Getting Desparate at Guttmacher

May 5, 2006

Volume 8 / Number 18

Getting Desperate at Guttmacher

Dear Colleague:

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

Steven W. Mosher

President

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.

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