Media and Abortion

 

Portraying abortion as incredibly safe at the heart of the attack on providing women with the truth about abortion and their options

By Dave Andrusko
You have to admire our benighted opposition, in a backhanded sort of way. Having control of the most powerful levers of public opinion—more popular as well as academic—they can simultaneously assert that every word they promote in their assorted forums might just as well have been chiseled on stone on Mt. Sinai and every syllable that challenges that supremacy is at best ignorant, at worse consciously lying.
So you hear, almost back to back, that (repeat after me) abortion is ridiculously safe and pro-lifers are lying when they say otherwise. And by ridiculously safe I mean safer in the sense that we read in the first sentence of a TIME magazine article:

People who get abortions are less likely to have complications than people who have their wisdom teeth removed, finds a new study published in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology.

Abortion is safer (for the mother) than having her wisdom teeth removed? Does anyone–other than those who will believe anything, provided it comes from a set of pro-abortion authors­­–actually find this marginally plausible? Think about what’s involved in an abortion and then ask yourself can there possibly be fewer complications than having a tonsillectomy?
So why do we get this barrage now? It’s the flip-side of the argument made in another new study that materials found in crisis pregnancy centers are absurdly inaccurate. They are rife with (as the headline to the study by Bryant, Narasimhan, Bryant-Comstock , and Levi from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine phrases it) “misinformation and disinformation.”
This study concludes that as many as 80% of CPC websites in the twelve states they looked at “provided at least one false or misleading piece of information.” What are the four most common? We already know the answer because these are the associations that are best documented and which most unnerve pro-abortionists:

a declared link between abortion and mental health risks; preterm birth; breast cancer; and future infertility

And—of course—the conclusion that follows as night follows day is the one articulated by Dr. David Grimes, one of the most infamous pro-abortionists of the past four decades. Writing at Huffingtonpost.com, he tells us

Although most states provide a disclaimer that they do not endorse the views of the agencies to which they refer, inclusion of these “Crisis Pregnancy Centers” on a state “Resource Directory” facilitates the campaign of deception. Moreover, providing medically inaccurate information violates the ethical principles of beneficence and autonomy. States should perform due diligence and delete from “Resource Directories” those agencies that mislead the public. The public deserves better.

So collectively these attacks are intended to discredit pro-abortionists’ on-the-ground competitors—CPCs—and the growing number of academics who are demonstrating that abortion has after-effects on many, many women. 

And all make intuitive as well as experiential sense. For example, an abortionist is cutting around a woman’s reproductive organs and you don’t expect that will make it more difficult for her to carry another baby to full-term?! Really?
And, as Grimes makes clear, another key objective is to discredit the kind of information that some states are making available to women to access before going to an abortion clinic. This is hugely important for it gives women another viewpoint before entering a place that makes its money killing unborn babies.

Time and time again we’ve written about the associations that Dr. Grimes dismisses with such utter cavalier disdain. NRLC has produced fact sheets on them.
NRLC’s director of education Dr. Randall K. O’Bannon will be looking at these two abortion-promoting studies in much more depth over the next few days.

Source: NRLC News