The Roe Decision has Unleashed a Tsunami of Misinformation and Lies
Last Saturday (NZ time) the the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) issued a ruling overturning the infamous 1973 Roe v Wade, and 1992 Planned Parenthood v Casey rulings.
Anyone who knows anything about Roe, will know that it was always a legally problematic ruling which involved some abusive contortions of the US Constitution in order to turn out the way that it did.
Sadly, as is often the case with things such as these, a lot of people are clearly ignorant of the history and flaws in the original ruling, along with what the actual overturning of Roe means in real terms.
This means that various actors have been free to propagate all sorts of lies and misinformation in this vacuum of ignorance with almost no challenge to their dishonesty.
Here’s just some of what we’ve come across since last Saturday morning:
“Pro-lifers don’t care about women, they’re just pro-birth”
This tired old trope has been regurgitated ad nauseam on social media this week.
This is nothing more than gaslighting - where the person who actually needs to give an account of their actions instead turns on the other person and accuses them of being the evildoer.
To suggest that someone could even be pro a child being born, but not pro that child’s life is just absurdly illogical - it’s actually the pro-choice ideology which devalues and rejects the wellbeing of the unborn child as being of any meaningful importance.
In fact, the pro-life movement has really put its (very limited) money and resources where its mouth is when it comes to caring for pregnant mothers and their unborn children.
Crisis pregnancy centres (CPC’s) are the brainchild of the pro-life movement, which have their genesis in the Christian tradition, which has unwaveringly dedicated itself to opposing abortion, saving unwanted children, and caring for vulnerable mothers since it’s very founding almost 2000 years ago.
Here’s a key truth to remember: right now there are almost three times as many pro-life crisis pregnancy centres as there are abortions facilities in the United States (2300 CPC’s vs 808 abortion facilities). That’s not a bad effort for a movement operating on limited funding, in the face of often hostile institutional opposition, and which is supposedly not doing anything to offer caring alternatives to women in need.
“Abortion is a right”
No, aborting an unborn child is not, never has been, and will never be a basic human right.
Even in the context of Roe this was never soundly established, instead the original justices in 1973 read legalised abortion into the US Constitution under the guise of a right to privacy.
Yet that didn’t stop New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern from making the following claims in the media this week:
"One of the principles of foreign policy… is that you don't comment on the domestic politics of other nations. Abortion policy is not the domestic politics of another nation, it is a basic human right for women,"
Apart from the admission that she should not be commenting on the domestic politics of another nation, none of what she has said here is true,
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares that we all have a right to life, but abortion has never been deemed a human right in any international law, and Roe v Wade was a domestic ruling that applies only inside the USA and nowhere else.
To suggest that one could establish a right to deliberately end the life of another innocent human being is one of the greatest and most diabolical fictions of our age. Not only has it underpinned institutional and commercial abortion, but it has now also given rise to legalised assisted suicide and euthanasia killings.
“The pro-life movement has a long association with violence”
Yesterday the New Zealand Herald published an article in which the author opined that:
“The depth of belief and emotion surrounding abortion in the US is such that it has a long association with violence, including hundreds of bombings or arsons at abortion providers, at least 11 people killed in attacks on abortion providers, and many more threats and thwarted attempts.”
No, that’s blatantly false.
The total number of violent or criminal anti-abortion incidents in the US since 1977 is just 61, not “hundreds” as is falsely claimed by an author who also claims that “making evidence-based arguments [is] critically important in a democratic society” just a few sentences later.
This total of 61 incidents equates to an average of just 1.3 incidents per year, and it includes everything from serious violence to minor offences such as spray painting graffiti on the side of abortion clinics. When you dig into the specifics of these cases you consistently find mentally disturbed individuals or lone wolf extremists - and often there are question marks about the true motive (if a disgruntled ex-lover kidnaps an abortion facility employee they used to be in a relationship with, is that anti-abortion violence or domestic violence?)
To put these low anti-abortion crime numbers into some wider crime-related perspective, in 2020, on average, more than two people were murdered every single hour of the year in the US.
Even more importantly, there have also been more than 50 attacks on pro-life pregnancy centres and Christian churches by pro-abortion activists over the past few weeks - at one point there was more than one per day with 48 attacks taking place over a 45 day period. And you know that pro-abortion violence is getting bad when even the notoriously progressive Guardian newspaper is publishing investigative articles about it.
Any violence is wrong, which is why the pro-live movement opposes abortion.
It is also why our movement has a long history of peaceful activism, and the incidents you do find, are small in number (just a mere two of them in New Zealand’s history, for example), and clearly involve mentally disturbed individuals or lone-wolf fringe elements.
“Overturning Roe v Wade has outlawed abortion in America”
It has been quite interesting, but not particularly surprising, to see the huge numbers of people who have clearly not bothered to find out even the most basic facts about this ruling.
The overturning of Roe does not outlaw abortion in the US.
What it actually does is return the issue of abortion laws back to the various states, allowing them to enact their own local laws that are consistent with local beliefs about the issue.
Even the so-called ‘restrictive’ states have term limits on abortion that are close to, or even higher than most other nations.
One of the most bizarre spectacles in all of this has been the sight of extreme pro-abortion protests taking place in states which currently have extreme abortion laws, and which clearly have no plans to introduce term limits or other restrictions.
“This will criminalise abortions after miscarriage, abortions for ectopic pregnancy, and septic uterus, etc”
The treatment for miscarriage is not abortion.
The treatment for ectopic pregnancy is not abortion.
The treatment for a septic uterus is not abortion.
None of the various states’ laws will ban any of these things, because, unlike abortion, they are authentic and ethical healthcare procedures.
This is yet another deception from pro-abortion activists which is intended to try and bring women who have experienced the grief of miscarriage into their camp. It’s yet another example of the long and growing list of manipulative and dishonest behaviours on the part of that movement.
“Women will die because of this!”
This is an attempt to revive the original pro-abortion falsehoods regarding backstreet abortion deaths.
The truth is actually a lot different to the myths that have become popularised in this regard.
Firstly, the maternal morality rate (female deaths related to pregnancy - which includes female abortion deaths) is now higher in the US than it was in the years prior to the original Roe v Wade ruling in 1973.
In the two years preceding (1971 and 1972) there were 18.8 deaths per 100,000 live births. This number has now risen to 23.8 deaths per 100,000 live births as of 2020.
(Cited in Thomas W Hilgers, MD The Fake and Deceptive Science Behind Roe v. Wade (New York: Beaufort Books, 2020) 30–31, from National Health Center for Health Statistics, 2004 Death Report, as reported in The Associated Press).
We don’t know how much legalising abortion under Roe contributed to this increase, but this clearly tends to pour cold water on one of the abortion activists’ favourite claims - that legalising abortion saves female lives.
This same trend has also been observed in multiple other countries now, while the trend of decreasing maternal mortality rates in other different countries that have more restrictive abortion laws has also been observed.
The truth is that backstreet abortion deaths were both; declining well before Roe v Wade (it was advances in medicine - like the advent of antibiotics - which was the contributing factor here, not the law), and also falsely and grossly over-exaggerated by pro-abortion activists.
Here’s what former abortionist and founding member of NARAL (the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws) Dr. Bernard Nathanson had to say about their dishonesty:
“We fed the public a line of deceit, dishonesty, a fabrication of statistics and figures. We succeeded [in breaking down the laws limiting abortions] because the time was right and the news media cooperated. We sensationalized the effects of illegal abortions, and fabricated polls which indicated that 85% of the public favoured unrestricted abortion, when we knew it was only 5%. We unashamedly lied, and yet our statements were quoted [by the media] as though they had been written in law.”
(Quoted in John Powell, Abortion: the silent Holocaust. Tabor, Allen, Texas. 1981.)
Sadly, these are just a small number of the dishonest claims we’ve seen and heard over the past week.
After all of the recent high profile talk of countering disinformation, it now seems that disinformation which serves an ideological and political agenda is actually something happily promoted by those who decry it the loudest when others are doing it.
Which leaves it up to us to keep telling the truth to anyone willing to listen.
