When Abortion Suddenly Stopped Making Sense

By Frederica Mathewes-Green
https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/01/abortion-roe-v-wade-unborn-children-women-feminism-march-life/?fbclid=IwAR1boZNqoCRCBYOnyXFNBQWfbO-HmOSpVTXKpxVR5ugQrK70JnEatP2wqho
January 22, 2016

Ultrasound: 14 weeks (American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine - AIUM.org)

At the time of the Roe v. Wade decision, I was a college student — an anti-war, mother-earth, feminist, hippie college student. That particular January I was taking a semester off, living in the D.C. area and volunteering at the feminist “underground newspaper” Off Our Backs. As you’d guess, I was strongly in favor of legalizing abortion. The bumper sticker on my car read, “Don’t labor under a misconception; legalize abortion.”

The first issue of Off Our Backs after the Roe decision included one of my movie reviews, and also an essay by another member of the collective criticizing the decision. It didn’t go far enough, she said, because it allowed states to restrict abortion in the third trimester. The Supreme Court should not meddle in what should be decided between the woman and her doctor. She should be able to choose abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.

But, at the time, we didn’t have much understanding of what abortion was. We knew nothing of fetal development. We consistently termed the fetus “a blob of tissue,” and that’s just how we pictured it — an undifferentiated mucous-like blob, not recognizable as human or even as alive. It would be another 15 years of so before pregnant couples could show off sonograms of their unborn babies, shocking us with the obvious humanity of the unborn.

We also thought, back then, that few abortions would ever be done. It’s a grim experience, going through an abortion, and we assumed a woman would choose one only as a last resort. We were fighting for that “last resort.” We had no idea how common the procedure would become; today, one in every five pregnancies ends in abortion.

Nor could we have imagined how high abortion numbers would climb. In the 43 years since Roe v. Wade, there have been 59 million abortions. It’s hard even to grasp a number that big. Twenty years ago, someone told me that, if the names of all those lost babies were inscribed on a wall, like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the wall would have to stretch for 50 miles. It’s 20 years later now, and that wall would have to stretch twice as far. But no names could be written on it; those babies had no names.

We expected that abortion would be rare. What we didn’t realize was that, once abortion becomes available, it becomes the most attractive option for everyone around the pregnant woman. If she has an abortion, it’s like the pregnancy never existed. No one is inconvenienced. It doesn’t cause trouble for the father of the baby, or her boss, or the person in charge of her college scholarship. It won’t embarrass her mom and dad.

Abortion is like a funnel; it promises to solve all the problems at once. So there is significant pressure on a woman to choose abortion, rather than adoption or parenting.

A woman who had had an abortion told me, “Everyone around me was saying they would ‘be there for me’ if I had the abortion, but no one said they’d ‘be there for me’ if I had the baby.” For everyone around the pregnant woman, abortion looks like the sensible choice. A woman who determines instead to continue an unplanned pregnancy looks like she’s being foolishly stubborn. It’s like she’s taken up some unreasonable hobby. People think, If she would only go off and do this one thing, everything would be fine.

But that’s an illusion. Abortion can’t really “turn back the clock.” It can’t push the rewind button on life and make it so she was never pregnant. It can make it easy for everyone around the woman to forget the pregnancy, but the woman herself may struggle. When she first sees the positive pregnancy test she may feel, in a panicky way, that she has to get rid of it as fast as possible. But life stretches on after abortion, for months and years — for many long nights — and all her life long she may ponder the irreversible choice she made.

This issue gets presented as if it’s a tug of war between the woman and the baby. We see them as mortal enemies, locked in a fight to the death. But that’s a strange idea, isn’t it? It must be the first time in history when mothers and their own children have been assumed to be at war. We’re supposed to picture the child attacking her, trying to destroy her hopes and plans, and picture the woman grateful for the abortion, since it rescued her from the clutches of her child.

If you were in charge of a nature preserve and you noticed that the pregnant female mammals were trying to miscarry their pregnancies, eating poisonous plants or injuring themselves, what would you do? Would you think of it as a battle between the pregnant female and her unborn and find ways to help those pregnant animals miscarry? No, of course not. You would immediately think, “Something must be really wrong in this environment.” Something is creating intolerable stress, so much so that animals would rather destroy their own offspring than bring them into the world. You would strive to identify and correct whatever factors were causing this stress in the animals.

The same thing goes for the human animal. Abortion gets presented to us as if it’s something women want; both pro-choice and pro-life rhetoric can reinforce that idea. But women do this only if all their other options look worse. It’s supposed to be “her choice,” yet so many women say, “I really didn’t have a choice.”

I changed my opinion on abortion after I read an article in Esquire magazine, way back in 1976. I was home from grad school, flipping through my dad’s copy, and came across an article titled “What I Saw at the Abortion.” The author, Richard Selzer, was a surgeon, and he was in favor of abortion, but he’d never seen one. So he asked a colleague whether, next time, he could go along.

Selzer described seeing the patient, 19 weeks pregnant, lying on her back on the table. (That is unusually late; most abortions are done by the tenth or twelfth week.) The doctor performing the procedure inserted a syringe into the woman’s abdomen and injected her womb with a prostaglandin solution, which would bring on contractions and cause a miscarriage. (This method isn’t used anymore, because too often the baby survived the procedure — chemically burned and disfigured, but clinging to life. Newer methods, including those called “partial birth abortion” and “dismemberment abortion,” more reliably ensure death.)

After injecting the hormone into the patient’s womb, the doctor left the syringe standing upright on her belly. Then, Selzer wrote, “I see something other than what I expected here. . . . It is the hub of the needle that is in the woman’s belly that has jerked. First to one side. Then to the other side. Once more it wobbles, is tugged, like a fishing line nibbled by a sunfish.”

He realized he was seeing the fetus’s desperate fight for life. And as he watched, he saw the movement of the syringe slow down and then stop. The child was dead. Whatever else an unborn child does not have, he has one thing: a will to live. He will fight to defend his life.

The last words in Selzer’s essay are, “Whatever else is said in abortion’s defense, the vision of that other defense [i.e., of the child defending its life] will not vanish from my eyes. And it has happened that you cannot reason with me now. For what can language do against the truth of what I saw?”

The truth of what he saw disturbed me deeply. There I was, anti-war, anti–capital punishment, even vegetarian, and a firm believer that social justice cannot be won at the cost of violence. Well, this sure looked like violence. How had I agreed to make this hideous act the centerpiece of my feminism? How could I think it was wrong to execute homicidal criminals, wrong to shoot enemies in wartime, but all right to kill our own sons and daughters?

For that was another disturbing thought: Abortion means killing not strangers but our own children, our own flesh and blood. No matter who the father, every child aborted is that woman’s own son or daughter, just as much as any child she will ever bear.

We had somehow bought the idea that abortion was necessary if women were going to rise in their professions and compete in the marketplace with men. But how had we come to agree that we will sacrifice our children, as the price of getting ahead? When does a man ever have to choose between his career and the life of his child?

Once I recognized the inherent violence of abortion, none of the feminist arguments made sense. Like the claim that a fetus is not really a person because it is so small. Well, I’m only 5 foot 1. Women, in general, are smaller than men. Do we really want to advance a principle that big people have more value than small people? That if you catch them before they’ve reached a certain size, it’s all right to kill them?

What about the child who is “unwanted”? It was a basic premise of early feminism that women should not base their sense of worth on whether or not a man “wants” them. We are valuable simply because we are members of the human race, regardless of any other person’s approval. Do we really want to say that “unwanted” people might as well be dead? What about a woman who is “wanted” when she’s young and sexy but less so as she gets older? At what point is it all right to terminate her?

The usual justification for abortion is that the unborn is not a “person.” It’s said that “Nobody knows when life begins.” But that’s not true; everybody knows when life — a new individual human life — gets started. It’s when the sperm dissolves in the egg. That new single cell has a brand-new DNA, never before seen in the world. If you examined through a microscope three cells lined up — the newly fertilized ovum, a cell from the father, and a cell from the mother — you would say that, judging from the DNA, the cells came from three different people.

When people say the unborn is “not a person” or “not a life” they mean that it has not yet grown or gained abilities that arrive later in life. But there’s no agreement about which abilities should be determinative. Pro-choice people don’t even agree with each other. Obviously, law cannot be based on such subjective criteria. If it’s a case where the question is “Can I kill this?” the answer must be based on objective medical and scientific data. And the fact is, an unborn child, from the very first moment, is a new human individual. It has the three essential characteristics that make it “a human life”: It’s alive and growing, it is composed entirely of human cells, and it has unique DNA. It’s a person, just like the rest of us.

Abortion indisputably ends a human life. But this loss is usually set against the woman’s need to have an abortion in order to freely direct her own life. It is a particular cruelty to present abortion as something women want, something they demand, they find liberating. Because nobody wants this. The procedure itself is painful, humiliating, expensive — no woman “wants” to go through it. But once it’s available, it appears to be the logical, reasonable choice. All the complexities can be shoved down that funnel. Yes, abortion solves all the problems; but it solves them inside the woman’s body. And she is expected to keep that pain inside for a lifetime, and be grateful for the gift of abortion.

Many years ago I wrote something in an essay about abortion, and I was surprised that the line got picked up and frequently quoted. I’ve seen it in both pro-life and pro-choice contexts, so it appears to be something both sides agree on.

I wrote, “No one wants an abortion as she wants an ice cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal, caught in a trap, wants to gnaw off its own leg.”

Strange, isn’t it, that both pro-choice and pro-life people agree that is true? Abortion is a horrible and harrowing experience. That women choose it so frequently shows how much worse continuing a pregnancy can be. Essentially, we’ve agreed to surgically alter women so that they can get along in a man’s world. And then expect them to be grateful for it.

Nobody wants to have an abortion. And if nobody wants to have an abortion, why are women doing it, 2800 times a day? If women doing something 2,800 times daily that they don’t want to do, this is not liberation we’ve won. We are colluding in a strange new form of oppression.

*   *   *

And so we come around to one more March for Life, like the one last year, like the one next year. Protesters understandably focus on the unborn child, because the danger it faces is the most galvanizing aspect of this struggle. If there are different degrees of injustice, surely violence is the worst manifestation, and killing worst of all. If there are different categories of innocent victim, surely the small and helpless have a higher claim to protection, and tiny babies the highest of all. The minimum purpose of government is to shield the weak from abuse by the strong, and there is no one weaker or more voiceless than unborn children. And so we keep saying that they should be protected, for all the same reasons that newborn babies are protected. Pro-lifers have been doing this for 43 years now, and will continue holding a candle in the darkness for as many more years as it takes.

I understand all the reasons why the movement’s prime attention is focused on the unborn. But we can also say that abortion is no bargain for women, either. It’s destructive and tragic. We shouldn’t listen unthinkingly to the other side of the time-worn script, the one that tells us that women want abortions, that abortion liberates them. Many a post-abortion woman could tell you a different story.

The pro-life cause is perennially unpopular, and pro-lifers get used to being misrepresented and wrongly accused. There are only a limited number of people who are going to be brave enough to stand up on the side of an unpopular cause. But sometimes a cause is so urgent, is so dramatically clear, that it’s worth it. What cause could be more outrageous than violence — fatal violence — against the most helpless members of our human community? If that doesn’t move us, how hard are our hearts? If that doesn’t move us, what will ever move us?

In time, it’s going to be impossible to deny that abortion is violence against children. Future generations, as they look back, are not necessarily going to go easy on ours. Our bland acceptance of abortion is not going to look like an understandable goof. In fact, the kind of hatred that people now level at Nazis and slave-owners may well fall upon our era. Future generations can accurately say, “It’s not like they didn’t know.” They can say, “After all, they had sonograms.” They may consider this bloodshed to be a form of genocide. They might judge our generation to be monsters.

One day, the tide is going to turn. With that Supreme Court decision 43 years ago, one of the sides in the abortion debate won the day. But sooner or later, that day will end. No generation can rule from the grave. The time is coming when a younger generation will sit in judgment of ours. And they are not obligated to be kind.

No, Abortion Isn't a Constitutional Right

By Ben Shapiro
https://townhall.com/columnists/benshapiro/2019/05/22/no-abortion-isnt-a-constitutional-right-n2546661
May 22, 2019





In the past several weeks, a bevy of states have passed extensive new restrictions on abortion. Alabama has effectively banned abortion from point of conception. Georgia has banned abortion from the time a heartbeat is detected, as have Ohio, Kentucky and Mississippi. Missouri has banned abortion after eight weeks. Other states are on the move as well.

This has prompted paroxysms of rage from the media and the political left -- the same folks who celebrated when New York passed a law effectively allowing abortion up until point of birth and who defended Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam's perverse statements about late-term abortion. According to these thinkers, conservatives have encroached on a supposed "right to abortion" inherent in the Constitution.

This, of course, is a lie. There is no "right to abortion" in the Constitution. The founders would have been appalled by such a statement. The Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade (1973) is a legal monstrosity by every available metric: As legal scholar John Hart Ely wrote, Roe "is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be." The court's rationale is specious; the court relied on the ridiculous precedent in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) that a broad "right to privacy" can be crafted from "penumbras, formed by emanations." Then the court extended that right to privacy to include the killing of a third party, an unborn human life -- and overrode state definitions of human life in the process.

How? The court relied on the self-contradictory notion of "substantive due process" -- the belief that a law can be ruled unconstitutional under the Fifth and 14th amendments so long as the court doesn't like the substance of the law. That's asinine, obviously. The due process provision of both amendments was designed to ensure that state and federal government could not remove life, liberty or property without a sufficient legal process,  not to broadly allow courts to strike down state definitions of conduct that justify removal of life, liberty and property. As Justice Clarence Thomas has written, "The Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause is not a 'secret repository of substantive guarantees against "unfairness."'"

Nonetheless, the notion that such a right to abortion is enshrined in America's moral fabric has taken hold among the intelligentsia. Thus, we now experience the odd spectacle of those on the political left declaring that the Constitution enshrines a right to abortion -- yet does not include a right to bear arms, a right to freedom of political speech, a right to retain property free of government seizure or a right to practice religion.

For much of the left, then, the term "constitutional right" has simply come to mean "thing I want." And that is incredibly dangerous, given that the power of the judiciary springs not from legislative capacity but from supposed interpretive power. Judges are not supposed to read things into the Constitution but to properly read the Constitution itself. The use of the judiciary as a club has led to a feeling of radical frustration among Americans; it has radically exacerbated our culture gap.

The legislative moves in Alabama and other states will open a much-needed debate about the role of the states, the role of legislatures and the role of government. All of that is good for the country. Those who insist, however, that the Supreme Court act as a mechanism for their political priorities are of far more danger to the country than that debate.

Ben Shapiro's Latest Book The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great is available on Amazon

The Case for Being Born

By Kevin D. Williamson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/case-for-being-born/

May 12, 2019


(ISTOCKPHOTO)

Why are pro-abortion activists such as Brian Sims so angry? Because they abhor the alternative.

Sims, a Democratic member of the Pennsylvania state legislature, filmed himself berating an old woman and a few children who were praying outside of an abortion clinic in Philadelphia — a city that, as the home town of that ghastly butcher Kermit Gosnell, knows something about the horror of abortion. Sims even went so far as to share photos of the children on social media with requests that his followers help him “dox” them, meaning to track down private information about them for the purpose of harassment.

Children, these were.

And that is what this is really all about.

The Left’s war on children is by no means restricted to the project of maximizing the scope of opportunity to surgically dismember them prior to birth, preferably at public expense. From radical feminists to radical environmentalists to academics and such mainstream figures such as Bill Nye, the word has come down: Children are not the future, but the future’s enemies.

An interesting fact about our political discourse is that Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich is still a part of it, commanding some attention in spite of his having been spectacularly wrong about every single major claim of his long public career. Erhlich has been delivering homilies on overpopulation since before I was born. Population Bomb, published in 1968, garnered a great deal of attention (and brisk sales!) for its claims that overpopulation made it inevitable that hundreds of millions of people would die of starvation in the 1970s. He was awfully sure of himself, as progressives so often are — “science says!” and all that — writing: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date, nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”

What happened, of course, was the opposite. Extreme poverty worldwide has been reduced by more than half in the past few decades; to the extent that famine exists at all in the world today, it exists almost exclusively as a political phenomenon, the product of failed states rather than failed crops.

But the cult of overpopulation takes no notice of the facts. Abortion advocates such as Representative Sims habitually present their case in Malthusian terms: He demanded of the elderly woman he was bullying whether she herself would provide for the material needs of the unwanted children who were being chopped to bits and stuffed into medical-waste containers inside the Planned Parenthood facility. Never mind, for the moment, the fact that there are far more American families looking to adopt children than there are abortions performed or children eligible to be adopted — the imbalance is so great that Americans go all over the world looking for children to adopt — and just consider the implicit argument there on its own merits, which is this: “If we think that there might be some inconvenience involved in seeing to the needs of these children, then it would be better to put them to death.”

But this line of argument does not end with the unwanted children who are killed by abortionists. Figures such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) have suggested that having children may be immoral, and many of her progressive allies have gone much further than that. Utilizing the familiar “Science says!” rhetorical formulation, Travis Rieder of the Berman Institute of Bioethics insisted that people should forgo having children because of the impact those children might have on climate change. “Science proves kids are bad for Earth,” NBC headlined the essay, “Morality suggests we stop having them.” Writing in the New York Times under the headline “Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?” Clemson philosophy professor Todd May concludes that the disappearance of Homo sapiens “might just be a good thing.” The cultivated folksiness of the expression adds a special horror to the display of moral illiteracy. (And ordinary illiteracy: He writes that “nature itself is hardly a Valhalla of peace and harmony,” apparently unaware of the martial character of Valhalla or that the heroes there spent their time preparing for the great climactic battle of Ragnarök.) Professor May asks:

How much suffering and death of nonhuman life would we be willing to countenance to save Shakespeare, our sciences and so forth? Unless we believe there is such a profound moral gap between the status of human and nonhuman animals, whatever reasonable answer we come up with will be well surpassed by the harm and suffering we inflict upon animals.

Unless . . .

Chelsea Follett, writing at Human Progress, briefly taxonomizes the partisans of “anti-natalism,” the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (“vehement,” they pronounce it; at least the end of the human race would spare us these dopey acronyms), etc. “Some anti-natalists are not content with promoting the voluntary reduction of birth rates,” she writes, “and would prefer to hurry the process along with government intervention. Various prominent environmentalists, from Johns Hopkins University bioethicist Travis Rieder to science popularizer and entertainer Bill Nye, support the introduction of special taxes or other state-imposed penalties for having ‘too many’ children. In 2015, Bowdoin College’s Sarah Conly published a book advocating a ‘one-child’ policy, like the one China abandoned. . . . Even after that policy’s collapse, she maintains it was ‘a good thing.’”

One of the fundamental differences in our public life is between those who see human beings as liabilities — as mouths to be fed and souls to be policed — and those of us who see human beings as assets. The economist Julian Simon ran the numbers and made the case for human beings as assets. His “Simon Abundance Index” measures the availability of resources relative to population and finds that with more people there are more resources. The Malthusians always forget to count the most dynamic and productive of all human resources: humanity.

One might be forgiven for seeing something providential in Representative Sims’s decision to attack a woman praying the Rosary, which points us toward a radically different understanding of childbirth and motherhood and fatherhood, one in which human beings participate in the creative work of the universe. It seems that none of Herod’s men ever thought to demand of Joseph or the Magi: “Are you going to pay for feeding that child? Huh? Huh?” It was understood. One need not be a Christian, or even religious, to grasp the moral philosophy illustrated there — or to be repulsed by the grotesque and vicious alternative to it personified by Representative Sims et al.

'Unplanned' Helps Pro-Lifers Tell the Truth about Abortion

By Abby Johnson and Lila Rose
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/unplanned-helps-pro-lifers-tell-the-truth-about-abortion/
April 1, 2019


Ashley Bratcher (left) as Abby Johnson in 'Unplanned'

Abortion may be one of the most hotly debated topics in America, but it’s a word that not many people can readily — and accurately — define. The abortion industry uses vague terms like “choice,” “autonomy,” “reproductive rights” or “reproductive health,” “essentially a miscarriage,” and “gently emptying the uterus” to cloud the conversation. In a discussion of abortion, we are told to consider only the mother and her choice. The other party is only a “product of conception” or an “undifferentiated mass of uterine matter.”

Equally vague is our language about the way abortions are performed, which we hardly ever hear described in medical terms. That is why the recently released film Unplanned is so important. Seeing the truth about abortion will change people’s minds on the procedure and society’s view of this heinous human-rights abuse. It did for us.

Abby Johnson

Unplanned tells the story of a former Planned Parenthood clinic director who comes face to face with the reality of abortion. That director was me. I worked for Planned Parenthood for eight years but, mid-career, I began to have misgivings. I saw that Planned Parenthood was willing to fire employees if they did not meet their abortion quotas and that there were monetary bonuses for directors who did meet the quotas. I saw how that lent itself to the pressuring and manipulation of pregnant women in our clinics.

I reached the breaking point on September 26, 2009, when a doctor asked me to help with an ultrasound-guided abortion. I had never seen one performed. I watched in horror as a 13-week-old baby fought for its life . . . and lost. An abortion doctor connected one end of tubing to a suction machine and inserted the other end into the pregnant woman lying in front of us. “Beam me up, Scotty,” the abortionist said, and the machine turned on. I saw the tiny baby began to squirm.

I remember it so clearly. The suction machine used in an “aspiration (D&C) abortion” has ten to 20 times the force of a household vacuum cleaner. For the briefest moment, the baby looked as if it were being wrung like a dishcloth, twirled and squeezed. And then it crumpled and began disappearing into the tubing before my eyes. The last thing I saw was the tiny, perfectly formed backbone sucked into the tube, and then it was gone. And the uterus was empty. Totally empty. After that, the abortionist used a sharp metal device called a curette to remove the baby’s remains from the mother’s uterus and completed the abortion.

I knew then that I had to expose the truth about Planned Parenthood and the violent death from which the group profits. My life would never be the same. I left Planned Parenthood and soon after started a group called And Then There Were None to provide counseling and clear action steps for those seeking to leave the abortion industry. Now I travel the country speaking the truth about Planned Parenthood and encouraging Americans to call for an end to government support of this unsavory organization, which has been implicated in potentially criminal behavior.

Lila Rose

Abby is not the only woman whose life was changed by witnessing the harsh reality of abortion. As a young girl, I saw a photograph of an aborted baby, only ten weeks old, in a pro-life book tucked away on my family’s bookshelf. That image stuck with me. I saw the image of tiny arms and legs, torn apart by a powerful suction abortion, and I remember thinking, “Is this real?”

I soon found that it was indeed real, and worse, that the baby pictured there was one of the millions killed in similar ways. I knew I had to do something to make sure as many people as possible knew the truth about abortion.

But that turned out to be difficult. The abortion industry has a vested interest in keeping the gory details about abortion under wraps. In an effort to document what goes on behind Planned Parenthood’s doors, I began working as an undercover investigative journalist, bringing the grim reality of the abortion industry to light by recording conversations with clinic workers. I actually earned a reputation among Planned Parenthood staff; I learned later that while still working as a clinic director, Abby Johnson had a poster of me up in her clinic, warning front-office staff to be on the lookout for me. (An “unplanned” friendship formed when she left and now we work together to end abortion.)

I was able to expose Planned Parenthood staff engaging in illegal and dangerous activity, including aiding and abetting child-sex traffickers, failing to report sexual abuse of underage girls, and lying to women about their preborn child’s development — all in order to perform abortions and procure the money that comes with them, at the expense of the women involved. My non-profit, Live Action, has exposed Planned Parenthood committing sex-selective abortions, accepting racially motivated donations that target black women and babies, and discussing how they’d leave babies born alive after abortions to die. I have seen inside these abortion facilities, and it changed my life to see how they treat women. That’s exactly what you’ll see in Unplanned — the stark reality of what happens behind closed doors. Even after all this, Planned Parenthood continues to receive our taxpayer dollars and claims to be a respectable organization.

Telling the Truth

Society’s best chance at ending the abuse of abortion and the abuse that surrounds abortion is to eradicate the idea that abortion is harmless. That takes education and a glimpse into how and where the abuse takes place. Live Action shared a medically accurate video detailing the most common abortion procedures and showed it to people in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. For many of the viewers who described themselves as “pro-choice,” the video was “eye-opening” and “distressing.” When people watch what happens as an abortionist tears a baby limb from limb during an abortion, what Abby Johnson and I saw at a younger age, viewers respond that abortion should not be legal, that these videos should be shown in educational settings, and that our country’s leaders should all be required to know the facts of abortion.

The truth is there, a preborn child is a human life, and abortion horrifically destroys that human life. Films like Unplanned and groups like And Then There Were None and Live Action make that truth available to millions. That is an essential service to the global conversation about abortion. How can we adequately discuss a topic about which we know nothing? Every American has a responsibility to be informed about abortion, as the discourse will surely continue. See the film. Watch the videos. And, knowing the truth, enter the conversation boldly.

Abby Johnson is the founder and director of And Then There Were None and author of Unplanned and The Walls are Talking. You can follow her on Twitter at @abbyjohnson. Lila Rose is the founder and president of Live Action. You can follow her on Twitter at @lilagracerose.

The Silent Scream and the Lies of Roe v Wade

By Alicia Colon
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/02/the_silent_scream_and_the_lies_of_roe_v_wade.html
February 15, 2019

On my first bus trip to the Right to Life March in DC, the driver put in the tape of the infamous film, The Silent Scream, narrated by Dr. Bernard Nathanson. Nathanson was one of the original co-founders of NARAL, (the first abortion advocate group), whose mind was changed about the issue after watching an ultrasound showing the struggle of a fetus fighting for its life.  What I found incredible about the film was a display of the many deadly instruments depicted that would be inserted into the woman’s body.



Ironically, laws here in New York forbade parents from having their children’s ears pierced without parental permission, but Planned Parenthood needed no such admonition about allowing those metal instruments to be inserted into minors requesting termination of inconvenient pregnancies.

According to a repentant Nathanson, Roe v. Wade was decided in the SCOTUS through a series of lies and deceitful testimony. Jane Roe, aka Norma McCorvey, admitted she lied to her attorneys about being gang-raped. One of her lawyers had recently had an abortion in Mexico but told McCorvey she did not know where she could obtain one. She also lied to the court that Ms. McCorvey had sought out many places to have it performed.  Bernard Nathanson admitted lying about the number of back ally abortion deaths, and said the figure of 5,000-10, 000 was completely fabricated. According to health records of 1972 over 130,000 women attempted self abortions; 39 died.

There were more lies to come from abortion advocates in the other case before the SCOTUS, Doe v. Bolton. This case extended the right to abortion from the first trimester to the point of delivery. According to Sandra Cano, “Doe,” she didn’t want an abortion at all. She had come to see her lawyer about a divorce. She never had an abortion nor sought one. Her ACLU lawyer saw an opportunity to advance the cause of abortion so, without telling her client, Ms. Cano, she proceeded to push this case all the way to the Supreme Court. Sandra Cano never knew this was even happening. The case came up with no evidence — unheard of at the Supreme Court. There was presented an affidavit that said that Sandra Cano asserted that she would “go crazy” if she had to have another baby.

The truth is that Sandra was pregnant and wanted her baby. She had already had two babies who were at that time in state care and she wanted them back. She loved babies and wanted to have them. Her lawyer lied and said that Sandra wanted to be sterilized. More lies. Both McCorvey and Cano subsequently became active pro-life spokespersons. They attempted to set the record straight and to dispel the lies surrounding Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. Lies, all lies and I wonder if these lawyers should have been disbarred for lying to their clients.
 In her second book, Won By Love, Norma McCorvey wrote about why she changed her stance on abortion:

“I was sitting in O.R.'s offices when I noticed a fetal development poster. The progression was so obvious, the eyes were so sweet. It hurt my heart, just looking at them. I ran outside and finally, it dawned on me. 'Norma', I said to myself, 'They're right'. I had worked with pregnant women for years. I had been through three pregnancies and deliveries myself. I should have known. Yet something in that poster made me lose my breath. I kept seeing the picture of that tiny, 10-week-old embryo, and I said to myself, that's a baby! It's as if blinders just fell off my eyes and I suddenly understood the truth—that's a baby!
I felt crushed under the truth of this realization. I had to face up to the awful reality. Abortion wasn't about 'products of conception'. It wasn't about 'missed periods'. It was about children being killed in their mother's wombs. All those years I was wrong. Signing that affidavit, I was wrong. Working in an abortion clinic, I was wrong. No more of this first trimester, second trimester, third trimester stuff. Abortion—at any point—was wrong. It was so clear. Painfully clear.”

Dr Nathanson, who had presided over 60,000 abortions as an OB/GYN and performed  over 5,000 himself including his own child by a former girlfriend, became increasing uneasy when he witnessed a live abortion on the newly developed ultrasound. It reminded me of an article I read in Esquire magazine.  It was a page long and illustrated with a picture of what appeared to be a procedure room. It was written by a doctor passing by this room where an abortion was taking place. Another doctor had inserted a saline solution into the womb and the passing doctor viewed with interest the needle protruding from the patient. He watched as the needle started moving back and forth and then watched it move violently as the fetus fought for its life as the killing solution filled the womb. The article was written not long after the Roe v. Wade decision, and the author of the article did not weigh in on the issue in depth other than to suggest that he was disturbed by the fetus's fight for life.

Up until this time, abortionists could argue that the fetus was just a clot of bloody cells, but the new technology showed the fetus as alive, breathing with a heartbeat and feeling pain. Besides Nathanson, McCorvey and Cano, many Planned Parenthood workers have become converts to the respect life movement. The public ignorance about what actually goes on in abortion clinics is coming to an end for several reasons.

• Underground videos of Planned Parenthood officials discussing the sale of aborted fetal parts has been confirmed by testimony of an ex procurement technician for biotech startup Stem Express.
•  Last year’s film, Gosnell: the trial of America’s biggest serial killer, largely suppressed in theatrical distribution by the left, is now on DVD and being widely distributed, is an eye-opener to the truth about the filthy and dangerous clinics available to minority women.
• The admission by Virginia Governor Ralph Northam that born alive aborted babies could be killed if parents and physician decided on this choice, shocked people more than the blackface picture in his yearbook.
•  Then, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo gleefully signing an abortion bill euphemistically called the Reproductive Health Act that allows abortion till birth, while still claiming his values are part of his Catholic faith since he was an altar boy, brought out calls for his excommunication.

I doubt that the Governor cares about being ostracized from a church he doesn’t even attend, but what might shake him up is when Democrat Catholics change their political registration to Independent or Republican. Perhaps it’s time that the clergy start preaching about how evil it is to kill babies just because they are inconvenient. Perhaps it’s time for Democrat voters to admit the party is not what it was before. Their party believes in infanticide and open borders that threaten our security.

It’s also time for no more lies about the evil of abortion still paid for by taxpayers.

No mas.


Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/02/the_silent_scream_and_the_lies_of_roe_v_wade.html#ixzz5fbJllfqS
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