Nearly all US members of the National Abortion Federation have ultrasound machines on-site, and 91% perform dating ultrasounds routinely before first-trimester aspiration abortion. (138)
Ultrasound plays a major role in pregnancy diagnoses… The milestones described in this section will consistently be imaged earlier with a vaginal, rather than abdominal, transducer. (68)
A 5- to 10-MHz vaginal probe improves visualization of earlier pregnancies. (143)
Advances in pregnancy testing, ultrasonography, and medical and surgical abortion techniques have accelerated the trend toward earlier abortion care. (135)
Remarkably, the NAF gives no indication that transvaginal ultrasounds are akin to rape. They simply state that such procedures allow abortions to take place earlier in pregnancy than would otherwise be advisable. That’s a far cry from the impression one gets from the mocking satire of Doonesbury or this week’s video offering from Kate Beckinsale, Judy Greer, and Andrea Savage – a parody in which they pose as imbecilic Republican women begging the government to “Get in My Vagina.”
The real question is, are the 91% of abortionists who are already performing pre-abortion ultrasounds “raping” those women whom they image transvaginally? No. And why not? Because by consenting to an abortion, a woman consents to all of the intrinsically intimate, unnatural and invasive procedures that are part of that abortion. Prominent late-term abortionist, Warren Hern, writes in Abortion Practice that “it is paradoxical to have a woman complain about the idea of an intrauterine device on the grounds that it requires the placement of an unnatural object in one of her body cavities, while she willingly submits to an abortion, requiring the placement of several unnatural objects into her body cavities.” (89)
Despite all the rhetoric about “vaginal probes” and “shaming wands,” the real issue has far less to do with the procedure itself than it does with the results of that procedure. Nine times out of ten, diagnostic ultrasound is going to take place anyway. What the laws in Texas and Virginia propose is that the real-time imagery from those ultrasounds be showed to the mother. Why are abortion-advocates so afraid of this? Because of that tiny little heart, beating rapidly there on the screen. Blobs of cells do not have beating hearts. Simply put, ultrasound imaging makes it much harder to maintain the illusion that abortion is anything less than the intentional destruction of the most helpless members of the human community.
The “Get in My Vagina” video trots out the tired old assertion that those who oppose abortion only care about controlling women’s bodies. This absurdity is easily exposed by the fact that you never see people praying and counseling outside a dental office, begging women to not get a tooth pulled. Nor will you find such people outside a beauty salon, urging women to leave their hair and nails as they are. There is no such presence outside of the offices of plastic surgeons or at tattoo parlors, nor is there a campaign to get women to stop smoking or drinking (unless you count the Ad Council amongst Republican conspirators). Finally, I’ve never seen anyone with signs outside of McDonalds or Baskin Robbins, trying to dissuade women from going in.
No, the only arena in which we’re trying to “control” women (if you want to call it that) is that of abortion, and the reason is simple. Abortion is an act of violence that kills an innocent human being. In the United states, it kills more than half a million women each year, and globally, the problem is even worse. It is no stretch to say that abortion represents the single greatest threat to women in all the world – which may be why 67% of Abort73’s Facebook fans are female, as compared to 54% of Facebook users in general. Opposing abortion has nothing to do with controlling women; it has to do with protecting the weak and vulnerable from being wrongfully destroyed. And guess what. Around the world, the overwhelming majority of the weak and helpless who are destroyed by abortion happen to be female.
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Returning to the issue of abortion, I find it ironic that so many of the news stories I reviewed this week refer to Chen as a women’s rights advocate. Strictly speaking, the moniker fits, but it’s a bit misleading. On the American political scene, women’s rights has become a euphemism for abortion rights, and many of the stories didn’t even bother pointing out that Chen is working to protect women from abortion. Nor does his profile on Human Rights Watch make any mention of abortion, instead declaring him to be an opponent of “family planning abuses.” Not surprisingly, Human Rights Watch is a global proponent of abortion–putting them in the awkward position of championing the cause of an abortion opponent. This, in fact, is the same tension facing President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton, who are both passionately committed to protecting abortion rights. But this is not the most significant tension they face as the U.S. tries to steer China towards the more humane treatment of their people.
The obvious problem is one of economics. Because China owns more than a quarter of our national debt, the U.S. is losing leverage and influence at an alarming rate. This is the same problem TIME magazine noted back in 2006, after Chen was first imprisoned on trumped-up charges:
In previous years, a plea from the U.S. State Department could help get a Chinese political prisoner released, typically as a goodwill gesture before important international summits. But in recent months, foreign pressure appears to have done little… After all, what leverage does the international community now hold? China is the world’s factory. It holds bountiful foreign-currency reserves… The balance has shifted from China feeling like it needs the world to the world needing China.
Because America is in China’s pocket, so to speak, it has become increasingly difficult for the United States to make any kind of credible threat against China’s continued human rights abuses. As reported this week by the Los Angeles Times, though President Obama claims to “emphasize the issue of human rights at every meeting with China,” this kind of “familiar diplomatic language [is] unlikely to limit the administration’s maneuvering room.” In other words, President Obama knows what he can and can’t say. If he has a reputation for “being too soft on China,” it’s because his hands are tied. He doesn’t want to step on the toes of America’s primary creditor. But I would suggest that there is something more than mere economics at play, and I say that because of America’s complicity in the monumental human rights atrocity that is abortion.
I have already called President Obama a pro-abortion president. Many will take issue with that label and remind me that he is a pro-choice president. Likewise, I have called Chen Guangcheng an anti-abortion activist. Here again, many will argue that it’s more accurate to call him a pro-choice activist, since his lawsuit only applies to forced abortion. To the first complaint, I would submit that the difference between pro-abortion and pro-choice is a distinction without meaning. A president who is pro-choice on abortion is the moral equivalent of a president who is pro-choice on slavery. When someone today calls themselves “pro-choice,” abortion is the only choice they have in view. If you doubt this, consider the outrage that’s arisen in recent months over whether or not employers, religious or otherwise, should have the choice to not pay for their employees’ birth control. Most of those who are firmly pro-choice when it comes to abortion are decidedly anti-choice when it comes to giving employers the right to choose whether or not to fund contraceptives.
To the second complaint, I must concede that I don’t know Chen’s position on non-forced abortion. But I’m optimistic. I have now read dozens of stories on Chen Guancheng, and not a single one has inferred that he supports elective abortion. Because so much of the mainstream media bends over backwards to support elective abortions, if Chen supported them too, I’m fairly certain that news would be shouted from the proverbial rooftops. The second reason I’m hopeful is because Chen is blind. He overcame incredible odds in a country where people with disabilities aren’t even allowed to attend college to become a self-taught lawyer. Surely, he knows what elective abortion does to unborn children diagnosed with disabilities. It kills them. Finally, I’m hopeful because of Chen’s close relationship with Pastor Bob Fu, who fled China with his wife to spare their first child from abortion. Fu wrote in op-ed piece for the Washington Post this week that, “This is a pivotal moment for U.S. human rights diplomacy. The United States must stand firmly with this broadly popular individual or risk losing credibility as a defender of freedom and the rule of law.”
It is precisely this, the United States credibility as a defender of freedom and the rule of law, that has been so compromised by our headlong embrace of abortion. Something that stood out to me in both of the medical textbooks I just read on abortion is this. All of the early innovations in abortion technique came out of Russia and China. The first aspiration abortion was performed in Russia in 1927. Thirty years later, the technique was “perfected” in China, where abortion was legalized in 1957. Warren Hern reports in Abortion Practice that “important innovations in abortion technology began to flow from China and Eastern Europe several years before legal changes occurred in the the United States.” (277) If you follow abortion’s trajectory, it’s not hard to see that America is simply following China’s lead, where more than 13 million abortions occur each year. This of course raises an important question. In light of China’s horrific record on human rights, what should we conclude about the ethics of abortion? Is China really the country we want to follow when it comes to how we treat the most vulnerable human beings?
We may criticize China today for forcing women to have abortion, but don’t lose sight of the fact that they’re simply further along the abortion timeline than we are. When China legalized abortion in 1957, Americans in the know decried their barbarity. Twenty-six years later, we legalized it ourselves. When China introduced their one-child policy in 1978, the international community was outraged. Thirty-three years later, Vice President Biden told a Chinese audience that he fully understands and does not second guess their one-child doctrine. Is this too where America is headed? Is this where all the claims that population growth is unsustainable will ultimately lead us?
I want to close with an excerpt from the most compelling of the stories I read about the lawsuit that first put Chen Guangcheng on the global map. This comes from TIME magazine and describes what forced abortion looks like in practice:
The men with the poison-filled syringe arrived two days before Li Juan’s due date. They pinned her down on a bed in a local clinic, she says, and drove the needle into her abdomen until it entered the 9-month-old fetus. “At first, I could feel my child kicking a lot,” says the 23-year-old. “Then, after a while, I couldn’t feel her moving anymore.” Ten hours later, Li delivered the girl she had intended to name Shuang (Bright). The baby was dead. To be absolutely sure, says Li, the officials—from the Linyi region, where she lives, in China’s eastern Shandong province—dunked the infant’s body for several minutes in a bucket of water beside the bed. All she could think about on that day last spring, recalls Li, was how she would hire a gang of thugs to take revenge on the people who killed her baby because the birth, they said, would have violated China’s family-planning scheme.
We must not lose sight of the fact that the end result of forced abortion, and the end result of elective abortion are exactly the same for the child in the womb. We read the account above and cringe at such cruelty. But is the practice any less cruel when it happens in accordance with the mother’s will? It is not. Instead of taking the moral high ground, the United States has followed Chinese utilitarianism down a dark and terrible path–one that is willing to trample upon individual human lives for the good of the regime. We may not be as far down the path, but it’s the same trail nonetheless. The question is, what are we willing to do to get off it? Chen Guangcheng was willing to invoke the ire of his government and to endure imprisonment and abuse. He fell as many as 200 times during his escape through the countryside before arriving at his destination muddy and bloody. “He was a very wounded man, except in spirit,” says Bob Fu. And though his wife continues to share in Chen’s danger, she remains unwavering in her conviction that “the outside world must know what is going on… so it can help change things for the better.”
May we follow her courageous lead as she herself follows a blind man with incredible vision.
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Induced abortion is arguably the most important human rights and equity issue of our time. (22)
Add that to the NAF statement I referenced earlier, about abortion being as integral to modern life as cars and computers, and you begin to realize that John Ensor did not overstate his case. Those devoted to promoting and protecting legal abortion have elevated its importance over and above all other justice issues. Their assertion is a staggering one if you really think about it. After all, what are the human rights and equity issues getting the most attention today? Sex-trafficking. Slavery. Child soldiery. AIDS. Famine. Unclean water. Is the NAF really suggesting that it is more important for a woman to have access to abortion than it is for her to have access to food or water? Is easy access to abortion really a more pressing need than freedom from sex-trafficking, slavery and disease? According to the NAF it is.
By my thinking, abortion is only comparable to these other human rights abuses if you understand abortion as something people must be protected from, not as something to be protected itself. From the vantage point of those most victimized by abortion, namely unborn children, its threat is even more serious than the threat of sex-trafficking, slavery, soldiery, AIDS, famine or unclean water. It threatens death, and it almost always delivers. The results are irrevocable. But even if you’re only looking at things from the vantage point of the woman, how absurd it is to argue that the right to abortion is more important than the right to freedom from slavery, famine or disease. And yet this is what the NAF seems to be advocating.
In this, my final set of observations from Management of Unintended and Abnormal Pregnancy, I want to focus on two abortion-related issues that received significant coverage in the NAF textbook and are plenty controversial in their own right. The first is birth control. The second is in-vitro fertilization (IVF), also known as Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs). In relation to each other, most forms of birth control attempt to artificially prevent conception (or implantation) while IVF attempts to artificially produce conception. In relation to abortion, birth control is touted as the best solution for reducing the number of abortions, and abortion (or fetal reduction procedures) is touted as the best solution for reducing the number of human beings conceived through IVF. Let’s begin with birth control by looking at one of the NAF statements on demographics and abortion that I did not include in yesterday’s analysis. Speculating as to why women who have aborted in the past are more likely to abort in the future, the NAF writes, “After abortion, women remain at elevated risk of having another abortion because they are sexually active, willing to terminate an unintended pregnancy by abortion, (and) have difficulty using contraceptive methods effectively…” (27) The universal solution to abortion, according to almost all abortion-rights advocates is contraception. You hear it over and over. The NAF pounded away at this idea throughout the book. But how effective are birth control methods really are at reliably preventing pregnancy and abortion? Consider the following statements, all from the pages of the NAF teaching text on abortion:
What’s the take away from all this? No matter what your ideologic opinion of birth control, from a purely pragmatic standpoint, contraceptives have proved remarkably ineffective at reducing our global reliance on abortion. Notice a few things from the statements above. The practical failure rate of the birth control pill is 6-8%. Borrowing some of the data from Abort73’s page on birth control, there are an estimated 21,131 sexually active girls at the University of Minnesota (according to a 2007 state survey on college sexuality). Even if all of them were on the pill (which is generally regarded as the most reliable of the non-implanted, non-permanent forms of birth control) that would still result in up to 1,690 unplanned pregnancies a year–on a single college campus. Of course, many people will claim that birth control would be more generally effective if more people had affordable access to it. But notice that only 12% of sexually-active, non-users cite access or cost as the reason for not using birth control. And further notice that only 11% of sexually-active women who don’t desire pregnancy are not using birth control. What is 12% of 11%? 1.32 per cent. Where do condoms fit in all this? According to the NAF, condoms do “not provide top-tier protection from pregnancy.”
On the very first page of the NAF textbook, no doubt in an attempt to normalize abortion historically, they say that “individuals in past societies vigorously sought to regulate their fertility [through] abortion and contraception.” They then concede that those same societies also regulated fertility through “child abandonment and infanticide.” Two things strike me about this statement. First, how does placing abortion alongside its historic bedfellows, child abandonment and infanticide, increase its moral legitimacy? The fact that abortion was perfectly normal in societies that also abandoned and executed their newborns is not a point in abortion’s favor. Second, if contraception was actually effective at eliminating unwanted pregnancies, and if these societies practiced it “vigorously,” then why did they have to resort to abortion, child abandonment and infanticide in the first place?!
Turning my attention now to IVF, I must be careful how I proceed. In-vitro fertilization is a delicate subject, and I don’t want to give the impression that IVF is intrinsically immoral. What I do want to point out is that most IVF protocols are inextricably linked with abortion, and anyone who uses such technologies must tread with extreme caution. The NAF reports that (as of 2009), “more than 2 million babies have resulted from assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs)… [and] multifetal gestation remains a serious concern.” (312) “Although fertility therapies hold important benefits for women and couples,” the NAF says, “they also increase the risk of multifetal pregnancy with its attendant maternal complications.” (316) The problem with IVF? Generally speaking, more children are being conceived than can realistically be born. What happens to all the extras? ART technicians, Mark I. Evans and David W. Britt, report that 75% of their patients “have combined CVS (chorionic villus sampling) and fetal reduction procedures” to solve this problem. (314) Chorionic villus sampling is a form of prenatal testing. Multifetal pregnancy reduction (MFPR) is the process of aborting the “extra” babies that were conceived through IVF. How do they selectively abort one baby without harming another? This is how it’s described in the book:
For the first 10 to 15 years, the approach we used was to perform the reduction first at approximately 10.5 weeks’ gestation, reducing down to twins or triplets… for patients reducing to a singleton pregnancy… we performed a CVS before reduction, usually on one fetus more than the intended desired number… Techniques to achieve fetal reduction have evolved over time. In the mid-1980’s, needles were inserted through the abdomen and maneuvered into the fetal thorax for injection of potassium chloride… Some centers used transvaginal mechanical disruption (like D&E), but data suggested a significantly greater loss rate (of the other fetuses) than with the transabdominal route. Today, virtually all experienced operators perform the procedure by inserting needles through the maternal abdomen under ultrasound guidance. For first-trimester fetal reduction placement of the needle within the chest cavity suffices for success. (314)
A 1993 study placed the MFPR pregnancy loss rate at 16%, meaning that 16% of the time, the fetuses who were not targeted to be killed still ended up dying in the process. A 2001 study places the loss rate at 9.6%. In reality, of course, the loss rate is 100% for the fetuses who were intentionally aborted through MFPR. And as if that weren’t enough, the NAF reports that since “reduction of twins to a singleton improves the outcome of the remaining fetus… we expect that requests for reduction from twins to singleton will increase in the years ahead.” In other words, since killing one twin frees up more resources for the other twin, they have no moral objection to doing just that–not realizing perhaps that the exact same argument could be applied to born twins as well. Here’s what the NAF authors do say about the moral implications of MFPR:
Although MFPR reduction has been integrated into infertility therapies, it will remain controversial because of widely divergent religious and ethical positions… Most proponents see it in terms of the principle of proportionality, [as a] therapy to achieve the most good for the least harm. (316)
For my part, I would urge couples struggling through infertility to consider adoption first. I realize that, as someone with biological children of my own, I’m not in the best position for giving advice. But in light of the dubious morality of most IVF providers and the abundance of needy orphans around the world, adoption makes for an extremely worthy alternative.
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First, as someone who has devoted my vocational life to persuading women (and men) not to have abortions, it’s fairly important that I have a sense of who is the most demographically vulnerable to abortion. One of the great challenges for those who want to intervene on behalf of abortion-vulnerable children is the fact that you can’t see them. They truly are invisible children, and the window for intervention is incredibly short. Walking down the street, there’s no way to tell which women are vulnerable to abortion and which women aren’t. That’s where some of the statistical data from the NAF comes in handy. For anyone interested in combatting abortion, it helps us identify whether our programs and resources are being the most strategically deployed, amongst those who are the most vulnerable to abortion. This information has already shaped some of the markers Abort73 uses to advertise on Facebook.
The second reason I think this information is important is because it can help make women themselves more aware of their own relative vulnerability to abortion. Lots of the testimonies on the Abort73 website are from those who always considered themselves pro-life until they suddenly found themselves in a crisis pregnancy. I’ve heard abortion-rights advocates cynically suggest that most women are pro-life, except when it comes to their own abortion. The NAF textbook even includes advice on how to manipulate women who are ideologically opposed to abortion. They suggest reminding “religious” women of God’s forgiveness and asking them, “Do you believe in a merciful God who understands what’s in our hearts?” (55) For women who have “always been against abortion,” they suggest pointing out that “If she has made exceptions for rape or life endangerment, then she can see herself as having kept an open mind on abortion for certain circumstances, and is now expanding her acceptance of other circumstances (to include her own).” It’s easy to think, abortion could never happen to me, but without vigilance and forethought, it can!
To those ends, these are some of the demographic markers related to abortion, all taken directly from the pages of the NAF text:
To summarize, if you’re having sex with someone you’re not married to, if you’re 20-24 years old, if you’re a minority or on Medicaid, if you live in a metropolitan area or in California, if you consider yourself young and healthy or you’re a smoker, if you’ve had multiple sexual partners or started having sex at a young age, if you’ve already had an abortion in the past, then statistically speaking, you have an elevated vulnerability for future abortion. Be aware of that. I realize that some of the listed risk-factors cannot be modified, and I’m not suggesting that changing cities or states is a way to escape the reach of abortion. What I am suggesting is for each of us to take a long, hard look at the behavior decisions that so often lead to abortion, and make any changes that are necessary.
I want to finish this post by looking at an one more, admittedly-perplexing NAF statement relating to demographics and abortion. It comes from page 224 of the NAF textbook:
Women of races other than White are more than twice as likely to die from induced abortion (in the US). About one-fifth of the excess mortality risk among minority-race women is because of their later gestational age at the time of abortion.
This statement seems totally unaccountable to me. Why do minority women die from induced abortion at twice the rate of Whites? The NAF attributes a small portion of this imbalance to the fact that minority women are more likely to abort later in pregnancy, which makes the procedure more dangerous to the mother. But what accounts for the other 80%? The NAF offers no explanation and probably hopes nobody will ask. But in light of the American abortion-industries’ long and sordid relationship to eugenic principles, is it possible that more minority women die by abortion simply because they’re not considered as valuable as their White counterparts? No doubt economics plays a role in maternal mortality as well, but abortion’s historic, disproportionate targeting of minorities may be evidence that something much more sinister is also in play.
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As a general rule, when cervical dilation is sufficient, fewer instrument passes are needed to remove the fetus. In some cases, intact delivery is feasible. Because the cranium represents the largest and least compressible structure, it often requires decompression… Removal of an intact or near-intact fetus minimizes the risk of retained tissue… Decompression can be accomplished with forceps or by making an incision at he base of the skull through which the intracranial contents are suctioned. If the fetus is in cephalic presentation with the calvarium well-applied to the cervix, the surgeon can pierce the calvarium with a sharp instrument and collapse it externally. (173)
Though medical jargon helps mask the barbarity of what is being described, it remains a chilling account. There are two ways the abortionist can get the baby’s head (cranium) through the mother’s cervix. The head can be crushed with forceps or it can be punctured with a sharp instrument so that the brain can be removed by suction aspiration. If the baby is delivered head first (cephalic presentation), the top of the head (calvarium) can be punctured externally! Because a portion of either the baby’s head or body is outside the womb before the abortion takes place, lawmakers labeled the procedure, “partial birth abortion.”
Included in the statute of the 2003 Partial-Birth Abortion Ban is the assertion that, “moral, medical, and ethical consensus exists that the practice of performing a partial-birth abortion… is a gruesome and inhumane procedure that is never medically necessary and should be prohibited.” The reason I call this ban an absurdity is not because I disagree with the law’s assertion, but because partial-birth abortion is no more “gruesome and inhumane” than any other form of abortion. And if you read the accounts of D&E and D&X side by side, you’d be hard pressed to say that D&X is the more gruesome of the two. In fact, one of the advantages the NAF attributes to D&X is the opportunity it affords grieving mothers to “hold an intact fetus.” (173) By comparison, D&E tears the baby’s entire body to pieces.
Don’t get me wrong. Partial-birth abortion should be banned, along with every other form of elective abortion. My remarks are not meant to be an indictment against the men and women who labored to ban this particular procedure, but rather to point out how absurd it is for the law to single out partial-birth abortion amongst other equally-barbaric methods. The NAF rails at the Gonzales v. Carhart verdict for failing to see that partial-birth abortion is not materially different from any other form of abortion, and quite frankly they’re right. If there’s nothing wrong with abortion, there’s nothing wrong with partial-birth abortion. On the other hand, if there is something wrong with partial-birth abortion, it’s only because there’s something wrong with abortion.
The most practical problem with banning just one abortion method is that all sorts of legal alternatives remain. Unfortunately, it is probably fair to say that the Partial-birth Abortion Ban has not prevented a single baby from being aborted. It has simply mandated that they be aborted in slightly different ways. The NAF textbook points out that physicians can circumvent the D&X ban by simply killing the baby by lethal injection, before the procedure begins. Specifically:
Injections to cause fetal demise prior to operative evacuation may have certain benefits. At gestational ages when a live birth is possible, these injections avoid that possibility… Some clinicians believe that the process of cortical bone softening, which begins within 24 hours of fetal death and makes fetal tissue more pliable, may facilitate evacuation and avoid lacerations caused by sharp fragments of fetal bone. Some patients may find solace in knowing that fetal death occurred prior to operative evacuation. US abortion providers may prefer using these injections to ensure compliance with the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 and related state laws. The act is an intentionally imprecisely worded statue prescribing criminal sanctions against offending physicians but applicable only when a “living fetus” is present at the outset of evacuation. (166)
There is much to draw out from this excerpt, but let’s begin at the end. Because the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban is only applicable if the baby is alive at the procedure’s outset, the only adjustment required by the abortionist is to kill the baby before performing the D&X. How is this achieved? By administering “agents to cause fetal demise 1 to 2 days before (intact) D&E, often in conjunction with cervical preparation.” (167) These agents are “administered via intraamniotic or intrafetal injection… [with] a 20-gauge or a 22-gauge spinal needle.” (166) Digoxin or potassium chloride are the agents of choice. When using digoxin, the text says that “providers may feel a change in resistance at the needle tip as it enters the fetus” (167) Fetal demise usually occurs within five hours. When using potassium chloride, “injection into the fetal heart or umbilical cord is required [and] needle placement should be maintained until fetal death is confirmed monographically.” (167) Once the baby is dead, the rest of the D&X procedure is materially unchanged. Its gruesomeness remains the same.
The second thing to note is the assertion that some patients “find solace in knowing that fetal death occurred prior to operative evacuation.” The implication here is that death by injection is a more humane way to die, which raises an interesting question. If the cause of death for this procedure is lethal injection, what is the cause of death in a D&E, D&X, or suction curettage procedure? Penetrating trauma. Think about that for a moment. Penetrating trauma is an injury sustained as a result of sharp force, which includes injuries from cutting or piercing instruments. If death by lethal injection is the most humane way to kill someone, death by penetrating trauma has to be among the least humane ways to kill a person, and this is precisely what most abortions do. That doesn’t mean that abortion by injection is any more justified than abortion by curettage, but the violence intrinsic to most abortions is something worth noting.
Finally, and most significantly, the first benefit listed by the NAF in regard to fetal injection is the fact that it removes the risk of the baby being born alive. They elaborate in the excerpts below:
Published data confer no clear medical benefit of causing fetal demise (by injection), although individual practitioners may want to consider it if… (3) they desire to avoid the possibility of unscheduled delivery of a live fetus; or (4) they are concerned about compliance with the Partial-Birth Aboriton Ban Act of 2003. (169)
Providers should consider the possibility of a live-born fetus, particularly if fetal death is not induced prior to the procedure an the gestational age is 18 to 20 weeks or more… Besides the emotional and ethical difficulties for patients, their partners, and staff, a delivery with signs of life may have legal implications. This situation necessitates a clearly defined protocol for resuscitation that involves neonatal intensive care staff, abortion providers, ancillary staff, and legal consultation. (180)
Do not miss the significance of these revelations. The foreword of the NAF textbook declares that “access to safe abortion is as essential to modern living as the internal combustion engine or silicon chip.” (xiv) That’s their starting point. From there, their attitudes and prescriptions regarding post-viability abortions (including partial-birth abortion) make it clear that they see no moral distinction between early abortion and late abortion. They are one and the same. And now they make the final progression, implying that there is no moral distinction between abortion and infanticide. If you don’t see it, read the quotes above again. Delivering a live baby MAY have legal implications. Physicians should use lethal injection IF they want to avoid the possibility of delivering a live baby. In other words, the NAF urges abortionists to be cautious about delivering babies alive and killing them outside the womb, lest they get in trouble with the law. Depending on the state, depending on the circumstances, the law might require them to let this baby live. It is on this point that the depraved absurdity of abortion is exposed in the clearest light. So long as a portion of the baby is in the womb, the abortionist can kill him or her with impunity. But if he’s not able to kill the baby before the entire body is out, suddenly that baby is a person protected by the law. Killing that same baby now may have legal implications. God help us!
All that to say, if you have created categories in your head which views infanticide as worse than late-term abortion and late-term abortion as worse than early-term abortion, take a lesson from the National Abortion Federation, take a lesson from Peter Singer, and wake up to the fact that they are all the same. Each year in the United States, roughly 134,400 American babies are torn to pieces by dilation and evacuation. (157) Partial-birth abortion may have a worse reputation, but all methods yield equally monstrous results.
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Following the lead of Warren Hern’s much earlier volume, Management of Unintended and Abnormal Pregnancy does not address the morality of abortion. In other words, it never troubles itself with an attempt to explain why it is ethically sound for a physician to intentionally end the life of a living human being. And though the book deals at some length with “abnormal” pregnancies, it readily affirms the fact that at all stages of pregnancy, “most women seeking abortion are young and healthy.” (159) Only 12% of women in the United States list a physical problem with their health among their reasons for having an abortion. (78) The closest this book comes to a moral argument is found in the second foreword, when Malcolm Potts writes:
Bernard Haring, who has been called “the foremost Catholic moral theologian of the 20th century,” wrote “The moment of ensoulment . . . does not belong to the data of revelation.” If, “the moment of ensoulment” is indeed a matter of faith, then religious freedom must encompass different interpretations of abortion. In short, in any society that separates church and state, the status of the embryo-fetus is a matter of personal, usually religious assertion; and like other religious assertions, it must remain a matter for tolerance. Logically, any pluralistic society built on religious tolerance must permit safe abortion. xiv
Later in the book, the authors declare that though “some abortion care providers may find it difficult to accept sex selection as a valid reason for an abortion… [the patient] may believe that aborting a female fetus is a rational act for the future good of the family.” (60) Physicians are advised to yield to the moral compass of their patients, so as to “provide care in a nonjudgmental way.” (325) None of these are moral arguments. Rather, these are arguments to be amoral physicians, and none of them bear up under scrutiny. The argument put forward by Malcolm Potts is ridiculous on its face. Does anyone suggest tolerance for religions that practice child sacrifice or even animal sacrifice? How about for religions that practice cannibalism, slavery or bigamy? Do these practices get a free pass as well? Biology tells us unequivocally that abortion kills a living, genetically-distinct human being. This is not a religious assertion. It is a matter of plain, empirical evidence. Therefore, it is folly to argue that abortion must be protected for the sake of religious freedom. We do not demand health care providers to be nonjudgmental if they encounter child abuse or rape. On the contrary, we expect them to intervene on behalf of the victim. Why should it be any different in the context of abortion?
In lieu of a moral defense of abortion, the NAF textbook relentlessly asserts that abortion is simply unavoidable. Consider the following remarks:
Why do they go to such great lengths to make such a statistically dubious assertion? Because it’s a lot easier than trying to defend the practice of abortion in its own right. By asserting, over and over and over, that women will have abortions whether they’re legal or not, the NAF is trying to sidestep the ethics of abortion. In an attempt to make the morality of abortion superfluous, they’ve landed on the following hypothesis:
a) Women will abort whether it’s legal or not.
b) Illegal abortions are unsafe.
c) Abortion must be legal.
Framing the issue this way essentially concedes the immorality of abortion, but argues that it must remain legal – lest women be killed en masse from illegal abortions. There are two glaring problems with this hypothesis, and both are demonstrable from the pages of the NAF textbook itself. We’ll start with page 32, where it says: “Studies have found that public funding of abortion makes services accessible to women who would otherwise carry unintended pregnancies to term.” In advocating that more public money be spent to pay for abortions, the NAF admits that a woman’s decision to abort is influenceable. After spending the first two chapters hammering away at the notion that not even the law can prevent a woman from having an abortion, they admit that a mere lack of funds is enough to keep many women from aborting. In chapter four, the authors lament the preventative impact parental notification laws are having in some states even as they note that “in states where no legal challenge is possible, abortion providers and advocates have devised systems to help minors obtain bypasses as efficiently as possible.” (41) Here again, if legal restrictions have no bearing on a woman’s willingness to abort, why does the NAF have to devise such elaborate networks of attorneys and judges to circumvent parental notification laws? Finally, the NAF textbook criticizes Mississippi’s recent “two-trip” legislation for reducing the state abortion rate by 15% in 12 months. By simply requiring patients to visit the abortion clinic twice instead of once, Mississippi reduced the overall number of abortions. If it were really true that nothing can dissuade pregnant women from aborting, these results would have been impossible to achieve.
The second problem with the NAF hypothesis relates to premise b, and this is where I want to place most of our focus. Even if we concede the first assertion–that the law has no bearing on a woman’s willingness to abort, the second assertion is just as untenable. Here’s why. Though the legalization of abortion is often credited with reducing abortion’s morbidity and morality rate, it was technological changes that played a far more significant role. To demonstrate, consider the bullet points below, all taken directly from the pages of the NAF text:
The NAF’s interest in demonstrating the technical simplicity and overwhelming safety of first-timester abortion owes to its desire to see abortion further deregulated. But such claims counteract the overarching assertion that for abortion to be safe, it must be legal. And lest you feel I’m reading too much into their statements on abortion safety, consider the following remarks which relate directly to the context of illegal, low-resource abortions:
In other words, it is not legality that made abortion relatively more safe for the mother, it is the advent of suction aspiration, the use of drugs like mifepristone and misoprostol, and improved methods of dilation. And guess what that means? It means it is dishonest to assert that though abortion is morally objectionable, it must remain legal for the sake of (born) women’s health. And lest you argue that in the absence of legal protection, the resources necessary for a “safe” abortion would be unavailable, consider these final remarks:
The resources and equipment used for elective abortion are the same that are used around the globe in the aftermath of spontaneous abortion care (miscarriage). This means that any physician willing to circumvent an anti-abortion law, would already have the equipment necessary to do so. And as the NAF points out in their remarks on securing safe abortions in a legally-restrictive context, medical abortions can be carried out almost entirely by the woman herself. I point all this out not because I wouldn’t grieve just as much over illegal abortion as I do over legal abortion, but because I’m tired of the safe/legal hypothesis being used as a moral trump card. If you support abortion rights, have the integrity to do so without making appeal to the supposed apocalyptic threat illegal abortion would pose to women’s health. You can’t have it both ways. If abortion is as safe and easy as the NAF wants us to believe, then it’s time to give up the pretense that, right or wrong, legal abortion is a pragmatic necessity. Until we do, we’ll never be able to examine abortion in an honest, objective light.
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The abortion ratio in the United States has risen… from approximately 1.3 abortions per 1000 live births (in 1963) to 428 (in 1980). (20)
This statement directly refutes the common notion that laws don’t influence behavior. Abortion advocates relentlessly maintain the assertion that women will have abortions whether they are legal or not. What they almost never clarify is the fact that while some women will have an abortion even if it’s illegal, the vast majority will not.
The longer the interval between the injection and D & E procedure, the better… With this consideration in mind, labor that is established quickly after injection (within 1 or 2 hours), before the fetal heart beat has ceased, may be suppressed by giving the patient a moderate dose of narcotic analgesic. (146)
What Hern is describing here is an amnioinfusion abortion of a baby that is past 21-weeks LMP. To accomplish the abortion, a solution is injected into the amniotic fluid to kill the baby. The problem that Hern alludes to is when the mother goes into labor before the baby is dead. To remedy this, Hern suggests a narcotic that will help suppress labor until the baby’s heart stops beating. This is significant because it so clearly demonstrates the absurdity of our existing abortion laws. The only reason this narcotic is given is to ensure that the baby dies inside the womb instead of outside the womb. Never mind the fact that it is the same baby in both places. Hern’s maneuvering is nothing less than an accounting trick that allows him to classify the death as abortion instead of infanticide. Morally, they are exactly the same.
…because pregnancy is a community as well as an individual phenomenon; so is abortion. (2)
In light of Hern’s vehement public assertion on page 324 that abortion is “a private business,” how can he also assert that abortion is a community phenomenon? The claim that abortion is protected by a constitutional right to privacy has always been a disingenuous one, and this statement helps illustrate that.
…women will subject themselves to violence in order to interrupt pregnancy. (4)
If you balk at the suggestion that abortion is an act of violence, consider this remark by Dr. Hern. He makes it to defend his ideologic understanding of pregnancy as disease. If pregnancy weren’t like a disease, he asks, why are so many women willing to undergo the violence of abortion to avoid it? Make no mistake. Abortion is an act of violence, as Hern well knows.
The relationship between the [pregnant] female and the [fetus] can be understood best as one of host and parasite.” (14)
By definition, a parasite must be of a different species than the host, but this relatively slanderous assertion still proves an important point. At no point in pregnancy is the embryo or fetus simply a part of the mother’s body. It is a separate, “foreign” body from beginning to end.
…it is paradoxical to have a woman complain about the idea of an intrauterine device on the grounds that it requires the placement of an unnatural object in one of her body cavities, while she willingly submits to an abortion, requiring the placement of several unnatural objects into her body cavities. (89)
The “unnaturalness” of abortion struck me on multiple occasions while reading Abortion Practice. As Hern frequently notes, it is difficult to destroy something that a woman’s body is so uniquely equipped to protect. Forcing the dilatation of the cervix is no laughing matter. The body does not yield access to the womb easily. And in light of the frequent criticisms I’ve received to the effect of, “What right does a man have to condemn abortion?,” Hern’s accounts of his forced entry into more than 10,000 wombs left me with a much more significant question. What right does a man have to kill a women’s baby?! Dr. Hern has made a career out of artificially manipulating nature to do something it doesn’t want to do, and he calls his actions a “cultural adaptation” necessary to combat the “flawed biological adaptation” of pregnancy. (15, 16) Biologically, Hern believes, pregnancy evolved to ensure the survival of the species. He calls it a flawed adaptation, because he believes we’re reproducing too much. In his mind, abortion is the necessary next step in the evolutionary chain.
…the risks of complications in the very early pregnancy terminations (4-6 weeks from LMP) outweigh the benefits…. Also, some studies have shown a higher incidence of complications when the abortion is performed in a pregnancy of less than 7 weeks from LMP. (120,121)
Abortion advocates who seek the moral high ground by only claiming to support abortion early in pregnancy should note Hern’s recommendation that abortion should not be performed prior to 7 weeks LMP. That’s approximately 5 weeks from fertilization, and if you look at Abort73’s page on Prenatal Development, you may be surprised at how developed this tiny human being already is.
The vast majority of women having abortions are young, in the teens or early twenties, and are having their first pregnancy… In view of these facts, it is important to determine whether induced abortion impairs later reproductive performance or results in adverse long-term psychological consequences. The first of these questions has been studied extensively with almost wholly inconclusive result. The second has had very little study at all. (275)
This statement is a bit out of step with all the abortion advocates who unequivocally defend the long-term, physical and emotional safety of abortion.
Tietze developed a table of risks comparing the mortality consequences of term pregnancy, contraception, and induced abortion on the basis of information available in 1969. Tietze and associates have continued to refine this method of analysis and have reached the conclusion that the lowest possible risk is experienced by women using barrier methods of contraception backed up by early abortion to terminate pregnancies resulting from method failure… The authors estimate that total reproductive mortality would be reduced by one third if women over the age of 35, especially those who smoke, would avoid using oral contraceptives. They point out that methods used for preventing pregnancy now cause almost as many deaths as pregnancy itself. (39-40)
These remarks indicate that the abortion industry is far more concerned with preventing births than it is with preventing abortions. Contraception is not really their end goal. And on page 45, Hern does not even include barrier methods among his list of “more effective” contraceptives. Nevertheless, he recommends that women pair the use of barrier methods with abortion (when those methods fail) as the safest form of birth control.
One of the most difficult (behaviors) for staff members of an abortion facility is the patient who returns several times for repeat abortions… [they] give counselors the feeling that they have failed to help the patient.”… A similar sense of frustration is experienced by the counselor who finds herself unable to gain a commitment from a woman seeking an abortion to use any method… of contraception after the abortion. (88)
Here again, why should this be troubling? If there’s nothing immoral about abortion, who cares how often women come in for one? Who cares whether they’re using birth control or not? Hair dressers, manicurists, and tanning salon owners aren’t troubled by repeat visits. They don’t think they’ve failed when they have to cut someone’s hair again. The reactions that Hern speaks of clearly demonstrate the underlying knowledge that abortion is an unethical act.
I’ll close with a line from the pep talk Hern gives to future abortionists at the end of his book. Abortionists, he says, must be willing “to absorb gratuitous insults and character assassination without wavering from one’s purpose.” If those performing and defending abortion are willing to demonstrate such devotion to their cause, what kind of devotion must we have who are working to expose and eliminate abortion? If we’re not risking insult, we’re probably risking too little.
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Writing a single-author, medical textbook is a massive undertaking, and the reason Hern did so was to “remedy” what he saw as an overall lack of proper abortion training. (x) Though he believes abortion is safer for (born) women than childbirth (when performed correctly), he also suggests that plenty of abortion providers and advocates are too cavalier in their risk assessment. “In medical practice,” Hern writes, “there are few surgical procedures given so little attention and so underrated in its potential hazard as abortion.” (101) Hern revisits this theme throughout the book, and you’ll find some of his parallel assertions on Abort73’s Abortion Risks page. What particularly struck me this time through were Hern’s assertions regarding anesthesia and laminaria (a thin piece of sterile seaweed used to gradually dilate the cervix). He writes:
There are some surgical operations that absolutely require general anesthesia… Operative abortion is not. (120)
…the use of general anesthesia is associated with a two to four times greater risk of death in abortion than the use of local anesthesia. (182)
Patient comfort and physician convenience appear to be highly marginal indications for general anesthesia considering the risks involved. The degree of bleeding experienced under general anesthesia is greater, the risk of perforation is greater, and the risk of death due to aspiration of vomitus, among other things, appears to be greater. I believe it is preferable to have a patient who is uncomfortable but able to tell me what she is feeling and if she feels a strange new abdominal pain than to have a patient who is quite comfortable because she is dead. (119)
While the National Abortion Federation (NAF) website states that general anesthesia is not commonly used during the first trimester, I’ve read plenty of abortion testimonies from women who were knocked out during their abortion. And many of the risks Hern describes would also be true of conscious sedation. Since the abortion industry positions itself as a champion of women’s health, why make general anesthesia and sedation available at all? As Dr. Hern asserts, “comfort” and “convenience” are not sufficient rationales – though these same factors seem to be influencing the use of laminaria as well. Hern writes:
I favor the use of laminaria for cervical dilatation as a means of minimizing complications… The need for local anesthesia is reduced… The pain resulting from from cervical dilatation is usually minimal, the procedure time is rapid… blood loss is usually insignificant [and] careful preoperative evaluation of the patient’s emotional status [can be made]… The principal disadvantage include the necessity for two clinical visits [and] the risk of mild to severe overnight cramping. (108)
Without going into the details of cervical dilation, the point here is that Hern believes the use of laminaria makes for a much safer first-trimester abortion. He calls it a “safe and natural way” to open the entrance to the uterus. As an aside, how is it natural to stick seaweed into a woman’s cervix so that it’s forced to open up before the appointed time?! More to the point, Hern’s Colorado abortion clinic may be the only one in the country following his recommended procedure. Why? It almost certainly owes to a general unwillingness to make abortion a two-day procedure. If Hern’s assessment is correct, safety is being compromised for convenience. He further states that the “common complications” of abortion are rarely serious. Rather, it is the mismanagement of these complications that can prove fatal:
The most common complications of first-trimester abortion cut across the major categories of complications. They include uterine hypotonia, or postabortal syndrome (PAS), retained tissue, infection, perforation, and vasovagal reaction… Major complications are rare, but they usually flow from one of these common complications that has progressed or is inappropriately managed. (176)
Towards the end of the book, Hern recommends that every abortion clinic should be located “within 5 minutes of a full-service hospital” and have “a ground-floor entrance… for the management of emergencies.” (224)
One of the ways abortion advocates try to “normalize” abortion is by arguing that it has always existed, and it is only the backwards or prudish who object to it. The following statements from Dr. Hern reference the historic stigmatism of abortion and demonstrate that it has never enjoyed broad, public support or acceptance:
…a surprising number (of women) feel that the abortion has been a rather positive experience.” (63) - If there is nothing abnormal abortion, why does Hern express surprise that some women react to it positively?
The woman who is considering abortion or who has decided to terminate a pregnancy is going against the grain of our cultural history. (63)
Abortion has been considered a stigmatized operation by the medical profession for centuries… In some programs, assignment to the abortion rotation is considered a kind of academic and surgical purgatory. (101)
The reputation for danger that abortion acquired in the United States, at least in the first half of the century, was due to the high incidence of incomplete abortions resulting in sepsis (a severe illness in which the bloodstream is overwhelmed by bacteria) and death. (107)
In the United States, abortion is one of the most significant social controversies of the 20th century… abortion has been stigmatized in the medical profession… the public and large segments of the medical profession considered abortion to be an unethical medical act regardless of its legal status. (317)
Communities do not like to be reminded that abortions are occurring within their boundaries… very few abortion clinics or physicians providing abortion services include the word abortion in the title identifying the activity. (317)
Dr Hern writes, “It is essential that each patient be given full information concerning the abortion procedure,” and he labels those abortion clinics that provide no counseling as “seriously deficient.” (67, 301) I agree. In fact, that is the very reason Abort73 exists. It was built upon the conviction that pregnant women are not being given the full story when they enter the abortion clinic. What do I make of Hern’s assertion then? I think its genuine so far as it goes, but clearly he has a very narrow view of what full disclosure looks like. He advises:
[Counselors should be trained in] reproductive anatomy and physiology, gynecologic diseases, venereal disease, breast and cervical cancer, sterilization, medical aspects of abortion, theory and case studies of oral contraceptives and intrauterine devices, and conventional contraceptive methods.” (311)
[Counseling should include:] social history relevant to abortion. Explanation of reproductive anatomy and physiology. Explanation of the abortion procedure. Explanation of birth control methods. Presentation of consent form. (312)
Notice that nothing is mentioned about prenatal development. Nothing is communicated to the effect that abortion kills an innocent, genetically distinct human being. To Dr. Hern, these considerations do not even exist. And despite his willingness to be more objective than most abortion advocates, he still makes conscious decisions to conceal key aspects of the truth:
the waiting room should not be located next to the procedure room: waiting patients should not be subjected to the sounds of the operating room. If physical layout requires such an arrangement, the dividing wall should be insulated to make it soundproof. (220)
It is not advisable for patients to view the products of conception, to be told the sex of the fetus, or to be informed of a multiple pregnancy. (304)
I also found these counseling-related statements telling:
It is common to find that a woman has presented herself for an abortion even though she does not really want one; her partner or her parents want her to have one. (81) Dr. Hern then goes on to tell of a situation where he was able to convince a 15-year-old girl who didn’t want abortion (but was brought in by her parents) that it was in her best interest to have the abortion.
For religious women, “frequently, fear of discovery of their pregnancy if they continue it outweighs their fear of going against religious precepts.” (83) He doesn’t come right out and say it, but I wonder if counselors are encouraged to play upon this fear of discovery?
“…the abortion counselor should recognize that the emotional trauma experienced by the rape or incest victim cannot be treated adequately, if at all, in the abortion clinic setting.”
I found this last statement interesting for two reasons. First, Hern gives no directive to counselors to report a rape to authorities when it is disclosed to them and advises them to not mention it in future. He suggests many of these stories are fabricated. Secondly, notice that he says that the trauma of rape cannot be treated adequately, if at all, in the abortion clinic! In other words, having an abortion does nothing to minimize the trauma and misery of rape. And yet over and over, we hear that abortion is an essential, therapeutic response to rape. Don’t miss the significance of Dr. Hern’s assertion.
I have a few more observations to share, but I’m going to wrap this post up here. Stay tuned for volume three…
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If there is a central, philosophic premise to Dr. Hern’s book, it is the notion that pregnancy should be understood and treated as though it were a disease. “Many, if not all, aspects of pregnancy,” he says, “can be understood best in terms of the cognitive framework of illness.” (4) Why does he say this? From a practical standpoint, he points to the discomfort and sickness-like symptoms often experienced by pregnant women. From a philosophical standpoint, he recognizes that it is the only way to justify abortion in the broader context of established medical protocol. “It is important to remember,” Hern tells the reader, “that the first principle of medical practice is to do no harm.” (188) If you visit Abort73’s Abortion Procedures web page, you’ll find the same principle, Primum non nicer, at the heart of our condemnation of abortion. It’s ironic that Hern points to the very same thing as a justification for abortion, and his basic argument is this: Pregnancy brings disease-like symptoms and is statistically more likely to kill a woman than full-term pregnancy. So, “unless pregnancy is desired for the purpose of reproduction,” he argues, “abortion is the indicated treatment of choice.” (46) Along the way, Hern compares pregnancy to smallpox and tuberculosis, and says, “the distinction between elective and therapeutic abortions is false; all abortions are therapeutic.” (46)
There are three things missing in Dr. Hern’s assessment. First, no consideration is given to the severe, emotional trauma that often follows on the heels of abortion. He simply states that there is “no strong evidence either way concerning the adverse or positive psychological effects of abortion.” (289) His argument that abortion is “healthier” than pregnancy is limited strictly to reported mortality rates. Second, no mention is made of the potential causal connection between abortion and breast cancer. If abortion does increase a woman’s likelihood of contracting breast cancer, then abortion presents a far more serious threat to her life than does a full-term pregnancy. And even if there is not a positive, causal connection between abortion and breast cancer, it is well established that pregnancy itself reduces a woman’s risk of breast cancer. Therefore, even if the average, post-abortal woman is no more likely to contract breast cancer than a woman who was never pregnant, the abortion still cancels out the health benefits that would have ensued from a full-term pregnancy. Third, and most significantly, Dr. Hern never addresses the harm done to the innocent human beings who are killed through the process of abortion. He says in the introduction that abortion involves a woman and her physician. No mention is made of the baby (or the father). In the book’s 340 pages, not a single reference is made to the question that is at the heart of the abortion debate.
Near the book’s close, Dr. Hern recommends that all abortion practitioners follow his own pattern of silence on the issue of fetal rights. It is both calculated and strategic. “With public support of the right to choose reaching nearly 80% among the general public,” Hern says, “debates are of limited value.” (325) He notes that in Colorado, the pro-choice community blankly refuses all requests to participate in public debates. While they’re happy to make presentations in schools, if both sides of the debate are to be presented, Hern requires that “the presentations must be made on different occasions [and] visual aid materials (must) not be presented by either side.” He only agrees to TV interviews if the station agrees to “[focus] on the public issue involved (right to confidential and professional medical care, freedom of choice, and so forth) and not on the specific details of the abortion procedures.” (323) According to Dr. Hern, this is the only message that should be communicated in a TV interview: “Abortion is safe; it is legal; it ought to stay that way; people who think otherwise are interfering with your private business and trying to ruin your life.” (324)
The closest Dr. Hern gets to a moral rationale for abortion is this: “We as abortion-service providers, cannot place moral judgments on the motives or actions of our patients… the counselor cannot know whether the reason given for the abortion is a good one or even if it is the real reason.” (85) In other words, Hern sees abortionists as amoral agents who have no place or responsibility to decide whether abortion is right or wrong. In his mind, any reason to abort is just as good as the next one, so long as it’s what the woman wants. To illustrate, he shares of an experience he had with a well-educated and affluent woman in her 30’s who came in for a second-trimester abortion after finding out she was having another boy. Hern writes: “(If she had the boy,) she felt she would inflict psychological damage on the child and … be miserable and resentful for the rest of her life. Even though I had begun by being totally opposed to an abortion for this reason, she persuaded me that, in her mind, abortion was the only choice she could accept for this pregnancy for her own mental health as well as the welfare of her family.” (85) Dr. Hern performed the abortion, and I suppose we should commend him for at least realizing that there is no moral distinction between a sex-selection abortion and a health-selection abortion. If he’s willing to do the one, he has to be willing to do the other.
Though Warren Hern realizes how damaging public debates and pictures of abortion can be to the “pro-choice” cause, there is plenty in the book itself that can and must be used to publicly expose abortion. That is my main intention in commenting on this book at all. The descriptions Hern provides of the abortion process are shocking (to say the least) and have reignited my anger and outrage that this continues to happen in America – while those on both sides of the debate are largely indifferent to its practice. We simply go on with business as usual. I pray that after reading the following descriptions, our opposition to abortion will become far more intentional. And I pray that as we rightly condemn the myriad of lesser injustices happening around the globe, we will stop shying away from the one, massive injustice that is happening right here at home. In the words of Dr. Hern, this is abortion:
Evacuation of fetal parts through the less dilated but softened cervix may produce uneven pressure on the internal os and result in serious laceration… Even though 2 cm to 2.3 cm of dilatation are obtained by laminaria alone… fetal parts such as the pelvis and collapsed calvaria (skull) may measure 2.5 cm to 3 cm or more in width. (128)
Collapse and dismemberment of fetal tissues become difficult, adding to the discomfort, duration, and danger of the procedure. (129)
As the forceps is closed, a solid feel will relay the information that fetal parts are grasped. The forceps is gently withdrawn in a rotating motion. The reason for the rotation is principally that it will disclose whether the material grasped is uterine wall instead of uterine contents. (139)
After the cervix is entered, force [should not be] applied to push the curet through… It must be remembered that the edge of the curet is sharp and the uterine artery may be less than a centimeter away. (149)
If labor is not established, 5 hours or more should elapse from the injection time to the time the D & E procedure is performed… Ideally, the fetus is presenting in the lower uterine segment and can be delivered quickly with little discomfort to the patient. Fetal tissues are significantly softened, permitting easy dismemberment. (145)
Fetal weight doubles from 13 to 14 weeks (11-12 weeks from fertilization), and total tissue weight almost doubles. The fetus is significantly larger than at 12 weeks and the [skull] may not easily enter or pass a large (12-mm) suction cannula. The [skull] can easily become trapped… At 14 weeks’ fetal age (12 weeks from fertilization), tissue is more likely to become lodged in the cannula. When this happens, it is a good procedure to put the suction tip aside and proceed with the forceps. (146-47)
It is better to use smaller forceps and take smaller amounts of tissue each time than to deliver fetal parts intact while traumatizing the cervix… If both the fetus and the placenta have been delivered but the [skull] has not, the Barrett is also an excellent instrument for exploration [because] grasping the uterine wall accidentally with the Bierer could be catastrophic. (150)
At 16 to 17 weeks (14-15 weeks from fertilization), fetal tissue is much more easily identifiable with the forceps and in some ways is easier to grasp and remove than in earlier gestations. The [skull] is about the size of a Ping-Pong ball and usually can be grasped readily with the Bierer. Collapsing it gives a definite sensation… (151)
[At 18-19 weeks (16-17 weeks from fertilization),] fetal parts are significantly larger and more difficult to mocellate (tear into pieces). (152)
[A 20-week abortion (18 weeks from fertilization) is] a significantly more difficult procedure accompanied by unnerving hemorrhage. Forceps use must be sure and relatively rapid. There is frequently not much time for exploring the nuances of different tissue sensations. Grasping and collapsing the [skull is] often difficult. Stripping the [skull] of soft tissue is sometimes the first step in successful delivery of this part, followed by dislocation of parietal bones. In this case, care must be taken in removal because ossification is occurring and the edges are sharp… Regardless of the amount of dilatation, delivery of the [skull] and pelvis is sometimes difficult… The advantage obtained by having a softened cervix could become a disaster if a laceration develops at the level of the internal os as the result of too much force. (153)
The procedure changes significantly at 21 weeks (19 weeks from fertilization) because the fetal tissues become much more cohesive and difficult to dismember. This problem is accentuated by the fact that the fetal pelvis may be as much as 5 cm in width… [the skull] can be collapsed. Other structures, such as the pelvis, present more difficulty… A long curved Mayo scissors may be necessary to decapitate and dismember the fetus, since it may be impossible to apply forceps or to do so while avoiding the thinned-out cervix. (154)
After a second-trimester dilatation and evacuation (D & E) procedure, fetal tissue is carefully separated from placenta and membranes… The aggregate fetal tissue is weighed, then the following fetal parts are measured: foot length, knee-to-heel length, and biparietal diameter. In most cases the [skull] has been collapsed but is basically intact. It is placed under running water and, as the water fills the cranium, a biparietal measurement is taken by sight with a clear plastic ruler… All observations should be carefully noted in the patient’s chart. Tissue specimens are placed in formalin and disposed of. (164)
A trapped [skull] is one of the most common, frustrating, and disconcerting complications, but it is one of the most innocuous when it is managed properly… When the [skull] cannot be grasped with the [forceps], the next step is to explore with a [curet]. Sometimes the curet can move the [skull] out of the cornu into the midline, where it can be grasped… Once the [skull] can be felt, it should be possible to collapse and deliver it. (194)
Cervical obstruction by the [skull] is a paradoxical problem, since it is the opposite of having difficulty in recovering tissue… Small instruments cannot encompass it; large instruments… either push it away, cannot be closed once the [skull] is grasped, or, having grasped the [skull], cannot be withdrawn. Unless the [skull] can be collapsed and delivered, however, the procedure cannot be completed… and the risk of complications begin to increase. The most useful maneuver in this case is to grasp the presenting of the [skull] with the cervical tenaculum, stripping away the soft tissue (skin). When the skull bones are visible, they are grasped also with the tenaculum. A long curved Mayo scissors is then used to dissect the [skull] to the point that it is opened and decompressed. At this time, a forceps with a very strong blade and firm grasp… may be used to grasp the tentorium and skull plates, sometimes dismembering by torsion and sometimes by sharp dissection with the Mayo (scissors)… Once some dismemberment has taken place, the operator may take a somewhat larger forceps… As the tissue is pushed slightly up in to the uterine cavity, the forceps blade is opened and a moderate amount of tissue is grasped… With good dilatation and effacement, the entire fetus may be delivered. More likely, however, it will be necessary once again to dissect the portion grasped using the Mayo scissors. This procedure is repeated until it is finally possible to deliver the smaller portions of the fetus, particularly extremities, intact. (199-200)
Dr. Hern’s website offers abortion through 26 weeks. Since he ages from the last menstrual period, that’s approximately 24 weeks from fertilization. You can see what a 24-week baby looks like on Abort73’s Prenatal Development page, and you can see what abortion does to a 24-week baby on Abort73’s Abortion Pictures page (though the 24-week baby pictured there was killed in a saline abortion). The method Dr. Hern prefers (D & E) dismembers the baby before delivery. And lest you argue that the procedures described above have no bearing on the ethics of first-trimester abortion, consider the fact that Dr. Hern makes no moral distinctions between first and second-trimester abortions. They are all the same in his eyes, save for the fact that second-trimester abortions are technically more difficult to perform. The only reason second-trimester procedures sound more gruesome is because the abortionist has to manually dismember the baby, whereas machines do it for them in the first-trimester. Describing a first-trimester, suction abortion, Dr. Hern says the abortionist will “first notice a quantity of amniotic fluid followed by placenta and fetal parts, which may be more or less identifiable.” (114) If the parts cannot be identified as they’re being sucked through the cannula, it is only because they’ve been so thoroughly torn apart. After the abortion is complete, Hern instructs that the gauze bag must be emptied into a flat receptacle and the fetal parts accounted for. This is the only way to ensure that a complete and “successful” abortion has taken place. Make no mistake. First-trimester abortions are no less violent than second-trimester abortions, and the pictures certainly bear this out. Is it any wonder that Dr. Hern refuses to engage in public debate where abortion photographs are included?! Abortion is much easier to justify when you don’t have to look at what it’s actually doing.
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How does this connect to Abort73? About 20 minutes into the film, a remarkable and completely unexpected statement is made by Ted Turner – who helped fund Cousteau’s work during the 1980’s. For me, it was one of those, Wait, what did he just say?! moments. Referring to Cousteau as one of his personal heros (whom he misses daily), Turner says:
I loved his message [about] the rights of the unborn, the next generation’s rights… that’s become part of my credo that we owe it to coming generations that have not gotten here yet to leave them an inhabitable, beautiful world – to leave it in as good a shape as we found it, or maybe better.
To hear Ted Turner speak about the rights of the unborn was a bizarre experience since Turner has a long and lamentable history of funding abortion-advocating organizations. He may be concerned about the next generation, but he has not been a friend to the unborn. As the movie continued, I was struck by the frequent references to Cousteau’s advocacy for future generations. He even composed a Bill of Rights for Future Generations, which his granddaughter, Alexandria Cousteau, references in her on-camera remarks. She notes that “the future generations he spoke of… have already arrived, and we’ve done far too little to honor them as he would have wished.” More than 9 million people have signed Cousteau’s declaration since it was first published, and a reworked version was adopted by the UN in 1997.
According to its own language, the document exists “to reaffirm faith in the dignity and worth of the human person,” and asserts that “the rights of future generations… with respect to the nurture and continuity of life… are seriously threatened,” so that “the preservation and promotion of these rights has a claim on the conscience of all peoples and all nations.” Think about those observations and objectives in the context of abortion. Does abortion reaffirm the worth of human beings? Does abortion respect the rights of future generations? Does abortion support the continuity of life?
With those questions in mind, I set out to find what Cousteau, himself, thought about abortion. And I did so with a fair bit of trepidation. Why? Because Jacques Cousteau was the “the first environmentalist of the ocean,” and environmentalists don’t always recognize the inhumanity of abortion. As it turns out, I could only find that Cousteau made one public remark about abortion, and though it’s a bit ambiguous, it gives me hope that it’s not a practice he endorsed. When asked in a 1996 interview why interest in the environment was fading, he replied:
People are still very much interested but seem to be turning their backs on the real problems. The monumental problem for the future is overpopulation. We had hoped that the Cairo Summit would help us find solutions, to send a clear message to people. The biggest obstacle was mixing abortion with overpopulation. These are two things that have nothing to do with each other.
Whether you believe overpopulation is a monumental problem or not, the implication of Cousteau’s statement is that they shouldn’t be tied together. Abortion is not a legitimate means of combatting overpopulation, and the threat of overpopulation is not a legitimate justification for abortion. Too often, the way we think about abortion entirely dictates the way we think about population issues. Those who oppose abortion won’t even entertain the thought that overpopulation is a real danger (for fear that it will be used to justify more abortions) while those who support abortion won’t question the general assumption that there are too many people in the world (for fear of losing their primary rationale for abortion). Just this week, Abort73 received an angry email that intrinsically linked these issues together. It reads:
[Abort73 is] an idiotic and childish piece of——, full of fake “testimonies” and ridiculously stupid “reasons” for believing that abortion is wrong… People need to just shut up and accept that abortion will continue because it is necessary… it allows all the millions of people who have abortions to keep from adding many more children to the world’s population every year, giving our species a little more time before we collapse our world’s resources completely due to our over-populating of it.
I’ve encountered the overpopulation argument countless times, both in person and online, and I can’t shake the impression that most of those who make it are being entirely disingenuous. I’d be curious to look at their consumption and spending habits to see how legitimately concerned they are about preserving the natural environment we live in. More times than not, it’s fairly obvious that they have little commitment to environmental stewardship. Rather, they play the overpopulation card in an attempt to justify a practice that they haven’t been able to justify on other grounds. To that I say with Cousteau, abortion and overpopulation have nothing to do with each other. If abortion is wrong, the threat of overpopulation doesn’t make it right. And if abortion isn’t wrong, the threat of overpopulation isn’t needed to make it right.
One of the things I’ve come to appreciate about Cousteau, both in watching the documentary and reading through numerous online interviews, is that he didn’t pit human beings and the environment against each other. As Jean Michel declares, his father’s life was marked by a love for the sea and a love for people. Cousteau didn’t see human beings as the enemy of the environment. Rather, human beings are the reason he devoted his life to preserving the environment – so that it would still be around for the enjoyment of future generations. In his own words, he was an environmentalist without the “exaggerated sentimentalism” that plagues so many others.
On the subject of animal rights he said:
[Animals] have a right to live when they are not killed for us to eat… “Baby seals… are slaughtered, it is awful.” Yes, it is, but we have suppressed their predators so the scientists in Canada have to decide how many baby seals to kill to keep the population stable. It is not cruelty, it is a logical decision of scientists.
On the subject of giving more rights to “higher animals” like dolphins because of their “human-like empathy” he replied:
When we try to film the dolphins in the water, they fly away. It’s very difficult to approach a gang of dolphins in freedom. Some dolphins that have been captured have been trained to be adorable pets, but that has nothing to do with their natural empathy.… young dolphins, when they are one or two or three years old, become terrible savages. They form gangs…it’s like Atilla the Hun when they arrive somewhere. “Oh, poor little dolphin.” (Humans are only drawn to them) because they have a built-in smile that has nothing to do with smiling.
On the subject of vivisection:
There are vivisection abuses but some of it is unavoidable. We have to test some. What about our search for an AIDS vaccine; are we going to stop that because of vivisection? C’mon… There should be an ethical group deciding when animal research is a must for the human species. When it is not a must, then we must suppress it.
On the subject of global warming :
[Global warming is] a very difficult problem to decide, because arguments are good both ways. It is probably true, the greenhouse effect syndrome… but let’s be realistic. Seventeen-thousand years ago the water level of the sea was 170 meters lower than today. There was no man, no industry, and the greenhouse effect came from volcanic clouds. The cause of the warming up of the earth is not only human - it is geophysical. There are decimation periods and there are warming-up periods… I don’t know what to say except we should be careful and not add to nature an additional bad factor. But to say we are responsible for the warming up, no.
One of Cousteau’s most controversial remarks dates back to a 1991 interview with The UNESCO Courier where he said:
It’s terrible to have to say this. World population must be stabilized and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. This is so horrible to contemplate that we shouldn’t even say it. But the general situation in which we are involved is lamentable.
Though Cousteau may have been better off following his own advise and not saying what he said, I haven’t found any evidence that he actually endorsed a public policy of euthanasia. Perhaps he was having a bad day. Perhaps he wanted to shock the world out of its stupor. Certainly, Cousteau was pro-contraception, but I think these later remarks more accurately reflect his position:
The population cannot be reduced until 50 years from now because the majority of people existing today in the third world, where populations have exploded, are less than 16 years old. Even if we reduced the fertility of people now to two kids per family, we would still reach 10 billion in 45 years. It’s mathematical; there is nothing we can do… But we can do one big thing: Open our arms and say to these 10 billion people, “Welcome to this Earth.” We have to prepare living space for them. We will have to modify our own way of living so that they can share the joy of living and the dignity of being a human being. It’s a monumental task for us now!
Cousteau once estimated that the planet could only support 700 million people living “with the income, purchasing power, and amenities enjoyed by the average American.” In light of continuing evidence that Americans are among the most depressed and discontented people on the planet, I find it a bit ironic that Cousteau held up the American standard of living as the global ideal. If conservation is the end goal, and the average American consumes 20 times the natural resources as the average Bangladeshi (as Cousteau asserts), why aspire to be like Americans at all? Wouldn’t we Americans do better to learn from the more modest lifestyles of the world around us? And shouldn’t Christians be the the ones setting an example of consuming less and giving more?
Returning to the Bill of Rights for Future Generations, I’d like to draw your attention to its final article. It reads:
Article 5. Governments, non-governmental organizations, and the individuals are urged, therefore, imaginatively to implement these principles (the preservation of earth as the ground of human history, culture, freedom & dignity), as if in the very presence of those future generations whose rights we seek to establish and perpetuate.
Do you see what’s being said? Future generations have rights, even before they are born, and the decisions we make each day should be made as if those future generations were standing here in the flesh. We have a moral obligation to act in the best interest of the generations yet unborn. Without question, there are many preservationists in the world today who see no disconnect between their support of abortion and their commitment to preserving the planet for future generations. Abortion, to them, is a means of preserving the environment for future generations. But here’s the problem with such thinking. Abortion is sold under the guise that it doesn’t actually kill a person. It kills a pre-person. Such thinking is dubious on many levels, but even if you refuse to concede that abortion kills a person, you have to at least concede that it kills a member of the future generation – the very group of people that Ted Turner and others are ostensibly out to protect. And if the goal of environmental conservation is to preserve the planet for future generations, what an absurdity to suggest that abortion is a way of accomplishing that. Abortion either kills a living, human person or it kills a member of the future generation. There is no other option to choose from, and both of these groups have a legitimate claim on our protection.
For a time, Jacques Cousteau was the most recognizable man on the planet, but he was not without his detractors. He is to be commended, his grandson tells us, for his willingness to think differently and challenge the status quo. Hearing that, I couldn’t help but think about the parallels that exist between Cousteau’s work and our own. According to Jean-Michel, the great life-lesson he learned from his father is that people protect what they love. The Cousteaus fell in love with the sea and then devoted their lives to protecting it. “But you cannot protect what you don’t understand,” Jean-Michel reminds us, and so Cousteau invested countless hours into research and education. The reason Cousteau was so successful, according to one National Geographic researcher, is because he was able to distill what science knew and take it to the public. He exposed an entire world to unseen threats that few were aware of and few wanted to think about. But he did it in a way that was accessible and compelling. In the words of my aunt, Jacques Cousteau was able to “concentrate information” and “funnel it into our imagination” – which is precisely what Abort73 is trying to do in the context of abortion. Famed ocean photographer, Bob Talbot, suggests that if Cousteau were alive today, he would urge us to “move [beyond] what’s comfortable to what’s effective” – advice that opponents of abortion would also do well to heed. Former Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, is another of the public figures to be interviewed for the Cousteau documentary, and I’ll close with his tribute to the captain. Cousteau’s genius, Gorbachev tells us, is his recognition that, “if we don’t have a peace for all, we’re not going to have any peace at all.”
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The first portion of the book was preached 20 years ago, in January of 1992. I was a sophomore in high school at the time, and it would be six more years before I would hear of John Piper or give more than passing thought to the issue of abortion. But by the time that year finished (1998), my life had been completely reoriented through reading Desiring God (along with Future Grace, The Pleasures of God and A Hunger for God) and coming face to face with the atrocity of abortion. The timing of Piper’s entrance into my life and his unwavering, public condemnation of abortion was nothing short of providential. Abort73 would not exist apart from the preaching and writing ministry of John Piper.
Returning to the book, the first message came from Ephesians 5 and is anchored on verse 11: Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. According to Pastor John, this text teaches us that, “Christians who walk in the light should be involved in exposing the dark and fruitless work of abortion.” We are called to shine the light of truth, justice and love into dark places so as to show evil for what it really is. He further elaborates:
I hope you hear the force of this. It is radically different from the passivity and moral withdrawal of many Christians. Many believers have a passive avoidance ethic and that is all. In other words they think: if I avoid the works of darkness, and don’t do them myself, then I am doing my Christian duty. I’m clean. I’m in the light. But that is not what verse 11 says. It says you are only doing half your duty. “Take no part in the fruitless works of darkness”—that’s an avoidance ethic. That’s half your duty. But it goes on, and in fact puts stress on the next phrase because it is easily overlooked and because it can be very costly: “Rather even expose them!” Don’t just avoid the works of darkness, expose them. This is not avoidance. This is action.
When this message was first preached in 1992, a “passive avoidance ethic” dominated most evangelicals. That is not nearly as true today as it was twenty years ago–as evidenced by my experience this weekend at The Justice Conference. Conferences like this didn’t exist 10 years ago, let alone 20. Evangelicals are leaving the passive avoidance ethic in droves and are pouring out massive amounts of focused, creative energy towards the elimination of global injustices–except when it comes to abortion. There were close to 150 exhibitors at The Justice Conference, and Abort73 was the only one taking on the injustice of abortion. There were nine general sessions and though I didn’t attend all of them, I don’t believe abortion was even mentioned. Numerous visitors to our table asked how a mostly-Christian conference on justice could leave out abortion, which they described as the defining social justice issue in the world today. That’s a good question. Aside from Scott Rae’s excellent pre-conference break-out session, nothing was said about the injustice of abortion. At the general sessions which I did attend, prominent attention was given to the injustice of not honoring other religions, the injustice of not doing more to free wrongfully-convicted prisoners through DNA testing, and the injustice of U.S. military spending. I’m certainly not suggesting that a conference like this should be all or even mostly about abortion, but to leave it out altogether is troubling.
John Piper’s 1992 sermon has something to say about this omission. The reason Christians are so prone to do only “half [their] duty,” he says, is because exposing the dark work of abortion “can be very costly.” And the cost he references is primarily a social one. I do not think it’s a coincidence that the justice issues getting the most attention at the conference are the same justice issues getting the most attention in the world. Christians are increasingly condemning the injustices the world condemns but remaining largely silent about the injustice of abortion, which much of the world supports and celebrates. There is almost no social cost to combatting politically-correct justice issues, but there are huge social costs to combatting abortion. So how do we find the courage to stand up when the world tells us to sit down? The second section of Piper’s new book, which was first preached in 1991, has something to say about the root of courage:
One thing I have learned from following the educational route as far as it goes in my field and then reading what the most educated write: there is nothing in advanced education that makes a person a courageous and clear spokesman for the truth. I believe in education. I believe some of our brightest young people should make scholarship a career for the glory of God. But let us get the idea out of our head that scholarship makes a man or a woman bold, courageous, straightforward, and clear. There is no positive correlation between advanced education and courageous clarity… boldness and clarity come from spending time with Jesus. Jesus is the truth we need to see, and Jesus is good—radically good. The more you have real dealings with him, the more confident you become in the truth, and the more good you become in not wanting to exalt yourself or protect yourself with impressive words… people who bank their hopes on Jesus and spend time with Jesus and obey Jesus—should stand up in public and tell God’s truth as they see it without worrying that secular listeners may not even agree with our most basic assumptions.
In other words, it may not be a lack of education that is holding our tongue. It may well be a lack of meaningful fellowship with Christ. The primary text for this message was Acts 4:13-22, where the religious leaders marvel at the courage and authority of Peter and John. They may have been uneducated, but they spent time with Jesus, and that gave them courage and conviction well beyond their schooling. Education is important, but it can only take us so far. Apart from the love and wisdom that comes from Christ, education can just as easily be a tool of cruelty and vice. For me, the highlight of The Justice Conference was John Perkins’ address. When asked what the most pressing justice need in the world today is, he immediately responded that it’s discipleship. Growing, maturing disciples of Jesus Christ can discern things that the world cannot and that, he believes, is what’s most needed.
The final section of John Piper’s ebook, which was preached just last year, offers a fitting conclusion for those of us who want to be hearers and doers–for those of us who want to abandon a passive avoidance ethic without abandoning Christ. He writes:
Let’s not be among the sophisticated Christians who resist talking about eternal suffering, and the horrors of hell. And let’s not be among the isolated Christians who resist working against the untold sufferings of this world… Let’s be like Jesus. In every social issue from abortion to alcoholism, from AIDS to unemployment, from hunger to homelessness, let’s give the help that we would like to receive if it were us. And at every moment in that love, let us feel an even greater urgency to pray and speak and work to rescue people from everlasting suffering through the gospel of Jesus. And to that end, may we rest and rejoice that we have a Father in heaven who hears our cry and will get us home.
Amen.
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Though I try to respond to emails in a timely fashion (ie in less than six months time), this was a difficult assignment. Nobis’ paper is not exactly a quick or easy read. Nor is the more abstract philosophy of academia a field I particularly enjoy. Too often, philosophy of this sort just clouds the central issue and serves to confuse the thinking of heretofore rational people. It can easily become a tool for justifying behavior that would otherwise be easily recognized as condemnable.
The central premise of Nobis’ paper is that Beckwith fails in his attempt to establish a metaphysical defense of fetal personhood and fails to demonstrate the inherent injustice or inequality of the utilitarian view he opposes. Nobis’ chief criticism is that Beckwith injects unsupported, moral arguments into his metaphysical defense, and he complains that Beckwith’s proofs are more complicated and controversial than the position he’s actually trying to establish. Though I haven’t read Beckwith’s book, I suspect it was largely written to combat those in the academic community who scoff at the assertion that abortion is wrong for the simple fact that it kills a human being. If so, isn’t it a bit ironic that in offering a more philosophic critique of abortion, Beckwith would be criticized for being too abstract?
Either way, it’s never quite fair to argue with a book since a book can’t answer back. No doubt Nobis and Bechwith would have a more fruitful debate face to face, though it’s unlikely that such a meeting would shift either man’s position in the slightest. And I suspect that were such a debate to take place, those in the audience who were already committed to the “pro-choice” position would leave with the notion that Nobis had won, while those already committed to the “pro-life” position would leave with the notion that Beckwith had won. I say that not because I think all public debates end in a draw, but because both of these men are unquestionably intelligent and articulate, and both have invested significant thought into their respective positions. It’s unlikely that either would hear something they hadn’t already considered and mentally answered for. The real question in such debates is this. What are the people in the uncommitted middle left thinking? This is where actual movement takes place. With that group of people in mind, I’ll take a turn at responding to ideas that can’t argue back – which is a particularly advantageous forum for someone like me, who likely falls a bit further down the IQ food-chain than Nathan Nobis or Francis Beckwith.
The main point of contention between these two men is the basis upon which human rights are assigned. Francis Beckwith defends what is called, “The Substance View,” which Nobis defines as follows (and it’s a definition I have no problems with):
The Substance View has both moral and metaphysical aspects. Metaphysically, it includes the claim that fetuses and adults are the same “type” of being, the same “substance,” and so fetuses and adults are numerically identical. Morally, it includes a claim that every individual of this substance or sort always has at least some of the moral properties it has when it is a rational moral agent, even when it is not an actual rational moral agent, because of what kind, sort, or type of being it is.
Said differently, the Substance View believes that human embryos, fetuses, newborns, infants, children and adults are all alike in their humanity and believes that membership in the human species should be the basis for assigning human rights. The competing view is one Nobis labels, “Mentalism,” and though he never makes a positive defense of abortion or defines himself as a mentalist, this is the view that Nobis implicitly defends. He writes:
Mentalists argue that beings that have never had mental lives or have lost their minds fully and permanently lack moral rights, are not persons, are not moral subjects, and/or are not morally valuable in their own right.
In other words, it’s not humanity which makes someone morally significant, it’s their mental capacity – specifically “consciousness, sentience, and autonomy.” The reason Nobis believes Beckwith’s Substance View is inferior to Mentalism is because, according to Nobis, Beckwith fails to demonstrate why mere membership in the human race is morally significant. He says Beckwith presupposes the intrinsic value of human life, which is the very thing he is supposed to be proving. In his own more eloquent words:
One could assert that at all times and stages biologically human organisms are prima facie wrong to kill… But these claims are very similar to premise (1) and we are seeking a reason to accept it. The Substance View does not provide such a reason since it appears that it just is that view. So although we might accept, even just for the sake of argument, the metaphysical components of the Substance View concerning identity… the Substance View’s moral components need defense.
On this point, Nobis’ complaint is a reasonable one, but notice that he’s essentially criticizing Beckwith for doing what virtually everyone else does too – namely for presupposing that human beings have a unique value that is over and above other life forms. Beckwith does his best to follow secular protocol, but trying to demonstrate the voracity of the Substance View without reference to a Creator God is largely an exercise in futility. What Nobis doesn’t seem to recognize is that this “weakness” plagues Mentalists as well. They may think they’ve solved the dilemma by making mankind’s superior understanding and intellect the basis of our moral superiority, but this does nothing to establish the doctrine of human equality. If superior reasoning ability makes human beings morally superior to other animals, then why doesn’t superior reasoning ability make one human being morally superior to another? Nobis complains that such suggestions are unfair since no Mentalists actually make such claims, but that doesn’t change the implications of their position. At the end of the day, their belief that all persons should be treated fairly and equally is just as rooted in Christian tradition as Beckwith’s. There is no “functional” reason for equality, and the fact that they value this doctrine so highly is strong evidence that their presuppositions are very much in sync with Beckwith’s.
Princeton ethicist, Peter Singer, notes this phenomenon and rails against it in his book, Practical Ethics. In making a moral defense of infanticide, he argues that the only reason infanticide is so off-putting to the western mind is because we haven’t been able to throw off our tired and unaccountable allegiance to the Christian worldview. He writes:
During the centuries of Christian domination of European thought the ethical attitudes based on these doctrines became part of the unquestioned moral orthodoxy of European civilisation. Today the doctrines are no longer generally accepted, but the ethical attitudes to which they gave rise fit in with the deep-seated Western belief in the uniqueness and special privileges of our species, and have survived… If these conclusions (in support of infanticide) seem too shocking to take seriously, it may be worth remembering that our present absolute protection of the lives of infants is a distinctively Christian attitude rather than a universal ethical value… The change in Western attitudes to infanticide since Roman times is, like the doctrine of the sanctity of human life of which it is a part, a product of Christianity… If this world had been created by some divine being with a particular goal in mind, it could be said to have a meaning… (but) when we reject belief in a god we must give up the idea that life on this planet has some preordained meaning. Life as a whole has no meaning.
I doubt Nathan Nobis would go so far as Peter Singer. Few do. But Singer is at least consistent in his application of the Mentalist principle. If you’re going to say that an active mental life is the basis for assigning rights of personhood, you must concede that the active mental life of a newborn is not materially different than the active mental life of a preborn. If Mentalism justifies abortion, then it also justifies infanticide. But Nobis is careful to focus his defense of Mentalism on a comparison between unborn fetuses and normally-functioning adults, not between fetuses and newborns or fetuses and mentally-handicapped adults. He asks:
Of course, normal adults, actual “rational moral agents,” are members of the moral community, have basic moral rights, are persons, are moral subjects, and are morally valuable. But why should one think that fetuses also have these moral properties and are like this?
Nobis goes on to argue:
If it were true that any two numerically identical beings, or stages of beings, share all the same moral properties, then that would follow (that they should be equally protected under the law). But adults and children have all sorts of physical, cognitive, and moral properties that fetuses lack.
Though he introduces children into the equation, he still leaves newborns out. Why? Because you simply can’t say that newborns have “all sorts of physical, cognitive, and moral properties that fetuses lack” – which is why Peter Singer says you can’t morally separate abortion from infanticide. If you accept one, by implication, you accept the other.
Even more perplexing is the fact that Nobis sees no ethical dangers with the position he’s carved out and repeatedly denies Beckwith’s claim that it opens the door to serious abuse. His response to such concerns turn a blind eye to history. For instance, he writes that Beckwith’s concern that “Mentalism justifies… the exploitation of beings with simple(r) mental lives by those with more complex mental lives” is a silly one since “virtually nobody argues, for example, that geniuses are morally entitled to, say, enslave the feeble-minded.” While it’s largely true that no one in America is making this claim today, the supposed mental and moral superiority of whites is precisely the argument that was used to justify the enslavement of blacks at our country’s outset. And the supposed mental superiority of men is the very notion that denied suffrage to women for so long – just as the supposed moral superiority of Europeans was the basis for ignoring the claims of Native-Americans. Call it want you want, but you’ll find Mentalism at the heart of history’s most egregious tragedies. Nobis claims that no Mentalist would dare suggest mistreating the “feeble-minded,” apparently forgetting that the “feeble-minded” were explicitly named and targeted by Hitler’s eugenics program.
Interestingly, Nobis says that if we just focus on the “clear-cut uncontroversial cases of exploitation” like “slavery” and “child abuse,” Mentalism provides a perfectly adequate framework for demonstrating their injustice. It is only the “controversial” areas of equality, like the “pro-life view of abortion,” that Mentalism cannot support. To this claim, it must be pointed out that slavery was every bit as controversial in its day as abortion is now. A worldview that is only willing to condemn uncontroversial injustices is a fairly useless one. Inequality always begins as a subject of controversy, until one position sufficiently demonstrates the injustice of the other. And even though slavery is no longer controversial in terms of public policy, that doesn’t mean it’s gone away. Most believe that there are more slaves in the world today than at any time in history.
Today’s slave traders no longer try to justify their behavior publicly, but the same ideology is still in play. Those with more knowledge and more power have the ability to enslave those with less knowledge and less power. That’s the practical reality, and the same is true for child abuse, which continues to increase, despite the fact that no one justifies it in theory. The inequalities of nature and environment make these injustices possible and the only ideologically consistent way to oppose such behavior is the implementation of a moral framework that views a person’s rights on the basis of something more foundational than their functional abilities.
Despite all of Nobis’ claims to the contrary, the functional distinctions at the heart of Mentalism have been the driving force behind all manner of historic abuses. And yet, Nobis’ final assessment of the Substance View is that it “does not seem to do much to justify egalitarianism.” I can understand the claim that The Substance View is too egalitarian (for wanting to grant equality to preborn human beings), but I have no idea what to do with this assessment. It seems completely illogical. Nobis condemns Beckwith for not adequately demonstrating the injustice of abortion and yet he never offers a positive defense of abortion. He never demonstrates why it is morally reasonable for human beings “with no mental history” to be killed with impunity. To me, this is entirely backwards. The burden of proof should fall on those wanting to justify abortion, not vice versa. The pro-life position is the far more natural and intuitive one. I say this for two reasons. First, when a child sees a picture of an aborted embryo or fetus, their most common reaction is, “what happened to the baby?” We’re born into the pro-life position. We must be “educated” into accepting the “pro-choice” position. Second, if you trace the arc of abortion history, you’ll see that until the last few decades, abortion was unequivocally scorned and condemned by the medical community. And even today, abortionists are dubiously regarded by most physicians. Why? Because abortion is a complete departure from normal, medical ethics, and the justification for such a departure has never been adequately demonstrated.
Nathan Nobis states that 99% of abortions are performed on “mindless” embryos and fetuses. He further says that they are “often microscopic.” At best, these statements are misleading. At worst, they are downright falsehoods. The forebrain, midbrain, and hindbrain begin to develop three weeks after fertilization. Primitive brain waves have been recorded as early as six weeks and 2 days after fertilization – which is about the earliest that surgical abortions can be performed. Medical abortions may take place before this, but unless the abortion is induced by emergency contraception or the birth control pill, the embryos being aborted are not microscopic. Nobis implies a less-developed victim-class to make the strength of his moral argument seem stronger. This is disingenuous.
The strength of the Substance View is that it’s concrete, measurable, and inclusive. The “weakness” of the Substance View is that mandates the embrace of a politically incorrect position. By contrast, the weakness of Mentalism is that it’s intrinsically subjective, is open to immense interpretation, and has historically excluded the most vulnerable members of the human community. The “strength” of the Mentalism, if you want to call it that, is that it provides a philosophical justification for removing, enslaving, or destroying the “unwanted” human beings who get in your way.
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I had an abortion back in 2006, and I feel today what I felt then: relief. Growing up, I was bombarded with the potential negative consequences of abortion - leading to an irrational fear. I personally find your information regarding the negative consequences of abortion to be astoundingly inaccurate. My abortion was pain free, easy, and the right decision for me, and 6 years later I would make the same decision for myself.
These are the remarks that preceded her abortion admission:
[Abort73 wants to enforce] a public policy that would have the collective ruling over the individual’s uteri - a no-man’s land that we must not allow individuals or governments to legislate. SCOTUS (the Supreme Court) has no more jurisdiction over the surface of the moon then they do over the cells growing inside of a woman’s uteri. Your web site seeks to make every matter - regardless of how private - [a subject] for public discourse. While your goal to fight for those you feel have been unjustly dispatched (aborted “children”) is noble, your method of being intrusively involved in the private matters of women, and your goal of controlling the minutia of human existence is absurd, illogical, and unenforceable. A fetus requires a number of things from its host: for its host to continue living (which inherently [makes] the fetus’ right to life dependent upon the hosts’ willingness to continue living, it requires its host to not ingest toxic substances, it requires its host to provide nutrients, oxygen, and space to grow. However, there is no law defining a human’s right to receive these things from another human. There is no law dictating the sharing of organic matter between two individuals - even if this sharing is required for one of the individuals to live. Hence: one is not required to provide blood to someone who needs it (even if they are the only available source of a rare blood type), a relative is not required to donate an organ to a dying individual (even if they are the only match for such a donation). These cases are true whether (or not) the life of a person will be lost due to non-cooperation. Likewise, regardless of how a fetus came to be inside of a woman’s body, a woman cannot be legally or morally required by any law or legislator to provide the organic connection, nourishment, or live herself to facilitate the development of said fetus. There is no law protecting the right of one to occupy another, and there is no right of a third party to dictate the occupancy of a woman’s uterus. There is no law protecting the right of one to continue to receive organic matter from another for the purpose of surviving and developing. Many abortions happen spontaneously - without medical intervention - for a number of reasons. Must you seek legal remedy to control those as well? Of course not, that would be futile and absurd. Don’t get me wrong - I would fiercely protect and support a woman who chose to keep her child - but I would not stand in her way to abort. I don’t have control over other people, much less the womb’s of other people. There is a point where government and individuals must relinquish the control they think they have and let individuals make their own choices - welcome to the human existence - where your or any government’s control over a woman’s body is not an inherent right.
I share her remarks for two reasons. First, Abort73 has no interest in silencing those who disagree with us. Without question, there are plenty of post-abortive women who think exactly as she does – at least publicly. We do not pretend otherwise. If we’re going to oppose abortion in the public square, we must have an answer for all the women who say: I had an abortion. It was painless. I have never felt anything but relief. If I had to do it again, I would. The answer, of course, is that even though the misery and regret often experienced by post-abortive women can be a strong deterrent to abortion, the case against abortion does not ultimately depend on their experience. Even if there wasn’t a single woman who ever regretted her abortion, that would not change the ethics of the matter or influence our opposition to it. The case against abortion is anchored on the fact that it kills an innocent human being, not on the emotional havoc it can wreak on the aborting mother. The second reason I share her remarks is so I can offer some short responses to them as a help to those who have or will face the same objections. To that end, I’ve broken up her remarks below and responded one by one. Whenever possible, I lead with a question.
[Abort73 wants to enforce] a public policy that would have the collective ruling over the individual’s uteri - a no-man’s land that we must not allow individuals or governments to legislate.
If it’s wrong for the collective to exert its will over and above the rights of the individual, isn’t that a strike against abortion? Abortion, after all, is a situation where the most fundamental rights of individual human beings in the womb are being denied because the collective whole has determined them to be human, “non-persons.”
SCOTUS (the Supreme Court) has no more jurisdiction over the surface of the moon then they do over the cells growing inside of a woman’s uteri.
Wasn’t it the Supreme Court that made abortion federally legal in the first place? It is only because the Supreme Court made the womb its personal jurisdiction that abortion is now considered a constitutionally protected act. And regarding your comparison to the moon, the Supreme Court would have jurisdiction over the surface of the moon if a crime was committed there by or upon a U.S. citizen. If Neil Armstrong had assaulted and killed Buzz Aldrin upon their historic landing, would anyone suggest that the normal rule of law doesn’t apply there?
Your web site seeks to make every matter - regardless of how private - [a subject] for public discourse.
When you say “every matter,” what do you have in mind beyond abortion? Do you think abortion should not be a subject of public discourse? Unless a woman self aborts (which is illegal in most states), abortion is not a purely private matter. And even if she doesn’t involve all the clinic staff who participate in a normal abortion, self-abortion still involves her child and the biological father–whether he knows about it or not.
While your goal to fight for those you feel have been unjustly dispatched (aborted “children”) is noble, your method of being intrusively involved in the private matters of women, and your goal of controlling the minutia of human existence is absurd, illogical, and unenforceable.
Since you call our goal of fighting for aborted children a noble one, how could we go about it in a less intrusive, absurd, and illogical way? What is intrusive, absurd, and illogical about offering a website that gives people a better understanding of what abortion is and does? And why do you say it would be “unenforceable” to outlaw abortion? There are all sorts of “services” that doctors and medical clinics are not allowed to perform for their patients. When such prohibitions are ignored, doctors go to jail and/or clinics lose their medical license. Why would it be any different for abortion?
A fetus requires a number of things from its host: for its host to continue living (which inherently [makes] the fetus’ right to life dependent upon the hosts’ willingness to continue living). It requires its host to not ingest toxic substances, it requires its host to provide nutrients, oxygen, and space to grow.
Do you think it should be legal for pregnant women to engage in behavior that will harm their developing child–things like smoking, drinking, or drugs? Do you think it’s wrong for the law to require parents to provide nutrients and a space to live in for their born children? By your logic, parents should never be held accountable to provide their children with the necessities of life.
However, there is no law defining a human’s right to receive these things from another human. There is no law dictating the sharing of organic matter between two individuals - even if this sharing is required for one of the individuals to live. Hence: one is not required to provide blood to someone who needs it (even if they are the only available source of a rare blood type), a relative is not required to donate an organ to a dying individual (even if they are the only match for such a donation). These cases are true whether (or not) the life of a person will be lost due to non-cooperation.
Granting your argument that the law cannot force someone to be an organ or blood donor (even if they’re the only match and the donation can be made with little risk to their own life), does that thereby give the “host” a legal right to actually kill the dependent? In other words, is there a difference between passively allowing a dependent to die and actively being the agent of their death? Essentially, there are two issues here. The first relates to law; the second relates to compassion. What you’re arguing for is the right to be selfish. And in many contexts, the government should absolutely honor a citizen’s right to be selfish. But imagine a scenario in which a 5-year-old girl needs a blood transfusion to survive, and for some reason her mother is the only match. Even if the law can’t force the mother to give up some blood to save her daughter’s life, what kind of mother would she be to let her daughter die because she was afraid of needles or didn’t want to take time off of work? The moral outcry over such a decision would be universal and well-deserved. And how much worse would it be if instead of just letting her daughter die, she hired someone to kill her daughter by poison or dismemberment?
Likewise, regardless of how a fetus came to be inside of a woman’s body, a woman cannot be legally or morally required by any law or legislator to provide the organic connection, nourishment, or live herself to facilitate the development of said fetus. There is no law protecting the right of one to occupy another, and there is no right of a third party to dictate the occupancy of a woman’s uterus. There is no law protecting the right of one to continue to receive organic matter from another for the purpose of surviving and developing.
Why can’t a woman be legally required to provide nourishment for her developing fetus? And when you say “there is no law protecting the right of one to receive organic matter from another for the purpose of surviving and developing,” are you implying that parents are not legally obligated to feed their children? Parents do have legal/moral obligation to take care of their children after their born. Why should it be any different before they’re born? Regarding the legal principles you outline, it must be noted that pregnancy is a wholly unique phenomenon. In many ways, it is incomparable to any other human relationship. We can create hypothetical situations in which one person can only survive by being attached to another person, but none of these scenarios have any connection to reality. Whether you attribute their presence in the womb to God or nature, this is exactly where unborn human beings are supposed to be. There is nothing artificial or unnatural about their being there, just as there is nothing artificial or unnatural about the intrinsically dependent nature of the parent/child relationship.
Many abortions happen spontaneously - without medical intervention - for a number of reasons. Must you seek legal remedy to control those as well? Of course not, that would be futile and absurd.
You’ve answered your own question. It would be futile and absurd to make spontaneous abortions illegal. Nobody is suggesting that.
Don’t get me wrong - I would fiercely protect and support a woman who chose to keep her child - but I would not stand in her way to abort. I don’t have control over other people, much less the womb’s of other people.
Would you stand in her way if she were trying to “abort” a born child? Would you say the government doesn’t have the right to exercise “control over other people” if those people are trying to harm an innocent victim? The primary function of government is to protect its citizens, nor matter how small they are and no matter where they’re located.
There is a point where government and individuals must relinquish the control they think they have and let individuals make their own choices - welcome to the human existence - where your or any government’s control over a woman’s body is not an inherent right.
Should individuals be allowed to make their own choices in the context of murder, rape and violent assault? Why is it reasonable and appropriate for the government to control a woman’s (or man’s) body if they want to molest young children who are born, but not when they want to kill a young child in the womb?
You’ll notice that the only way any of her arguments can work is if she’s able to demonstrate that the “thing” being aborted is not an individual human being, but rather a morally insignificant clump of cells – as she asserts at the outset. This point, however, is one she simply assumes. She never provides any evidence to establish its reality (perhaps because there isn’t any) and bases all of her objections to Abort73 on this false assumption. The only reason she thinks women should be free to abort is because she sees abortion as more akin to a mastectomy than a murder. It is not. Abort73’s opposition to abortion has nothing to do with wanting to control the “minutia of human existence.” It has everything to do with wanting to protect the most innocent and helpless members of the human community from violence and destruction.
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Not surprisingly, Komen’s decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood (they gave them $680,000 last year) brought celebration from abortion opponents and indignation from abortion supporters. This dichotomy was perfectly illustrated yesterday on my own Facebook news feed (as I’m sure it was on millions of other feeds around the world). One of my Facebook friends posted the following your ecard:
Remember, if your organization wants to cure breast cancer, stop funding an organization that offers free breast exams. Because that makes sense.
Directly below her post was another your ecard. It was the same size and color, but expressed exactly the opposite sentiment:
Welcome to Planned Parenthood where we don’t do mammograms but we will gladly give you birth control pills that cause Breast Cancer.
For my part, I can’t help but feel that people on both sides of the abortion issue are making more of the Komen decision than we really should. The fact that Komen ever partnered with Planned Parenthood in the first place is strong evidence that the leadership at Komen supports abortion as a matter of public policy. No one who is ideologically opposed to abortion would partner with the nation’s largest perpetrator of abortion. And do not forget that the Komen website continues to deny even the possibility that abortion is a risk factor for breast cancer, despite significant evidence indicating a causal connection. The fact that the nation’s breast cancer epidemic corresponds to the nation’s abortion epidemic seems lost on them–and keeps them from informing women about one of the few risk factors that is both behavior-based and avoidable. If abortion does increase a woman’s likelihood of developing breast cancer, then it will be exceedingly difficult to reduce breast cancer frequency without first reducing abortion frequency.
In terms of their respective bottom lines, USA Today reports that Planned Parenthood received $650,000 in donations within 24-hours of the Komen announcement. They also report that Komen’s average, daily donations have doubled since the news broke. In other words, both organizations have financially benefited from the split–which is worth considering whether you’re an abortion-opponent who is celebrating this as victory over Planned Parenthood or an abortion-advocate who claims this will cripple breast cancer prevention.
A video of Komen founder and CEO, Nancy Brinker, just posted to their website in response to the controversy, reiterates the claim that Komen’s new policy has nothing to do with the fact that Planned Parenthood provides abortions. It has to do with the fact that they don’t provide mammograms. In Brinker’s words, they’ve decided to limit their funding to organizations that are “actually providing the mammograms.” Despite Planned Parenthood president, Cecile Richards’, erroneous public claims, Planned Parenthood doesn’t provide mammograms, and that, according to Brinker, is the real problem. This, of course, leaves open the possibility that should Planned Parenthood start performing mammograms in the future, they could reclaim their grant money.
The real issue for abortion-opponents is one of ideology, and it’s one abortion-supporters don’t seem able to grasp. It boggles their mind why “pro-lifers” can’t make a mental distinction between Planned Parenthood, the abortion business, and Planned Parenthood, the women’s health care provider. Essentially, there are two reasons why such a distinction is impossible to maintain. The first is a practical one. The second is a philosophical one.
Think of it in terms of Abort73. Let’s say we devoted a portion of our website to breast cancer education. Now let’s say someone gave us a large donation but specified that is was only to be used for breast cancer-education, not abortion-education. How can an organization with one logistical infrastructure make such a distinction? If we’re using the same staff, the same building, the same computers for both projects, then any donation that benefits one project inherently benefits both. So it is with Planned Parenthood. If they’re receiving money that is tagged for “non-abortion” use, that money still benefits their organization as a whole and frees up other money that can be invested towards abortion.
The second, more central issue, is a moral one. Fundamental to Planned Parenthood’s understanding of women’s health care is unrestricted access to abortion. If you don’t understand why this is a problem, just flip the issue. What if there was a huge pornography conglomerate, say a Playboy or Hustler, that was also operating walk-in breast-exam clinics. Would the fact that they’re helping prevent breast cancer erase what they’re doing to demean and objectify women around the world? Would you really be able to make a distinction between the misery and abuse perpetuated by pornography and the health benefits perpetuated by breast exams? Or maybe pornography isn’t an issue you care about either. What if it was sex trafficking? If there was an international organization running a legal, but highly dubious sex brothel, and also offering mammograms, would you be able to support the one, but not the other? Would you be able to say your promotion of their breast cancer services has nothing to do with their sex trafficking? Of course not. And while pornography demeans women and forced prostitutions abuses women, abortion kills women… by the millions, before they’re even born.
That is why you cannot make a mental distinction between Planned Parenthood, the abortion clinic, and Planned Parenthood, the health clinic. The Nazi regime provided some great services to Aryan Germans, but none of them come close to compensating for what they did at Auschwitz and Dachau. You may object to the comparison, but this is precisely what’s at stake for those who are ideologically opposed to abortion.
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There are a number of ways to respond to a story like this. The first is to remind people that even if abortion is safer for the mother, it is certainly not safer for the child. Maternal, abortion-related deaths may be a rarity, but fetal, abortion-related deaths are not. We could just as easily say that for every 167,000 abortions in the United States, there are 167,001 abortion-related deaths. The headline of the MedicineNet article was a much more honest one: “Abortion Safer for Women Than Childbirth, Study Claims.”
The second thing to note is the sources of the datasets used in this study. While accurate birth data is available from the federal government, accurate abortion data is not. As such, abortion data must be obtained from the Guttmacher Institute, a research group founded by Planned Parenthood and named after their former president, Alan Guttmacher. The Guttmacher Institute openly advocates abortion and seeks to normalize its use around the world. Speaking to this issue, Dr. Donna Harrison, director of research and public policy at the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, says, “Abortion mortality is not systematically collected. What Dr. Grimes’ paper most clearly illustrates is the immediate need for reporting requirements for abortion deaths in all 50 states.”
The third thing to recognize is that the study’s authors, Dr. Elizabeth Raymond and Dr. David Grimes are both abortion advocates. The express purpose of their study was to demonstrate that abortion is “dramatically safer than continuing the pregnancy.” Dr Raymond works for the Gynuity Health Projects, a group seeking to expand reproductive health technologies (abortion) worldwide, and Dr Grimes makes no secret of his contempt for state-mandated efforts to dissuade women from having an abortion. They had a clear, ideological agenda going in, and their abortion-related data came from an organization that shares their agenda.
Finally, we must remember that in the scope of abortion-related health risks, there is much more to consider than mortality rates. The two most serious health risks to be tied to abortion are not even considered by studies like these. They are rejected out of hand. But if abortion increases a woman’s likelihood of contracting breast cancer and/or experiencing extreme mental trauma, then the safety scale shifts considerably. Dr. Joel Brind suggests that legal abortion has accounted for roughly 300,000 cancer-related deaths in the United States, and many have suggested that the female suicide epidemic in China may easily be tied to their forced abortion policy.
At the end of the day, those who support abortion can give you all sorts of reasons why abortion is perfectly safe for aborting women, and those who oppose abortion can give you all sorts of reasons why it is not. At some level, these are important discussions, but they are peripheral to the central ethical question. Does abortion kill an innocent human being? That is the question at the heart of the abortion debate, and that is the question that ultimately determines whether abortion is an amoral surgical procedure or a historic injustice.
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