Dear Colleague:

Guttmacher ignores the obvious and twists the statistics in defense of
abortion.

Steven W. Mosher
President

PRI Weekly Briefing
5 May 2006
Vol. 8 / No. 18


Getting Desperate at Guttmacher
By Joseph A. D'Agostino


As the chances of meaningfully protecting unborn American children and
their deceived mothers continues to increase, the pro-abortion side grows
ever more desperate in its defense of the abortion-on-demand policy
imposed on the country by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade (1973).  Some
of their tactics are laughable, such as those employed to smear Samuel
Alito before he became a Supreme Court justice.  Some are plausible and
insidious, such as the latest report from the Guttmacher Institute, the
supposedly scientific research division of Planned Parenthood.

One of the least regulated in the nation, the abortion industry needs much
better reporting requirements and examination by those bodies charged with
overseeing the health care sector.  In the meantime, we must rely on
Guttmacher and other such organizations with the funds to study abortion
in the United States.  Yet the latest report has holes so big and
assertions so far from being scientific that its authors should be
ashamed.

It's true that the institute does not really hide its bias.  "The
institute's mission is to protect the reproductive choices of all women
and men in the United States and throughout the world," it says.  "It is
to support their ability to obtain the information and services needed to
achieve their full human rights, safeguard their health and exercise their
individual responsibilities in regard to sexual behavior and
relationships, reproduction and family formation."  It doesn't say so
explicitly, but that clearly means that the institute is pro-abortion,
pro-contraception, and pro-homosexual.  And it is accurately described as
pro-abortion, not pro-choice, because it advocates taxing Americans to pay
for abortion.

The very first sentence of the report, "Abortion in Women's Lives"
released May 4, implicitly links the abrogation of the natural operation
of women's bodies to social progress: "The ability to determine whether
and when to bear children has become a prerequisite for women's full
participation in modern life."  The report also contains self-parodying
statements such as, "In short, most women who choose to have an abortion
are not opposed to accepting parental responsibility."

"Abortion in Women's Lives" uses the common statistical chicanery of
grossly exaggerating the number of abortions taking place in the United
States before Roe.  "In the 1950s and 1960s, it is estimated that 200,000
to 1.2 million women each year had illegal abortions in the United States,
many of which were under unsafe conditions," it says.  "According to
another estimate, which extrapolated data from North Carolina, 699,000
illegal abortions occurred nationwide in 1955 and 829,000 illegal
procedures were performed in 1967."

As Ramesh Ponnuru pointed out on National Review Online the day the report
came out, "The upper end of that estimate isn't remotely plausible.  The
number of reported abortions in 1974, when Roe had made them all legal,
was 899,000.  The number in 1975 was 1 million.  Are we really supposed to
believe that the number of abortions fell when abortion became legal?
(And then immediately started to climb for a decade and a half?)  As the
pro-life lawyer Clark Forsythe has pointed out, the relatively low number
of legal abortions in California after its 1967 liberalization makes even
the low end of the estimate look excessive" (parentheses in original).

In a section called "The Long-Term Safety of Abortion," the Guttmacher
report does a great disservice to women around the world.  Prima facie,
abortion would carry risks of health problems.  It is, after all, the
violent, artificial interruption of a major natural process.  Yet the
report continues to dismiss the evidence tying abortion to decreased
future fertility, breast cancer, and severe psychological consequences
even while hurriedly acknowledging that second trimester abortions can
"pose some increased risk of complications in future pregnancies."  The
greatly increased risk of breast cancer for women whose first pregnancy
ends in induced abortion is well-established, and I won't go into the
details yet again in this article.  (One source of information on this
topic is http://www.abortionbreastcancer.com/The_Link.htm.)

Perhaps most egregiously, the report simply ignores the best study done on
the link between abortion and mental illness, released earlier this year
by Professor David M. Fergusson and other New Zealand scientists.  Since
this study was conducted by pro-abortion experts who avoided
methodological pitfalls, perhaps the Guttmacher Institute thought best to
pretend it doesn't exist.  The study found far higher rates of severe
depression and anxiety among young women who had abortions than young
women who did not, and that the abortions preceded the mental illnesses.

The report also notes that "placing children for adoption has never been
common and has been declining in recent years."  This simple, pro-life
solution to unintended pregnancy gets a small sidebar in the report, and
should be getting a lot more from government policymakers as married
couples wait years to adopt infants.

The report authors point out that higher rates of unintended pregnancy
tend to lead to higher rates of abortion.  That is fair enough.  Yet it
concludes that the only way to reduce untended pregnancies is to increase
funding for contraception use.  Not only has the dramatic worldwide rise
in abortions in the last few decades coincided with the dramatic worldwide
rise in contraceptive availability, but even the report notes that half of
all unintended pregnancies in the United States happen to women currently
using contraception.  As for those who become pregnant unintentionally
while not using contraception, the explanation does not lie in the Marxoid
implications of the report, which blames lack of government funding for
poor women's and "women of color's" higher rates of unintended
pregnancies.  Contraception is far too inexpensive, easily available, and
propagandized in favor of for there to be any explanation other than this:
The couple in question didn't want to use it, or couldn't be bothered to
obtain any.  The facile availability of abortion must be a contributing
factor to this lackadaisical attitude, here and in those foreign countries
where abortion is technically illegal but still widely accessible.

Of course, the report fails to address the contraceptive mentality, the
idea that the human body is a commodity for use, that children are
something to be avoided even if adoption is an option, that sex should be
without consequences.  It is this mentality, this reliance on cheap sexual
pleasure and anti-child procreation avoidance, that makes abortion
inevitable when contraception fails.  If respect for the human body's
natural powers, for the opposite sex, for the generation of new life are
restored to society, abortion will wither away.


Joseph A. D'Agostino is Vice President for Communications at the
Population Research Institute.


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