Toronto March for LifeAbortion has surfaced pretty regularly in the news these days. The World Health Organization, for example, reported good news and bad news. The good news: “A recent study by the World Health Organisation (WHO) shows that the rate of abortion in the developed world dropped by 19 points, from 46 to 27 for every 1,000 women aged between 15 and 44.” The bad news: “The data collected compared findings between 1990 to 1994 and 2010 to 2014, and showed that the rate of abortion in the developing world…had not dropped significantly.” A staggering 56 million abortions take place worldwide per year, around 88% of those in the developing world. Many of those abortions are funded by the “foreign aid” of the Obama Administration, and Justin Trudeau’s government has promised to begin funding abortions overseas imminently as well.
And then there was a supremely awkward interview between alleged comedian (or is it comedienne?) Natasha Leggero and Conan O’Brien. Leggero, who single-handedly gives teeth to Christopher Hitchens’ infamous assertion that women aren’t funny, told O’Brien that converting to Judaism from her long-abandoned-Catholicism was great because Judaism considered abortions to be “cool.” At one point she claimed that you could have an abortion “on every Jewish holiday and it would be okay.” This was to the great discomfort of O’Brien, who at several points vociferously disagreed with her— “I don’t think they go around saying ‘abortions are cool’…I was just given a signal. The Jews don’t want you anymore.” The attempted jokes bombed so badly that at one point Leggero pointed at the audience and asked, “Do you have a big Catholic following or something?”
Which brings me to the fact that Glamour Magazine, which styles itself the go-to place for “fashion trends, outfits, hair, makeup, and celebrity news” is running an article series on abortion, a fact that is as mind-blowing as the “5 Mind-Blowing Stats About Abortion in America.” Those facts are as follows:
59% of women who get abortions have children. This fact should be important to pro-lifers for one very important reason. As my former colleague Stephanie Gray has pointed out, “the post-abortive are pre-abortive”:
A couple years ago when my colleagues and I were displaying abortion victim photography in Calgary, a woman confided in me that she had had an abortion in Edmonton just a few months prior. She said through tears, “Nobody told me it looked like that.” Tragically this woman made the choice she did because she was ignorant. Incidentally, she’s the exact kind of woman some pro-lifers use as a reason for why abortion victim photography shouldn’t be shown—“she’s already had an abortion!” they say. Well yes she has, but she could be part of the 30,000 [Canadian women] that will have another one, so wouldn’t you rather she grieve the loss of only one child rather than two? Delivering the pro-life message is just as important for those who haven’t had an abortion as it is for those who have.
The second “mind-blowing” statistic is that according to Glamour, 51% of women getting abortions were actually utilizing contraception the month they got pregnant with their child. This fact is only “mind-blowing” to the feminists and sex activists who are forever blathering on about how contraception will lower the abortion rate, a non-solution that defies every bit of statistical evidence available to us. As even abortion activists are forced to note when publishing the evidence, contraception often does not prevent pregnancy.
The third statistic is a great one: 320 abortion restrictions were enacted by states since 2011. In spite of the fact that Donald Trump’s campaign is a raging dumpster fire and federal Republicans have consistently sold out the pro-life movement, the pro-life movement on the state level has been phenomenally successful. As one abortion activist wrote earlier this year, 2015 was the worst year for abortion rights since Roe v. Wade.
The fourth stat revisits an age-old abortion argument: between 100,000 and 240,000 women, says Glamour (although it admits that the higher numbers are an invented projection) attempt to self-induce an abortion at some point during their lives. This, they say, is why abortion must be legal, ignoring the fact that everything that is made illegal still happens to some extent or another, and that the reason we make things illegal is to deter people from that behavior. I remember when our activist team met a woman who had survived a back alley abortion. The coat hanger her mother had tried to use to kill her missed her heart by a centimetre. The solution to illegal killing isn’t to legalize the killing so as to make it safer. That’s like saying that we should give a man abusing his wife boxing gloves so he doesn’t wreck his knuckles while he beats her. Pro-life activists are against killing babies with suction aspirators, and we’re against killing them with coat hangers. It’s really very simple.
The fifth stat is a long-debated one: a first-trimester abortion, says Glamour, is “one of the safest medical procedures.” One of the irritating things about this argument is that it misses the point entirely. Since the science tells us the pre-born child in the womb is in fact a human being who began his or her life at fertilization, a first-trimester abortion violently suctions that human being into bloody shreds. It is not “safe” for the child, who is being ignored. This is to say nothing of the fact that, as one pro-choice filmmaker discovered recently, most abortion complications are covered up or ignored by the medical community and the abortion establishment. It’s not good for business, you see.
Abortion rates dropping in the West. Hundreds of anti-abortion laws passing on the state level. As always, there’s good news and there’s bad news. And as always, it’s our job as pro-lifers to create more good news.
