Pro-Abortionists Scrambling

By Dave Andrusko

As the week winds down, a few thoughts about a very welcomed development. As we've written about several times, it's not often that the abortion issue gets a real airing in Canada. The powers that be in the media and academia are so thoroughly pro-abortion they find it hard to bestir themselves beyond ridiculing anyone so primitive as to respect unborn life.

Then Prime Minister Stephan Harper had the audacity to say he wants Canadian foreign aid money to go to productive ideas to improve the health of poor women and their children. No money for abortion? pro-abortionists thundered. The list of critics included pro-abortion Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who put in her two cents. (www.nrlc.org/News_and_Views/April10/nv043010part2.html)

Pro-abortion Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking here at the UN on behalf of the Obama Administration, loudly proclaims the falsehood that lowering maternal mortality rates requires more and more abortion.

But there's been backsliding, so to speak, among some pro-abortionists who grasp that overwhelmingly, the reason the worldwide maternal mortality rate has dropped 35% has nothing to do with abortion. (We'd argue it contributes nothing to reducing maternal mortality, but at least they are on the right path.) Good news! (http://www.nrlc.org/News_and_Views/
May10/nv050410.html)

How to get around this welcomed news? Let's take two examples. One is an editorial from a Canadian publication which clobbered Harper for his decision. The writer illustrated his/her argument with a cartoon of a skeleton holding her dead baby! Why did they die? Because the mother is caught in a trap labeled "politics of abortion."

This is to back the editorial's contention that "Women's groups argue -- rightly, by the way -- that access to safe abortion is a vital part of any maternal health initiative." But it's not backed up by anything other than the insistence of the usual abortion organizations, which have a vested interested in promoting the noxious notion that killing unborn babies = a decrease in maternal mortality. In fact the evidence increasingly points in the opposite direction.

Most of the time proponents simply ignore the recent result of a study that appeared in The Lancet. In explaining a 35% decrease in worldwide mortality, the study pointed to every commonsensical explanation you could think of--cleaner water, better medical facilities, more skilled health workers, etc. Not one word about abortion. (http://www.nrlc.org/News_and_Views/April10/nv041510.html)

The second development is a piece that appears on the pro-abortion site, http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog, which tries to refurbish the alleged connection between abortion and a reduction in maternal mortality. A lame attempt, at best.

No one could disagree with the title of Elizabeth Maguire's op-ed--"No Cause for Complacency on Maternal Health." But her conclusion is another story.

She writes, with clear annoyance, that the new Lancet study does not even mention "unsafe abortion" as a "critical contributor to maternal deaths and injuries." But are we to believe that researchers from the University of Washington and the University of Queensland in Australia were too stupid/too oblivious to point this out? Obviously not. They evidently didn't find any data that confirmed any such connection.

Maguire, grasping for straws, argues that "many pregnancy-related deaths are not classified as such in vital registration records," and that "many deaths related to abortion are likely not to be reported or recorded as such, reflecting the strong, pervasive stigma and secrecy that surround unwanted pregnancy and abortion."

But, of course, this is not an argument that can be disproven--there are all these "secret/unreported" deaths from abortion. She can say it without fear of contradiction. Nice work, if you can get it.

Getting back to our neighbors to the North, as a friend recently pointed out, Canada has a long, long ways to go. But the resistance of the Harper government to using Canadian money to export the abortion plague and the growing uneasy about sex-selection abortion (www.nrlc.org/News_and_Views/April10/nv041310part2.html) are beginning to change the discussion.

Have a great weekend!