Rape Survivor Child Custody Act

978 - Hazard Kiessling
Kelsey Hazzard (left) is the founder and president of Secular Pro-Life. Rebecca Kiessling (right) is an advocate for unborn human beings conceived through rape.

Secular Pro-Life has an important article about much-needed reform the pro-life community is pushing for that everyone should support.

A majority of states have no laws preventing rapists from obtaining custody or visitation of the children conceived through their violence. Absent such laws, a mother choosing life after rape faces the horrifying prospect of an 18-year co-parenting relationship with her rapist.

Understandably, the pro-life movement is particularly sensitive to this issue because “people in that impossible situation are under tremendous pressure to abort.” Notable pro-life spokeswoman Rebecca Kiessling is leading the charge to reform these laws. Kiessling, who was herself conceived as a result of rape, is a controversial figure who opposes rape-exceptions to abortion restrictions. Her position in that regard is not always popular, sometimes even within the pro-life community. But this effort should have universal support, because there is no case in which the government should be protecting the parental rights of rapists.

Contacting your legislators is easy. Click here for your Representativesand here for your Senators. Take five minutes out of your day to email them, then tell a friend. It’s the least we can do for the families who have courageously chosen life after rape.

March for Life 2015

Photo of crowds at the 2013 March for Life. (CatholicPhilly.com)
Photo of crowds at the 2013 March for Life. (CatholicPhilly.com)

The annual pro-life March for Life on Washington DC is huge, and it seems to be getting bigger (and younger) every year. Crowd estimates are very controversial, but here’s what the Wikipedia entry has just to give you a sense of the scale:

The march has previously drawn around 250,000 people annually since 2003, though estimates put both the 2011 and 2012 attendances at 400,000 each. The 2013 March for Life drew a claimed 650,000 people.

The March for Life in 2013 was the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, which explains the huge numbers. Yesterday’s 2015 iteration was down from the high numbers, with early estimates of up to 200,000.

But don’t expect to hear about “hundreds of thousands” from mainstream media coverage. Don’t even expect to hear about “tens of thousands.” You might, if you actually go out and search for them, find an article about “thousands” of people marching. More likely, however, you’ll hear crickets chirping. This is one event the media does not like to cover.

For anyone who is already associated with the pro-life movement: you know how much this movement means. You know what is at stake in principles and in innocent lives. For anyone who might not know, however, let me just quote from an address given at the 2008 March for Life:

We contend, and we contend relentlessly, for the dignity of the human person, of every human person, created in the image and likeness of God, destined from eternity for eternity—every human person, no matter how weak or how strong, no matter how young or how old, no matter how productive or how burdensome, no matter how welcome or how inconvenient. Nobody is a nobody; nobody is unwanted. All are wanted by God, and therefore to be respected, protected, and cherished by us.

We shall not weary, we shall not rest, until every unborn child is protected in law and welcomed in life. We shall not weary, we shall not rest, until all the elderly who have run life’s course are protected against despair and abandonment, protected by the rule of law and the bonds of love. We shall not weary, we shall not rest, until every young woman is given the help she needs to recognize the problem of pregnancy as the gift of life. We shall not weary, we shall not rest, as we stand guard at the entrance gates and the exit gates of life, and at every step along way of life, bearing witness in word and deed to the dignity of the human person—of every human person.

You might not readily associate this quote, with its talk of support for young pregnant women and for babies even after they are born, because the stereotypes of the pro-life movement is sex-obsessed and devoid of compassion for anyone except the unborn. Well, whatever you may have heard, these words echo my convictions. They echo the conviction of every ardent pro-lifer I have ever met.

I encourage you to read the rest of the speech, which First Things reprinted today.

This is what we stand for.

This is who we are.

Catholics and Polls

How often have we heard the statistic cited along the lines of “98% of Catholic women use contraceptives.” It seems come up every time the word ‘Catholic’ and ‘contraceptives’ appear in the same sentence. Here’s the original study.

There are some real oddities in this study, as people have noted since the study came out in 2011. I’ll highlight the two most prominent ones:

1) 11% of women are noted as using no method of contraception, and they mysteriously vanish from the math because only the 2% of women who are identified as using NFP are subtracted from 100% to reach the conclusion that 98% of Catholic women use contraception.

2) The data “[r]efers to sexually active women who are not pregnant, postpartum or trying to get pregnant.” So the study excludes women who are pregnant, postpartum, or trying to get pregnant. Since the Catholic Church teaches NFP as a way to space children, chances are NFP users are going to fall into one of these three categories for decent portions of their reproductive lives.

Normally, I would just put this case down as one more example in the ‘Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics’ folder. However, the proliferation of this statistic and similar statistics involving the Catholic Church are not simple mistakes. They serve a very clear purpose: To paint the Catholic Church as backward and out of touch with its members and therefore irrelevant. How do I know? Because this has been done before with abortion. Bernard Nathanson, a co-founder of NARAL who later became pro-life and then Catholic, lays out exactly what they did and why:

We systematically vilified the Catholic Church and its “socially backward ideas” and picked on the Catholic hierarchy as the villain in opposing abortion. This theme was played endlessly. We fed the media such lies as “we all know that opposition to abortion comes from the hierarchy and not from most Catholics” and “Polls prove time and again that most Catholics want abortion law reform”.

And the media drum-fired all this into the American people, persuading them that anyone opposing permissive abortion must be under the influence of the Catholic hierarchy and that Catholics in favour of abortion are enlightened and forward-looking.

Sound familiar? This tune is played endlessly on every issue involving in the Catholic Church. People who disagree with the Church are enlightened and forward-thinking. People who hold the Church position are brainwashed and backward. The Guttmacher study above even takes time in its short discussion to paint the Catholic hierarchy as out-of-touch and behind the times:

Even among married Catholic women, only 3% practice natural family planning, while a majority uses contraceptives that the Church hierarchy routinely denounces. This research suggests that the perception that strongly held religious beliefs and contraceptive use are antithetical is wrong—in fact, the two may be highly compatible.

I think it’s worth noting this tactic because it’s moving beyond the Catholic Church. I have been keeping track of the controversy in the Mormon church over women’s ordination, and the same narrative appears: The Mormon hierarchy is backward and authoritarian, bent on enforcing its will on regular Mormons. Those who oppose the hierarchy are free thinkers who want to liberate the church from its oppressive dogmas. This instance is even more obnoxious because, while I’m fairly certain a sizable majority of American Catholics use contraception (just not 98%), we know for a fact that the vast majority of Mormons oppose women’s ordination, and more Mormon women than men oppose it!

Any church that makes a habit of opposing the zeitgeist can expect similar treatment. So if people see some discrepancy between what they see in church and what the internet insists their fellow congregants believe, this is one reason why.

Another Pro-Choice Spin Job

2014-10-16 Keep Abortion Legal

I often comment on the lamentable pro-choice bias in American journalism, but one of the strange things you will only learn if you dig deep into this issue is that the bias really gets serious when international stories come into play. I have no idea why this is, I’ve just seen it happen enough to know that the amount of skepticism required when you read a mainstream report of an abortion-related news story (already pretty high) gets even higher when the events take place in a foreign country. Just to give the story I’m about to relate some context, the most recent major example of this was the case of Dr. Savita Halappanavar, who died along with her 17-week unborn child as a result of complications from a miscarriage. The story had literally nothing to do with abortion–and this was known from day 1–but it quickly became a media sensation when reporters claimed that she died because she was denied an abortion. If that sounds extreme, it’s actually barely scratching the surface. Read the rest here.

Unfortunately, of course, the fact that the lies are lies never really seems to matter. “A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots,” as Mark Twain is reported to have said. And, by the time truth gets its boots on, nobody really cares anymore. There’s already a new crisis to pay attention to.

And that’s what’s happening again, but this time with a story out of El Salvador:

American media giant National Public Radio (NPR) published a report last week claiming to expose the underbelly of El Salvador’s pro-life legal system by profiling a woman whom they say was sentenced to 30 years for abortion after a stillbirth. On-the-ground evidence reveals, however, that the woman was in fact convicted for murdering her son after he was born alive.

It’s not hard to see why El Salvador is a target. First: it’s small, the smallest country in Central America. Second: it’s pro-life. It banned abortion–with no exceptions–in 1998 and then recognized personhood from the moment of conception in 1999. Just as powerful American evangelical lobbies meddle in African countries to get anti-gay laws that they can’t pass in the US, pro-choice lobbies in the United States (often working through the UN or powerful non-profits) throw their weight around in African, Central, and South American countries to get their political way.

And, as usual, it’s easy to see how this makes sense from their perspective. If you’re coming from a strong pro-choice background, then El Salvador has to strike you as an absolutely terrifying human rights tragedy in the making. It’s only a matter of time before some poor woman dies because she can’t get a life-saving abortion. Why wait for it to really happen? Much more compassionate to invent a story instead and make an issue out of that way. Much better than waiting for someone to actually die.

Two additional points to keep in mind. The first is evidence from Chile that criminalizing abortion doesn’t, in fact, lead to women dying. We covered that story back in February. The second is a very technical but very important clarification of what it means to have a “no exceptions” law against abortion. The problem is that Catholics (who are obviously rather dominant in S. and Central America) have a peculiar definition of “abortion” that amounts to “deliberate killing of the unborn human being to end a pregnancy,” whereas the technical definition of abortion simply means “early termination of a pregnancy.” In practice, this means that no-exception laws often do have exceptions. To see an example of this, consider the case of “Beatriz” She would not survive her pregnancy and requested an abortion (in El Salvador). Her request was denied, but permission was granted for an early Cesarean section instead, even though the fetus was non-viable. Did she get an abortion? If you use the Catholic definition, she did not, because the unborn child was removed without harm and even incubated and given fluids rather than being killed or abandoned. But if you use the more general term, she did, because the pregnancy was terminated early even though it would result in the death of the fetus.

This confusion leads to a lot of unhelpful acrimony in the abortion debate. The reality is that no one, as far as I know, has ever actually maintained a true no-exceptions stance on abortion when the general definition is used. For further reading, check out the principle of double effect, which is the ethical principle that allows abortion to save a mother’s life with the caveat that the abortion not be a deliberate act of killing but rather a removal of the fetus to preserve the woman’s life that results in the foreseen but unintended death of the fetus.

Abortion, Race, and Cluelessness

2014-10-10 Abortion and Race

In September, The Atlantic ran a post called Abortion’s Racial Gap that was breathtaking in its cluelessness.

The rate of abortion among American women is currently at its lowest point since Roe v. Wade, according to a recent report by the Guttmacher Institute. About 1.1 million abortions were performed in 2011, at a rate of 16.9 abortions for every 1,000 women of childbearing age, down from a peak of 29.3 per 1,000 in 1981. Since the report’s release in February, the reason why has been the subject of much debate. Its authors and abortion-rights supporters point to the increase in contraceptive use and sexual education, while anti-abortion activists counter that the decrease is a result of abstinence-only teachings and state restrictions.

Largely missing from the debate, though, is discussion of abortion’s racial disparity: Although rates among Hispanic and African-American women have decreased along with the rest of the country, they remain significantly higher than the national average.

To the extent that abortion’s racial disparity is “largely missing from the debate,” it is absolutely not because pro-lifers are either ignorant of it or silent on the topic. The problem, by contrast, is that the overwhelmingly pro-choice media squelches any discussion of, for example, the insidious beliefs that prompted pro-choice hero Margaret Sanger to advocate for legalized abortion. I’ll go ahead and give away the secret: she was an ardent eugenecist who hoped that abortion and birth control could be used to exterminated blacks from the country. Ask any pro-lifer about this, and they’ll happily tell you about it and find one of her more infamous quotes and point out that, tragically, her legacy seems to be alive and well. Meanwhile Planned Parenthood, the organization she founded, still gives an annual award in her name. Oh there’s a racial disparity alright, but it’s only on one side of this issue.

To their credit, I think that pro-choicers (who are usually liberal) aren’t intentionally trying to conceal the concern that pro-lifer’s have on this issue. I think they just genuinely can’t imagine that conservatives (who are supposed to be racist) might actually sincerely care about the racial impact of abortion policy in the United States.

By chance, I happened upon another article that demonstrates exactly how this plays out in real time. Over at Townhall, Ryan Bomberger described the reaction to some comments from Jessa Duggar after visiting the Holocaust Museum. She wrote:

I walked through the Holocaust Museum again today… very sobering. Millions of innocents denied the most basic and fundamental of all rights–their right to life. One human destroying the life of another deemed “less than human.” Racism, stemming from the evolutionary idea that man came from something less than human; that some people groups are “more evolved” and others “less evolved.” A denying that our Creator–GOD–made us human from the beginning, all of ONE BLOOD and ONE RACE, descendants of Adam. The belief that some human beings are “not fit to live.” So they’re murdered. Slaughtered. Kids with Down syndrome or other disabilities. The sickly. The elderly. The sanctity of human life varies not in sickness or health, poverty or wealth, elderly or pre-born, little or lots of melanin [making you darker or lighter skinned], or any other factor… May we never sit idly by and allow such an atrocity to happen again. Not this generation. We must be a voice for those who cannot speak up for themselves. Because EVERY LIFE IS PRECIOUS. #ProLife

No matter what you think about this message, one thing is clears: she understands the connection between discrimination and being ProLife. The backlash was as vicious as it was predictable:

Cosmo went into full anti-woman mode. Filipovic attacked Jessa Duggar for daring to put history into perspective: “Jessa had just walked out of the Holocaust museum, and instead of absorbing the scale of that atrocity, decided to make a point about abortion rights. That’s not just tone-deaf; it’s deranged.”

So, just to be clear, pro-lifers are acutely aware of the connection between race and abortion. Folks–especially those in the media–just tend to have an allergic reaction every time we bring it up. Then, when they discover the connection themselves, they act as though it’s the most starting, unexpected thing in the world.

Maybe they should have been listening.

Feminism Defined in Charts

I don’t agree with everything from this article at the Guardian, but I like the main point. Which is as follows:

Not a feminist

The chart above is not a valid definition of feminism. As the article says:

The test is fun, to the point, inclusive: it gets people on board and gets more men calling themselves feminists. Allies – huzzah! But it’s also kind of lying. You need to believe some other important things in order to be a feminist…

Then we get a more complicated chart:

Congratulations feminist 2

I could nitpick the chart (all the reasons for being “Not a feminist” are pretty lame), but the article is a bit more nuanced:

There are plenty of ways to be awesome without working towards equal rights for women. For example, if you answered “Who do you think is more disadvantaged by gender inequality?” with “Women, but I’m still more interested in talking about men,” that’s fine. Maybe, like Tom Matlack, who founded the Good Men Project, you are a pro-feminist: that is, someone who supports the goals and objectives of the movement for equal women’s rights, but who is actively working on male issues. Gender initiatives like the Good Men Project move us towards a more equal society, which benefits women in many ways, just like feminist initiatives benefit men in many ways.

So the point ends up being that you have to be pro-feminist in order to be a decent human being, but you don’t actually have to be feminist. I like this because it’s honest about the fact that feminism means more than “I support equal rights for women.” In doing so, it defuses the main use of the term feminism these days, which is to browbeat social conservatives into silence. Here’s how that works:

  1. Feminism means equal rights for women.
  2. Feminism also means being (for example) pro-choice.
  3. What, you’re pro-life? Then you must not be a feminist (by #2).
  4. And if you’re not a feminist, then you  must hate women (by #1).

See how that works? It’s nonsensical, but it is effective. But if, like the author of this piece, you’re honest enough to admit that there’s more going on with feminism then just equal rights for women, the tactic mostly falls apart. Which, in the long run, is good for everyone. What ever feminism means (opinions vary widely), making it something other than a subset of left-wing ideology is probably good for everyone.

Kickstarter Censors Gosnell Documentary

Abortion Clinic Deaths

Phelim McAleer is a controversial documentarian whose past work includes FrackNation (a defense of hydraulic fracturing), Not Evil Just Wrong (a critique of global warming alarmism), and Mine Your Own Business (a critique of environmentalist opposition to the Roșia Montană mining project). He used Kickstarter to garner $212,000 from 3,305 backers for his most recent film (that was FrackNation), and so he returned to Kickstarter for his current project: a documentary about Kermit Gosnell.

Not so fast.

Kickstarter wrote to tell us that it “couldn’t” go ahead with our posting — first, we needed to remove our (utterly factual) descriptions of “thousands of babies murdered” in order to “comply with the spirit” of the site’s “community guidelines.”

Well, that sounds sort of plausible at first glance. But wait.

This was shocking — and even more so when I looked at which projects don’t violate those standards. One project about a serial killer had a photograph of a dead body. There were 43 about rape, 28 with the F-word in the title or project description and one with the “C” word. There was even one called “Fist of Jesus” (don’t ask).

McAleer switched from Kickstarter to IndieGoGo to try and get the project going. Then Kickstarter decided to accept the project, but only on condition that they could subsequently cancel it at any time if they didn’t like McAleer’s updates. McAleer stuck with IndieGoGo.

The attempt to squelch the Gosnell story is nothing new. Any other story about a serial killer would have been made into a movie by now, but when it comes to abortion no one wanted to touch the story. Just look at the empty seats at the trial that were set aside for media who never came.

2014-10-14 Gosnell Reserved Seats

It’d be nice if we could just write of the whole Gosnell incident as one isolated, horrific case. The problem is, we can’t. Just last week, Secular Pro-Life ran an article highlighting how New York state has inspected exactly 17 of its 225 abortion clinics in the last 14 years. That kind of political protection is what allowed Gosnell’s house of horrors to continue. Even if you’re not pro-life, anyone who is sincerely concerned with protecting women’s health ought to be concerned at the way the Gosnell story is being swept under the rug as though it had never occurred.

All You Need to Know About the Hobby Lobby Case

2014-03-31 Hobby Lobby

The Washington Post has a couple of great sources if you want to know more about the Hobby Lobby case the Supreme Court is considering right now. In a nutshell, Hobby Lobby is a Christian company that doesn’t want to provide access to certain kinds of birth control that can work as  abortifacients instead of as contraceptives.

To get even more of a background in the case, I recommend Jaime Fuller’s Here’s what you need to know about the Hobby Lobby case. For legal analysis of the constitutional issues, I recommend Prof. Michael McConnell’s post at Volokh Conspiracy (which now operates within the WaPo). These two articles will give you a solid understanding of this controversial and well-known court case.

What Do Americans Think About Abortion?

Will Saletan, the national correspondent at Slate, is a smart and independent thinker on the abortion issue. He even wrote a controversial but highly regarded book called Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War. Peter Beinart, editor of The New Republic, said that the book “will make activists on both sides of the debate uncomfortable,” and that “there’s no smarter political commentator in Washington today.” Meanwhile, on the other side of the spectrum, the editor of National Review Rich Lowry, called Saletan “one of America’s shrewdest political writers,” and added “If you care about the issue of abortion, you must read this book.”

So when Saletan weighed in on the question of Do Most Americans Think Most Abortions Should Be Illegal? for the 41st commemoration of Roe v. Wade, I was intrigued to read his perspective.

The statistics on public opinion of abortion are pretty complex and very controversial. Saletan took an immediate dislike to a poll paid for by the National Right to Life Committee that provided unusually granular survey responses to a question about when abortion should be legal.

01 NRLC Poll Results

The poll (above) found that 53% of Americans fell within the broadly pro-life categories of opposing abortion at any time during a pregnancy with exceptions for the life of the mother as well as for rape and incest.

The NRLC also published the results of a poll from Gallup (a poll that they didn’t choose the questions for), and that poll confirmed the findings of the NRLC poll:

03 Gallup Poll Results

Based on these polls, one would conclude that most Americans are against most abortions, but Saletan thinks we should ignore these polls, and instead we should pay attention to a different collection of polls (also from reputable sources) that broke down abortion into the following cases: legal in all cases / legal in most cases / illegal in most cases / illegal in all cases.

02 Meta Results

As you can see, the NRLC and Gallup polls shows Americans opposed to most abortions. The polls provided by Saletan show the opposite. Who to believe?

Saletan argues that we should disregard the NRLC poll, but his reasoning is actually quite poor. According to him, the NRLC stacked the deck by picking 3 questions that are broadly pro-life and 3 that are broadly pro-choice, thus creating the false sense of equality between the two sides. Additionally, he suggests that with so many choice, folks will just opt for the middle.

This argument makes no sense, primary because both the polls Selatan disbelieves and the polls he likes are identical in terms of his alleged shenanigans. Three of the six NRLC options are more or less pro-life, but so are two of the four options in Saletan’s preferred polls. Additionally, it makes no sense to talk about driving people towards the middle when there are six choices. Six is an even number. If there was a strong central tendency for poll responses (Saletan provides no evidence of this assertion, and I couldn’t find any either), then wouldn’t the NRLC have picked five options instead of 6? (Or seven?) And, once again, the polls are identical in this since both have an even number of choices with half being pro-life and half being pro-choice. In short: Saletan has offered zero credible evidence to prefer one set of polls to the other.

The simplest explanation is the most reasonable, both polls are correct. In fact, Saletan implicitly argued for this in a follow-up piece (published the very next day) called The Political Peril of Second-Trimester Abortions. He wrote, “Poll numbers are usually meaningful, even when they don’t mean exactly what the sponsors claim.” In other words: respect that the answers people give to the actual poll questions are the best you’re gonna get, and be suspicious of what people extrapolate from there. That means we should prefer a theory that accommodates both sets of polls rather than one that forces us to try and explain away either set. (This is especially true because the NRLC’s poll is backed by a poll from Gallup and another one from CNN/ORC).

I took the trouble of looking through all of the polls that Saletan compiled to see if I could find a pattern. And I did. I found a very, very strong pattern that Saletan didn’t pick up on, and it is this: poll respondents react very strongly to the way the words “illegal” and “legal” are used. Here’s the Gallup poll that backed up the NRLC results:

Legal under any circumstances 26%
Legal under most circumstances 13%
Legal only in a few circumstances 38%
Illegal in all circumstances 20%


Here’s
the CNN/ORC poll (scroll down a bit):

Always legal 25%
Legal in most circumstances 11%
Legal in a few circumstances 42%
Always illegal 20%

Note that the third option doesn’t contain the word “illegal”. That is different from the four options that Saletan mentioned: legal in all cases / legal in most cases / illegal in most cases / illegal in all cases. To see what ones of those examples looks like, take a look at the AP/GfK poll:

Always legal 34%
Legal in most circumstances 19%
Ilegal in most circumstances 13%
Always illegal 29%

Now the third option includes the word “illegal”. That’s it, that’s pretty much the sole difference between both sets of polls. If the pro-life position is described without the word “illegal”, then Americans are pro-life. If the pro-life position is described using the word “illegal”, then Americans are pro-choice. Take a look at those polls again, when the third option uses the word “legal” it is the most popular response (in both polls). When the third option uses the word “illegal” it is the least popular response. The swing is truly enormous: support for the same option drops by about 67% when the word choice shifts from “legal” to “illegal”.

Unlike Saletan’s theory, the observation about the effect of word-choice is actually strongly supported by empirically verified theory and also consistent with all of the results. That’s good. Unfortunately, it doesn’t actually make the answer to the question much more clear. So if you want the simplest answer to the question, it is this: Americans do not know if they want most abortions to be illegal or not.

I’ll go a little farther, however, and make two observations.

First, I’m inclined to think that the NRLC poll is actually the best poll of the bunch because it doesn’t switch between “legal” and “illegal”. It uses only “legal” throughout. (What I’d really like, however, is a comparison to the NRLC poll that asked the exact same questions but rephrased them to use “illegal” throughout”.) My hunch (and I admit it is just an informed hunch), is that this probably takes some of the emphasis off of the emotional punch of the change from “illegal” to “legal” and gets closer to Americans policy preferences.

Second, I think that in some ways the most important finding is being obscured by all this discussion. We may not know exactly what Americans think about abortion, but we do know with certainty that the policy the American people want is a policy that is incompatible with Roe v. Wade. This becomes really clear in Saletan’s second piece (The Political Peril of Second-Trimester Abortions). In it, he used additional data from a poll funded by the Knight of Columbus and found significant erosion of support for abortion rights during the 2nd trimester even among the population that self-identified as strongly pro-choice. The decline in support was constant regardless of how the questions were asked. He concluded:

This doesn’t mean that most Americans think most abortions should be illegal. According to the most recent government data, 92 percent of abortions are performed in the first trimester. Beyond that point, abortions are much rarer and much harder to defend, both morally and politically. Without the protection of the courts, it’s difficult to see how they’d stay legal. [emphasis added]

In other words, the only thing standing between the will of the people and pro-life reform of abortion is the Roe v. Wade decision. This is one of the common themes of the entire abortion debate: Roe v. Wade was such an absolutist ruling that it gave the pro-choice side everything it could possibly have wanted. Despite a thin veneer of moderate rhetoric it is, when combined with the Doe v. Bolton decision handed down the same day, a truly extreme position. As a result of getting everything they could have wanted, the pro-choice side has had nothing to win and everything to lose since 1973.

In contrast to the Roe v. Wade ruling, the American people are anything but extreme and absolutist. It’s clear that any abortion after the first trimester is outside the mainstream of public opinion. Within the first trimester, it’s harder to say where Americans draw the line.

In a sense, though, it doesn’t matter where they draw the line today. Right now that’s an academic question because—until Roe is overturned or modified in some way—there’s no way to touch first-trimester abortions. Or second trimester abortions, for that matter. This makes pro-life strategy obvious: focus on using the unpopularity of 2nd trimester abortions to erode Roe v. Wade. Support for Roe is still deep and strong, but only because so few Americans understand what the ruling actually does. By name? Roe v. Wade is popular. By effect? It’s toxic. The key is to make defenders own the toxicity. (Related: It’s also important to help Americans realize how many of them already oppose abortion, because media bias causes us to significantly over-estimate the popularity of the pro-choice movement.)

And that’s really all you need to know about American opinion on abortion. When they see the facts, Americans still make the right choice. It’s true of Roe today, and I believe one day it will be true of elective abortions, regardless of trimester.

(Note: This post has  been reprinted with permission by Secular Pro-Life and also by LifeSiteNews.)

Does Criminalizing Abortion Lead to Women Dying?

2014-02-06 Aborto Legal

One constant refrain from the pro-choice side of the abortion issue is that there will be just as many abortions if they are illegal, but that they will be much more dangerous. Both arguments are objectively false. It’s old news that the first part of that argument is false. The famous chapter in Freakonomics that claimed abortion lowered crime rates was based on a study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics called The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime (pdf). One of the subsidiary findings of the study, discussed in footnote 8, talks about the relatively small decline in births at the same time as the number of abortions went up dramatically after legalization:

Note, however, that the decline in births is far less than the number of abortions, suggesting that the number of conceptions increased substantially—an example of insurance leading to moral hazard. The insurance that abortion provides against unwanted pregnancy induces more sexual conduct or diminished protections against pregnancy in a way that substantially increases the number of pregnancies.

In other words: when abortion was legalized you didn’t see a shift of the same number of abortions from illegal to legal. You simply saw many more abortions. The second part of the argument is also deeply flawed: abortions got safe long, long before they were legalized, and it had nothing to do with the law. (Details here.) It was simply a reflection of advancing medical technology. Even prior to Roe, illegal abortions were performed by doctors, and in the arguments leading up to Roe the safety of illegal abortions was considered an argument for legalizing them. The whole “back-alley abortion” thing was invented after-the-fact as a scare tactic. So the evidence suggests criminalizing abortion would lead to a lower rate of abortions without making the illegal abortions that do take place any more dangerous. Maternal death should not increase.

But what about direct evidence? Well, now we have that too. This article discusses a recent medical study that examined the change in maternal death rate in Chile when abortion was criminalized in 1989 after being legal since 1965. (Full article also available.) The result? With decades of data before and after criminalization, there is no evidence of any increase in maternal death due to illegal abortions.

This is strong evidence, along with what we already knew, that criminalizing abortion would not lead to a flood of scary, dangerous, coat-hanger abortions.