ABORTION IS NOT SAFER THAN CHILDBIRTH
Ruth Bader Ginsburg Falsely Claims Abortion is Safer Than Childbirth
OPINION FATHER FRANK PAVONE MAR 18, 2020 | 9:07AM WASHINGTON, DC
The abortion industry has been more successful than many other propaganda groups in making lies take hold in the public imagination through repetition.
Examples include: “It’s not a baby; it’s just a clump of cells.” “Thousands of women died every year from unsafe abortion before Roe v. Wade.” “Abortion is health care.”
Every one of these assertions is demonstrably false.
Yet one of the most pervasive and dangerous lies promulgated by abortionists and their friends in government and the media is that abortion is safer than childbirth.
The lie is so deeply ingrained in the pro-abortion psyche that even Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg repeated it during oral arguments earlier this month in an important abortion case from Louisiana.
“Among medical procedures, first-trimester abortion is among the safest – far safer than childbirth,” Ginsburg said, failing to attribute this “fact” to any reliable source – as the abortion advocates have failed to do since Roe v. Wade.
This old – and specious – claim was demolished in the amicus briefs filed for the case of June Medical Services v. Russo.
The American Center for Law and Justice, the American Academy of Medical Ethics, and the American College of Pediatricians submitted a brief in support of a Louisiana law that requires hospital admitting privileges for abortionists.
On page 17 of the 119-page brief, they wrote:
No one expects to see an ambulance pulling away from a dermatology or dental office. Yet ambulances are a not uncommon sight at abortion facilities. This sorry fact is just one of many that belie the abortion industry myth that abortion is safe and routine, even safer than childbirth. As demonstrated below, abortion in fact is a hazardous procedure that all too often results in serious complications. Moreover, the common claim of abortion advocates that abortion is safer than childbirth is based upon incomplete data and flagrantly inapt comparisons. The published medical evidence strongly suggests that abortion is more dangerous, not less, than childbirth.
The brief documents 72 instances of women being taken by ambulance from abortion businesses in 2019 alone. Perhaps that seems a very small number, given the annual carnage caused by legal child-killing, but the brief also notes that the only way the public finds out about abortion injuries is when pro-lifers are outside the facilities to take note.
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“There is every reason to believe this list is just the tip of the iceberg,” the brief explains. “The news media do not, as a rule, report on medical emergencies at abortion facilities.”
The names of 10 young women killed by legal abortion in recent years were also included in the brief. Some of these deaths generated a story or two in each woman’s local media, but certainly not the wall-to-wall national coverage that followed the death of Kanye West’s mother after cosmetic surgery. Moms who die from abortion are just the under-reported collateral damage of the killing machine that is legal abortion.
The brief analyzes the ways that the relative “safety” of abortion is compared to childbirth, suggesting that in the end it boils down to which statistics are included and which are omitted. Here’s a sampling of some of these errors, as spelled out in the brief.
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Abortion deaths are also counted as pregnancy deaths.
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Abortion death statistics don’t include delayed deaths that can be attributed to abortion, like suicide.
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Abortion deaths are under-reported, since the collection of abortion data is not mandated, and abortion deaths are routinely attributed to other causes.
The story of Keisha Atkins, mentioned but not detailed in the brief, is a heart-breaking example of an abortion death cover-up.
Keisha died during a second-trimester abortion in New Mexico. She had been in medical distress for more than nine hours before the abortion clinic transferred her to the hospital, and physicians there waited several more hours before taking her to the operating room, where she died. An autopsy later blamed her death on a pulmonary embolism, a leading cause of maternal mortality. In other words, the autopsy alleged that the pregnancy killed her, not the abortion.
But a string of emails from various hospital personnel questioned the autopsy conclusion, with one physician reporting being “floored” by the assertion. A more realistic cause of death, they said, was sepsis.
By the time Keisha died, her dead daughter had been in her womb for more than 60 hours. This is a known cause of sepsis. The abortion killed Keisha.
To find factual information about abortion deaths, the brief’s authors had to look abroad to studies performed in Finland, Norway, and Denmark, because in this country, pro-abortion researchers funded by pro-abortion foundations perform the bulk of the peer-reviewed studies. The vast majority conclude that abortion is a “safe” procedure. But in the studies from abroad, abortion was not found to be safer than childbirth.
The brief concludes:
Abortion is a procedure fraught with hazards. The notion that abortion is safer than childbirth rests on inapposite comparisons and incomplete data, flies in the face of far more rigorous peer-reviewed studies, and should not be relied upon by this Court for any purposes.
The Supreme Court is expected to release its opinion in the Louisiana case in June. Whether the coronavirus pandemic and the postponement of oral arguments in other cases will come to bear on this timetable is unknown. One can only hope that the justices take their time making their way through briefs like this one that tell the truth about abortion.
Women’s lives depend on it.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Falsely Claims Abortion is Safer Than Childbirth
NATIONAL MICAIAH BILGER MAR 6, 2020 | 1:24PM WASHINGTON, DC
Abortions are not safer than childbirth because a baby always dies.
Women, too, risk their physical and mental health – and their future children’s as well – when they have abortions.
But some of the most respected minds in the country continue to mislead the public about the truth.
On Wednesday, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg claimed abortion is safer than childbirth while attacking a Louisiana law that requires abortionists to have hospital admitting privileges for patient emergencies, The Independent reports.
The justices considered a challenge to the law Wednesday, and they are expected to rule on the matter in June. The case will determine whether states may require abortionists to have hospital admitting privileges for patient emergencies and whether abortion businesses may sue on behalf of their patients.
Ginsburg, a pro-abortion icon, questioned the necessity of the law, arguing that most women who get abortions do not require medical treatment afterward.
“Most of the people who get abortions never have any need to go to a hospital, isn’t that so?” she asked lawyers for the state. “You don’t dispute … that among medical procedures, first-trimester abortion is among the safest, far safer than childbirth.”
This is not the first time Ginsburg has made the old, debunked pro-abortion argument. She made the same claim in 2016 when the Supreme Court heard a challenge to a similar Texas law.
First and foremost, abortion never is safer for the unborn child. The very purpose of an abortion is to destroy an unborn human being’s life.
Second, it is not accurate to say that abortion is safer for the woman, either. At the very least, researchers point out that the U.S. does not receive enough data from abortion facilities to make that conclusion. Several European studies have refuted the claim even further, concluding that more women die after abortions than childbirth.
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In 2016, Anna Paprocki, an attorney at Americans United for Life, wrote an article explaining how U.S. abortion data is incomplete and unreliable. This makes it hard to make any conclusions regarding the safety of abortion, she wrote.
Dr. Byron Calhoun, vice chair of West Virginia University-Charleston’s Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, published research in 2013 to explain how little data Americans have about abortion complications and maternal deaths. He wrote in the Catholic medical journal Linacre Quarterly:
There are numerous and complicated methodological factors that make a valid scientific assessment of abortion mortality extremely difficult. Among the many factors responsible are incomplete reporting, definitional incompatibilities, voluntary data collection, research bias, reliance upon estimations, political correctness, inaccurate and/or incomplete death certificate completion, incomparability with maternal mortality statistics, and failing to include other causes of death such as suicides. Given the importance of this disclosure about abortion mortality, the lack of credible and reliable scientific evidence supporting this representation requires substantial discussion.
Studies that claim to show abortions are safer than childbirth tend to be biased. They come from pro-abortion organizations or abortionists themselves who have a financial interest in the outcome.
In contrast, a comprehensive study of medical records in Denmark found the opposite to be true: “Compared to women who delivered, women who had an early or late abortion had significantly higher mortality rates within 1 through 10 years.” The study was published in the Medical Science Monitor in 2012.
There also is evidence that legalizing abortion does not reduce maternal mortality rates. Before Ireland legalized abortion in 2018, research showed that maternal mortality rates were lower there than in neighboring countries where abortion is legal. A study from Chile also found that maternal mortality declined because of better access to health care, not changes in the country’s abortion laws.
Abortions also can affect the health of future children. A new study from the Acta Obstetricia et Gynecologica Scandinavica in Finland found that abortions can lead to an increased risk of preterm birth and low birth weight in future children. Previous studies found similar results.
An abortion is the exact opposite of safety or healthcare. Its purpose is to destroy the life of a unique, living human being – the woman’s own child. In America, abortions have killed more than 61 million unborn babies since 1973. But the number of mothers who have been harmed or killed as a result of an abortion remains a mystery.
A new paper demonstrates that taxpayer-funded Planned Parenthood obtains 35 percent of the U.S. abortion market, a figure that well overtakes the market shares of leaders in other industries.
“In 2015, Planned Parenthood performed more than one third (35.4%) of all the induced abortions in the U.S.,” write Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI) President Chuck Donovan and Dr. James Studnicki, CLI’s vice president and director of Data Analytics.
The authors compare Planned Parenthood’s share of the U.S. abortion market to the market shares of leaders of other industries:
“The level of market dominance for abortions demonstrated by Planned Parenthood could be taught in business schools as the ultimate example of strategic planning and execution,” Donovan and Studnicki assert. “It is a defining activity.”
Additionally, the authors find that Planned Parenthood depends primarily on its abortion-centered business model – and is not a significant provider of medical care in the United States, despite its self-promotion as an “irreplaceable” and “life-saving” healthcare provider:
The report observes that Planned Parenthood provides less than 1.4 percent of the nation’s HIV tests and less than 1 percent of pap tests, and that in the last five years service-to-client ratios for breast exams and pap tests have declined by 37 percent.
“There is little or no demonstrable capability for definitive diagnosis or a range of treatments for any disease or condition at Planned Parenthood centers,” write Donovan and Studnicki. “With the exception of abortion, Planned Parenthood does not provide any service that is not easily available from alternative providers.”
Planned Parenthood’s own 2015-2016 annual report indicates the organization performed 328,348 abortions – an increase of 4,349 abortions over the 323,999 abortions the group states it performed in 2014-2015.
The group also reported 2,945,059 contraception services in 2014-2015, and 2,808,815 of the same services in its latest report, a drop of 136,244 within a year.
Similarly, Planned Parenthood reports 9,419 prenatal services in its latest report, a significant drop since a year ago, when the group claimed 17,419 of the same services.