According to the abortion industry, there’s practically nothing that the legal right to kill your preborn child can’t accomplish. They claim it ‘saves lives,’ provides ‘freedom,’ and is the most vital part of ‘women’s health care’ that all women absolutely rely upon.
But are any of these talking points based in truth? Or are these simply ways to make induced abortion — the intentional, targeted killing of a preborn child — more palatable to the American public through propaganda?
Myth #1: Abortion is… freedom.
The Truth: Freedom can never be achieved by oppressing another human being.
Men and women alike are constantly told that abortion is necessary because it will make them free. On Mother’s Day this year, for example, numerous businesses within the abortion industry celebrated by arguing that what moms need is “reproductive freedom.” Teen Vogue ran an op-ed telling girls that abortion would make them popular, and that it gives girls freedom. And within just the past month, Pete Buttigieg argued that abortion should be legal because it makes men free.
On the flip side, abortion advocates frequently refer to pro-life laws, which protect preborn children from abortion, as laws that enslave women. The problem with this line of thinking is that true freedom can never be granted through the enslavement or oppression of another.
The abortion industry fails to mention that many women feel coerced into abortions, or how an anti-child society leads women to feel that abortion is their only choice. For abortion advocates, these injustices are resolved through abortion — but the first problem with that is that the injustice is not eliminated; it is merely redistributed to another person. It robs one person of their intrinsic right to life in order to make another person feel empowered — and that is not freedom.
Myth #2: Abortion is… health care.
The Truth: Abortion is not medically necessary, and is not health care, because it intentionally kills a human being.
Since Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, there has been no shortage of horror stories shared by the abortion industry and its advocates, specifically designed to scare Americans into believing that induced abortion is a legitimate and necessary form of health care. Whether the woman in the story is experiencing an incompetent cervix, pre-eclampsia, a missed miscarriage, or other urgent medical problem, abortion is touted as the solution to this problem, which that woman was allegedly denied due to pro-life laws.
In fact, induced abortion is not listed as a standard of care for pregnancy-related complications.
Even abortionists have admitted that abortion is not health care, and not medically necessary. Abortionist Don Sloan stated:
If a woman with a serious illness – heart disease, say, or diabetes – gets pregnant, the abortion procedure may be as dangerous for her as going through pregnancy … with diseases like lupus, multiple sclerosis, even breast cancer, the chance that pregnancy will make the disease worse is no greater that the chance that the disease will either stay the same or improve.
And medical technology has advanced to a point where even women with diabetes and kidney disease can be seen through a pregnancy safely by a doctor who knows what he’s doing. We’ve come a long way since my mother’s time….
The idea of abortion to save the mothers’ life is something that people cling to because it sounds noble and pure – but medically speaking, it probably doesn’t exist. It’s a real stretch of our thinking.
In an induced abortion, a preborn child is intentionally targeted with the direct goal of causing his or her death. In the case of legitimate medical intervention, the preborn child may not survive the action needed to save the mother’s life (such as a child delivered too early to be able to survive), but the child’s death is not the goal of the procedure. There is a difference between a life-saving procedure, in which one of the two patients dies as a secondary and tragic result, and a procedure that is carried out with the intention of causing death prior to delivery.
Over 1,000 medical experts have signed a declaration affirming that direct abortion is never needed to save a woman’s life.
Myth #3: Abortion is… necessary.
The Truth: No one needs to intentionally kill a preborn child. Women deserve better than abortion.
Women are frequently led to believe that they need the ability to kill their own preborn children, and without it, they will suffer. The most notorious example of this is the Turnaway Study, in which researchers claimed that over 90% of women who had an abortion experienced no regret, while women denied abortions were worse off — emotionally, physically, and financially. It is almost never acknowledged that the study was fundamentally flawed, with biased researchers, a skewed sample size, an overall poor design, and deceptive reporting.
Meanwhile, women have frequently spoken out about the post-abortion regret they feel, and even in the Turnaway Study, women who had abortions had higher rates of depression and suicidal ideation afterwards than the women who were turned away. In addition, after five years, most women who were turned away from abortion said they are glad they didn’t abort their children.
Women don’t need to intentionally kill their preborn children; they need better options and more support so they have a real choice.
Myth #4: Abortion is… safe.
The Truth: Abortion can never be “safe” for the human being it kills; in addition, it comes with risks for the mother.
The abortion industry argues that women need legal abortion, insisting that thousands of women died in dangerous, back-alley abortions before Roe… and besides, abortion is safer than childbirth, anyway. Of course, that childbirth/abortion study has never been replicated, and was authored by two pro-abortion researchers. Elizabeth Raymond works for Gynuity Health Projects, which seeks to expand access to the abortion pill regimen and overturn safety standards set by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The second researcher, David Grimes, is an abortionist. The study also did not include statistics from Maryland, Washington D.C., New Hampshire, New York City, or California, none of which report their abortion data, and there is no federal requirement for abortions or abortion complications to be reported.
Dr. John Ferrer of the Equal Rights Institute also questioned whether or not the data in that study had been manipulated.
“For example, compared to abortion mortality rates, the ‘maternal mortality rate’ in the RG study is inflated,” he wrote. “The CDC maternal mortality rate takes all birth-related deaths (the numerator) and divides them by only live births (the denominator), so all stillbirths and miscarriages are only addressed in the top number and not the bottom. The result is an inflated mortality rate from childbirth but not abortion.”
Researchers also excluded deaths after an abortion that were unrelated — meaning if a woman contracted MRSA at an abortion facility and died, that would not be included in the study. However, they did not do the same for women who gave birth.
“The study is careful to avoid false positives for abortion cases, presumably since those would undermine its argument, but not so careful with childbirth cases,” Ferrer said. “This double-standard is all the more troublesome because if the same measure were used for both childbirth and abortion then abortion would appear two to four times deadlier than childbirth. Abortion correlates with higher rates of murder, drug-related death, and suicide, but the RG study excludes those cases from the data while including those cases in the data on childbirth. It’s a flagrant double-standard that, by itself ruins the credibility of the RG study.” (emphasis added)
Women are also known to have died and been injured in legal abortions. With regard to chemical abortions, or the abortion pill regimen, numerous studies showed that 6% of women experienced complications serious enough to visit urgent cares or ERs. This rate is 107 times greater than the adverse event rate for acetaminophen/Tylenol. Then there is the issue of dangerous abortion facilities, often unregulated, with scores of health code violations and parades of injured women.
