they have been given no choice but abortion:

-          The Alan Guttmacher Institute (historically associated with Planned Parenthood, the world’s largest abortion provider) has found that the two most common reasons women  abort are lack of finances and emotional support.   And yet pro-choicers try to shut down the pregnancy help centers that offer emotional support and material help that’s not available anywhere else (see Pro-life Answers to Pro-choice Arguments) .

-          Mary Cunningham Agee surveyed post-abortive women about what they had really wanted.  91 0ut of 100 women said that they would have preferred to give birth, but felt that abortion was their only choice.  This survey was part of her inspiration for the founding of The Nurturing Network, an organization with thousands of volunteers providing the practical assistance that women told her they needed.

  

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Essential Pro-Life Resources:

Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments (link)  

The Elliot Institute (link)  

National Right To Life Committee (link)  

Care-Net (link)

The Nurturing Network (link)


To See The Entire Abortion Myths Series Click HERE 

Abortion Myth # 6

Myth: “If abortion becomes illegal, tens of thousands of women in the U.S. will die again from back-alley and coat hanger abortions.”

 Truth:

-Women never died “by the thousands” in the United States: this figure was fabricated by pro-abortionists (see Abortion Myth #1).  The highest verified figure is 388 maternal deaths in 1948, before antibiotics became available.

New, improved post-Roe abortionist Kermit Gosnell

-For decades prior to legalization, 90% of abortions were performed by doctors in their offices, about the same number as today. 

- Women still die from legal abortions in the United States [here, here].

- The same pro-abortion activists who warn about coat hangers and the back alley fight strenuously against any regulation of abortion clinics, even minimal health regulations, that they believe might discourage abortions (see Davis, Wendy).

-Because pro-abortion activists oppose regulation of abortion facilities, and the politicians who rely on their financial support look the other way, brutal and deadly abortionists like Kermit Gosnell are able to flourish.

-Every year more than half a million unborn women die in legal abortions in the United States.

-Poland went from 148,200 abortions in 1975 to only 253 in 1998, and maternal deaths decreased by 30%, and miscarriages decreased by 25!

Much of the information above comes from Randy Alcorn’s Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments.

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Essential Pro-Life Resources:

Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments (link)  

The Elliot Institute (link)  

National Right To Life Committee (link)  

Care-Net (link)

The Nurturing Network (link)


To See The Entire Abortion Myths Series Click HERE