The Australian Family, March 2004

DISMANTLING THE ABORTION MYTHS

Bill Muehlenberg

The horrors of abortion have been covered up by a number of myths - myths promoted by the “pro-choice” camp, and given a wide hearing by a sympathetic media. It is important to go beyond the deception, subterfuge and misinformation to see what is really at stake in the abortion debate.

Myth: Abortion is a “woman’s issue”. This is true to an extent, given that only women undergo abortions. But it is also false, since roughly half of all abortion victims are males. But more than this, abortion is a human rights issue. To say only women can debate the issue is quite beside the point. As E.J. Mishan has remarked: “Perhaps the crudest defence of abortion rights, more often thrown out in anger or in the heat of controversy, is the assertion that no man has a right to pronounce on the subject since he does not know what it is like to be a woman, an injunction that might tempt a retort no less impertinent, that a woman has no right to condemn a rapist since she has no idea of what it is like to be a man.”  

Moreover, this argument assumes the position that a people cannot assess a moral issue unless they have experienced it themselves. But that is like saying we cannot condemn slavery unless we have first been slaves, or we cannot condemn arson unless we have first become one of its victims. Does the fact that I am not Jewish mean I cannot speak out on the Holocaust? Whether an issue is right or wrong does not depend on our experience of it.

Myth: Abortion is all about freedom of choice and control of one’s body. A recent three page statement by the National Abortion Rights Action League in the U.S. used terms like “choice” and “the right to choose” some thirty times. Not once was the word “abortion” used. To talk of rights and choice is neat and painless. But the reality of abortion is not so neat and painless. Abortion, as one writer put it, “is a violent act that reduces a living human entity with a beating heart and a functioning brain to a puree of blood and bone.”

To attempt to rationalise abortion under the rubric of “choice” quickly crumbles when the analogy of slavery is introduced. In 1857 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that blacks were “non-persons” and therefore could be legitimately owned, bought and sold as slaves. In effect the 1973 Supreme Court Roe v Wade ruling said that a fetus was a non-person, which could be kept or disposed of at the whim of the mother. In either case the choice belonged to the “owner”. But as Joseph Sobran has observed, “those who favor the option of abortion, or slavery, refuse to take into account the human nature of the option’s victim. Extending choice to the slave himself would amount to abolishing slavery, and the same holds true for abortion.”

One pro-feminist journalist was honest enough to express these concerns: “For me, the problem is not feminists’ pro-choice stance, but that the stance has no moral context. All the emphasis is on rights. None is on the morality of using those rights. It is as if we were back in the 1850’s: No one is talking about whether slavery is wrong; instead, the whole discussion revolves around the question of whether each slaveholder has a basic right to decide the issue for himself.”

Furthermore, the child is not a part of the mother, but a distinct and unique individual. When a sperm and ovum come together, the become a new human being. Indeed, “sperm and ovum do not really unite. They cease to be and lead to a new being”.

Moreover, as Carol Everett shows in her book Blood Money,  the abortion industry is anything but about choice. Everett, a former abortionist, knows all about this lack of choice. The owner of five abortion clinics, she set up what she called Advisory Referral Centers which advertised sexual counselling and pregnancy tests—both free of charge. Of course, once in, women were steered in the direction of abortions.

The use of fear was often a good tactical weapon. Women who feared having their parents discover they were pregnant were especially susceptible to being sold on abortion. “I knew how to sell abortions - take the fear, amplify it, get their money, push them through.”

Staff were in the business of pushing abortion, not offering choice. One clinic assistant who showed women a book on fetal development was sacked. Says Everett: “Although Barbara was a good employee, if she could not sell abortions, she had to go.” (Italics added)

The truth is, the victims of abortion do not have any choice. And in fact, mothers are getting very little choice as well. As Janet Folger puts it, “The only choice those in the abortion movement offer women is the choice of a dead baby”.

Myth. Abortion simply removes some unwanted tissue. The pro-death camp endlessly uses the term “termination of pregnancy” and other euphemisms. Now if it is true that the “fetus” which is “terminated” is not really human, but is just a blob of protoplasm, or at best, “a potential life”, then abortion is not much different than removing a tonsil or a false eyelash. But if the fetus is indeed a living human being, then the whole story changes.

The question of when a human life begins is of the utmost importance. As F. LaGard Smith puts it, “When it comes to human life, we dare not play games with either doubts or definitions. If, in fact, we cannot decide when human life begins, then we cannot safely assume that it hasn’t begun. At a minimum, the almost universal agreement that an unborn fetus is both human and living must raise a presumption in favor of human life. Are we prepared to find out that we’ve been wrong all along in denying the obvious?”  

The stakes are indeed too high. How would a hunter fare before a court of law if, while hunting, he had shot at a movement in the bush and killed, not a bird, but a fellow hunter? Surely the judge would ask, “if you were not sure, why did you shoot?” The burden of proof must lie with those who contend that human life is not being eliminated.

But biology and science are on the pro-life side on this debate. At conception a wholly unique individual is formed, complete with its own genetic makeup. It is not just one more cell of the mother, but a distinct and different life. As philosopher Peter Kreeft explains, the zygote “is completely individual, it’s completely different. It’s got its own genetic code. If you cloned any cell in the mother’s body, you’d get a replica of Mommy. But if you cloned the zygote, you’d get a totally different person.”

That human life begins at conception (or fertilisation) is not opinion but scientific fact. Indeed, as an article in Nature recently put it, “Your world was shaped in the first 24 hours after conception”.

It seems that the pro-abortionists are all too aware that human life may indeed be present in the unborn, thus the remarkable lengths to which they go to hide this fact. Take but two examples. Contrast a spontaneous abortion (miscarriage) and a chosen abortion. There is grief for the baby lost in a miscarriage. But in an abortion there is “merely” the loss of an unwanted fetus. Says Smith, “Have you ever noticed that the only time those of us who are not in the medical profession refer to a fetus is when we talk about abortion? In every other case, we refer to a baby. We don’t ask, ‘What are you going to name the fetus?’ Nor do we console a women who has just miscarried by saying, ‘I’m sorry you lost your fetus.’ In referring to a pregnancy, we invariably understand that we are dealing with a little person developing in the womb. Only when it is subject to an abortion must a baby go incognito.”  Its a baby if you want it, a clump of tissue if you don’t!

Another significant factor which seems to belie the claim that the fetus is simply a collection of cells is post-abortion trauma and guilt. If a fetus is indeed just a blob of tissue, why all the trauma, why all the guilt? When an appendix is removed, no one experiences guilt - a little pain perhaps, but no psychological and emotional upheavals. “Guilt about abortions was not invented by the pope” says Smith.  Indeed, it seems to be a universal condition. As another commentator puts it, “Findings such as these do not constitute an argument against abortion. But they certainly tell us we are not in the realm of tonsillectomies.”

The ironies of the pro-choicers are indeed incredible. We can choose to have a baby, or dispose of it, but it is no longer “politically correct” to choose to wear a fur coat. In America teenagers need parental permission to get their ears pierced, but not to get an abortion. Outside the womb, child abuse is clearly not an option; inside the womb its “a woman’s right to choose.” As one observer puts it, “What irony that a society confronted with plastic bags filled with the remains of aborted babies should be more concerned about the problem of recycling the plastic.”

Choice is indeed the false god of this age. Hiding behind such facades as “I’m personally against abortion but I won’t impose my values on others - its their choice” just won’t wash. One might just as well say, “I’m personally against rape and genocide, but others must make up their own minds.” There are some areas that are just out of bounds, just beyond choice.

Myth: Abortion is about helping women. Wrong. Abortion is about making money - big money. Greed, not love, is the motivating factor behind the abortion industry. At Everett’s clinics, an abortion for a woman eighteen weeks pregnant cost $375. At twenty weeks it cost $500. Her abortion clinics became abortion mills, working with assembly line efficiency. Operating seven days a week, she could oversee 400 abortions a month. She received a $25 commission for each abortion. Thus she was earning $10,000 a month. Her plans were to have 5 abortion clinics operating full-time in the Texas area, performing 600 abortions a month, earning her $15,000.

Abortion was definitely big business for Everett. She had ads in the Yellow Pages of five southern states, each with a toll-free number. Ads in newspapers offered coupons with 10 per cent discounts! Setting up clinics near high schools was an effective tactic. She even planned to set up a clinic by a mall so customers could go shopping while waiting for their abortion! Says Everett: “Greed - the love of money and the things I could have with it - blinded me. [I was] an abortionist who used whatever means available to get a woman to have an abortion for the sake of money.”

This insatiable lust for money resulted in abortions being performed on women who were not even pregnant! Indeed, the temptation was to get every woman who came into a clinic to have an abortion. Says Everett, “Do you think an abortionist who works on a straight commission is going to tell a woman who has signed her consent form and has already paid in full that she is not pregnant?”

Myth: Abortion helps prevent child abuse. ‘A wanted baby is a loved baby’ we are told. However, a simple look at the facts dispels this myth. In the same period that abortion has increased, so too has child abuse. Indeed, one can argue that the abortion culture leads to the child abuse culture. As Maggie Gallagher as expressed it, “The ethic of the child-batterer is the abortion ethic. Child abusers, like abortion activists, believe in adults' right to be in control of their lives. Child abusers, like abortionists, believe that only children who gratify parental desires have a right to exist. It is hard to believe that the cultural message contained in abortion, the insistent eulogies to control, and the references to parenting as a right and a pleasure have not contributed to the explosion in child abuse and neglect”.

Research reveals that a “planned” child is as much at risk of abuse as an “unplanned’ child. “There is no assurance that the child that was planned for will continue to be well treated by its parent or parents. Indeed, over 90 per cent of the children in the United States who are abused by their parents were originally wanted babies. At all events and notwithstanding the annual one and a half million abortions, there is no indication that family life in America is becoming happier. On the contrary, since abortion on demand was made legal in 1973, the number of abused children is estimated to have risen by over 300 per cent.”

The most obvious response to this myth however is the simple fact that killing an unborn child is the ultimate form of child abuse.

Myth: Abortion must remain legal to prevent backyard abortions. The pro-abortion camp is fond of speaking about rusty coat-hanger abortions and other horror stories associated with illegal abortions. There are a number of mis-truths and deceptions going on here. First, legalising abortion did not make abortion safer. It was made safer in the 1940s and onwards with the availability of antibiotics. Second, the majority of abortions performed before legalisation were done in doctor’s offices, something even planned parenthood has admitted.

Third, the claim that thousands of women died each year in America before the 1973 decision to legalise abortion is simply not true. Bernard Nathanson ought to know. He was a leading abortionist during this period – having performed 60,000 abortions – and helped to make up this figure of 5,000 to 10,000 deaths a year: “I confess that I knew the figures were totally false, and I suppose the others did too if they stopped to think of it. But in the ‘morality’ of our revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics? The overriding concern was to get the laws eliminated, and anything within reason that had to be done was permissible”.

Nathanson goes on to describe the real figures: “In 1967 … the federal government listed only 160 deaths from illegal abortion. In the last year before [Roe v Wade}, 1972, the total was only 39 deaths”.  While 39 is too many, the figure must be held up to the 1.5 million babies killed each year since 1973.

Fourth, women are still dying from abortions, even though they are now legal (see below).

Myth: Abortion doesn’t hurt the unborn child. Science has shown us that babies do indeed feel pain. For example, surgeon Robert Shearin argues that unborn babies can experience pain at quite an early age: “As early as eight to ten weeks after conception, and definitely by thirteen-and-half weeks, the unborn experiences organic pain. . . . [At this point she] responds to pain at all levels of her nervous system in an integrated response which cannot be deemed a mere reflex. She can now experience pain.”

More recently a British review of the latest research has found that an unborn baby is definitely aware of pain by 24 weeks, and possibly aware as early as 20 weeks.

Myth: Abortion should be legal because of the ‘hard cases’. Rape and incest are two common excuses for abortion. However several comments are in order. First, regarding rape, the cases of conception are quite low. Planned Parenthood’s Guttmacher Institute has admitted that in America abortions for rape amount to one per cent of all abortions. Another researcher has found that cases of rape and incest make up only 0.08 per cent of all abortions in America.

While we can all sympathise with such difficult cases, we must be careful not to allow such concerns to result in the sweeping arm of the law. The legal axiom, hard cases make for bad laws, needs to be observed here.

Morover, it needs to be recalled that when legalised abortion was first debated, it was for these very hard cases that it was proposed. But as concerned thinkers warned back then, this would be the start of a slippery slope. And that is exactly what has happened. As bioethicist John Wyatt puts it, "over the past thirty years we have moved imperceptively from abortion as an option in extreme circumstances, through abortion as an option on request, to a duty to abort".

Myth: Abortion helps us to avoid mentally and physically defective babies. Increasingly abortion is being used when a parent is told a child may have a physical or mental disorder. Indeed, it is already becoming a method of sex selection.

However, a number of assumptions underlie this myth. One is that handicapped children are social liabilities. Who says so? Indeed, what is normal? Is a child with only one arm less than a person? Is a deaf child a social burden? Many handicapped or disabled children, along with their families, have spoken of the rich and rewarding lives they have lived. If we decide that society cannot accept a child with Down's syndrome today, what will we prohibit tommorow? Redheads? Dwarfs?

Dr C Everett Koop has spent much of his life working with "deformed" and handicapped people. He says that it is his "constant experience that disability and unhappiness do not necessarily go together. Some of the most unhappy children whom I have known have all of the pysical and mental faculities and on the other hand some of the happiest yougsters have bourne burdens which I myself would find very difficult to bear".

Moreover, who decides who should live and who should dike? Those who decide that certain handicapped children deserve to die may also decide that certain adults who are handicapped also deserve to die. Indeed, infanticide and euthanasia are logical outcimes of the arguements for abortion. Bear in mind that before Hitler started killing the Jews, he had 275,000 handicapped people murdered.

No one has the right to decide that another human being is not fit to live. this is especially true since a doctor's diagnosis can prove incorrect. I have heard of more than one story where a mother was councelled to have an abortion to prevent the birth of an unhealthy child. Fortynately, the doctor's advise was ignored and a perfectly healthy baby was born.

A well known story is worth repeating here. A medical school professor gave his students a case study in whether or not to advise an abortion: The family is very poor, the husband is alcholic and has syphilis: one of their numerous children is mentally deficient, and there is a strong family history of deafness. The wife, who had tuberculosis, finds she is pregnant again. What should she do? A student quickly advised an abortion. Thankfully, two hundred years ago the woman did not have that option, and the world has been immeasurably enriched because of the child she bore, Ludwig van Beethoven.

Myth: Abortion is a safe and harmless procedure for women. Wrong. There are a number of serious pyhsical problems associated with abortion.

Death is the worst complication. carol Everett recounts a number of cases where botched (and legal) abortion led to to the death of the mother. How many women die as a result of abortion is not known, but the figure must be quite high.

There are many other physical complications. Internal bleeding, for example, is normal after an abortion. Not uncommon are perfoated uteruses. pelvic Inflammatory Disease is an infection which occurs with abortion may occur in as much as 30 per cent of all cases. And women who have had an abortion are two to four times more likely to experience an etopic pregnancy.

Then there is the growing scientific consensus on the relationship between abortion and breast cancer. One American expert, Dr Joel Brind, an Endocrinology Professor, has said that "the single most avoidable risk factor for breast cnacer is induced abortion".

Myth: Women do not suffer after an abortion. Women do suffer after an abortion: physically, emotionally, and psycholgically.

A number of support groups exist around the world to help women cope with the after effects of abortion. Groups such as Women Hurt by Abortion and Victims of Choice deal with women each day who are coming to terms with their abortions.

An important book was recently published in Australia by Melinda Tankard Reist entilted Giving Sorrow Words. The book grew out of small ads placed in newspapers and magazines asking for storiess of women hurt by abortion. Hundreds of women responded. this book is a collection of some of these stories. It is a painful read. Every one of these women featured here regrets her decision, mourns the loss of her child, and grieves for months and years afterwards. Pro-abortionists try to deny these stories, or explain them away. the stories contained in this book are a testimony to the truth that abortion kills little babies. the mothers know it.

Myth: Abortion helps control our overpopulation crisis. Even if we are over poplulated - and many experts dispute the claim - abortion is not the answer. Just as the answer to a crowded apartment building is not murdering half the residents, so too here, murdering the unborn is not an acceptable solution. There are many couples eager to adopt children. That is certainly a more humane solution.

And if we are serious about proposing death as a solution for the problems of world hunger and overpopulation, why stop at just killing unborn babies? Why not kill adults? After all, they consume a lot more resources, they take up a lot more space, they make demands on our enviornment, etc. The point is, one serious social problem cannot be solved by means of another serious social problem.

Myth: Pro-lifers have no right to impose their values on others. In a democracy, all points of view are entilted to a hearing. after all, does not the other side claim the banner of "choice"? Why then deny one side the right to be heard?

This myth is based on the false idea of tolerance, which has become the gratest virture in contempray culture. Tolerance used to mean repecting the other person while disagreeing with his or her ideas. Today it means you must accept the other person's views, or be seen as intolerant, judgemental and narrow mided. But 'to be tolerant of differing viewpoints involves just that - differing viewpoints, all of whichcannot be equally correct at the same time".

Moreover, on important moral issues we need to speak out. Should we tolerate poluters, racists and rapists? This is like saying "I am personally against ethnic-cleansing and lynching but I do n ot want to impose my values on others". When the protection of innocent life is at stake, we not only have the right but a duty to speak out. And such moral concerns need to be reflected in the law. Issues as important as killing human beings need to fall under the domain of law. "All civil rights should be protected by law".

And values are being pushed all the time. the real question "is not whether values are going to be imposed or legislated, but whose values". It just so happens that at the moment, the values of the pro-death camp are predominating, legally, socially and culurally. That is why they do not want the other side to be heard. They enjoy the idealogical hegemony they currently possess.

Conclusion:

With around 100,000 babies being killed in Australia each year (Autralia has the second highest abortion rate of any developed country), and 45 to 50 million killed around the world, mostly as after-the-fact contraception, it is time to challenge the abortion myths. For too long we have been fed misinformation and falsehoods on this issue. It is important that the truth about abortion be made known as widely as possible. Perhaps one day, as the truth gets heard, the situation will turn around. Just as slavery in the Western world was finally stopped when enough people learned the awful truth about the practise, so too one day abortion may be stopped. Perhaps in the near future we will be able to look back and say, "How barbaric. They used to kill their own children back then".

Afterword:

To learn about the abortion issue and to take a stand is crucial, but it is only half the battle. It is not enough to simply denounce the evil of abortion, important as that is. What is also needed is for the pro-life camp to provide pratical alternatives to abortion. When a frightened, pregnant 16 year old girl comes to you and says, "My family has just kicked me out of the house and my boyfriend is demanding that I get an abortion, " it is not enough to tell her that abortion is wrong. We need to be able to say to that girl, " come to our community or church, we have a crisis pregnancy support home where you can stay. Er'll feed you, clothe you, shelter you, and when the baby is born, we can look at the options (adoption, keeping the baby etc.)." Until the pro-life camp is able to provide real alternatives to the evil of abortion, it may lose the credibility, if not the right, to speak out against this evil.