Now that abortion “rights” have become a states’ issue and no longer a federal right you regularly hear rabid young women (mostly) fairly frothing at the mouth foretelling back-alley abortions and the butchering that entails. On the right, you will hear rabid young men (mostly) fairly frothing at the mouth that abortion is murder and women who get them so must be charged. Neither are right.
Here is a graph taken from Abuse of Discretion – The Inside Story of Roe V. Wade (80) a must read for anyone who wants to see how from the get-go the “right” to abortion was bamboozled into the Constitution by purposeful, pernicious, people. I apologize for the off-kilter bent of the image. I didn’t know how to correct it. You internet people will know how and where to find this same graph. But perhaps its bizarre bent may remind you of the facts.
Back-alley abortions and the death from mothers forced to get them was a major push behind legalizing abortion. You will see that the number of deaths were nowhere near what the rabid pro-abortionists ever claimed they were. Distilling the graph we find, “Of the 780 maternal deaths in 1972, 140 (or 18 percent) were attributed to ‘abortion deaths.’ But this included spontaneous miscarriages, too” (Italics original, ibid. 102)[i]. And this fact was known even by 1973. But it didn’t matter. The media continued to beat the drum of the horrors of back-alley butchery. Even now, dollars will get you doughnuts, that if you contact the media with this info, they will say something like, “Antiabortion groups claim to have statistics…” or, “According to information provided by antiabortion groups….” See if they say the same thing when it’s pro-abortion groups providing the information?
As for the other rabid group calling for women who get abortions to be charged with the murder that it is, it will be hard for most readers of this column to understand why not and why it only enflames the issue to make the call.
Notice that I didn’t’ say abortion was not murder. It is. However, “The uniform practice of virtually all states for the century proceeding Roe was to target the abortionist and to treat the woman as the second victim of abortion…” (Ibid., 84-85). Furthermore, “’Nationwide research has disclosed only two cases [one in 1911 and one in 1922] in which a woman has been charged with participating in her own abortion. …No American court has upheld the conviction of a woman for self-abortion or consenting to an abortion performed on her by another. And with the exception of Weible and Crissman [the two cases above], there is no record of any woman having been charged with either offense as a principal or as an accessory’” (Ibid. 381). Finally, it’s important to note that “it was abortionists, not prosecutors, who aimed to get women charged as accomplices. If an abortionist charged with the crime could get the woman treated as an accomplice, he could knock out the woman’s testimony (under criminal evidence law) and likely get the prosecution’s case thrown out” (Ibid. 113).
Marvin Olasky, either his Abortion Rites (1992) or The Story of Abortion in America: A Street-Level History, 1652-2022 (2022), is excellent here. Behind virtually every abortion there is a man driving the crime in a variety of ways victimizing the women or girl in some way. The pressure, the coercing, the fact that she can be left all alone and unprovided for if she keeps her baby, lead her to accept that murderous choice. In fact, depending on the circumstances, she will be manipulated into feeling she has no choice.
Of course, she always did have one, but the law has recognized she was under duress and coercion. Even in other crimes these are legally treated as significant in mitigating crimes even as crimes of passion have been so treated. Don’t misunderstand; before her Lord and Maker she must confess that she has committed murder. But historically the law has treated her becoming the mother of a dead child as sufficient enough consequence for her part in the crime.[ii]
[i] This is important for young women to know. If you have a miscarriage, it is recorded as an abortion in your medical records. You have no choice about this. After a miscarriage, on intake for the next pregnancy, the nurse said to my wife, “I see you’ve had 3 live births and one abortion.” I didn’t hear her say “spontaneous” before “abortion”, and I know my wife did not for she vehemently denied – as was the truth – ever having an abortion.
[ii]One other point, that I need to insert. The other cry you will hear from the rabid Pro-Abortion side is the mantra “abortion is safer than childbirth”. This claim dates to 1961 by an abortion advocate in a medical journal and made its way into court decisions (159). In the Roe v. Wade for example, the claim that abortions “appear to be” safer than childbirth on p. 149 became “now-established fact” on page 163 (165). Twenty-three years after Roe and Doe (a Georgia pro-abortion case), the Guidelines for Women’s Health Care, published by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, claimed “’that maternal deaths from pregnancy and birth are 25 times higher than maternal deaths during abortions, but without reference to any research or other sources’” (180). Why this is a bogus claim is that the CDC uses live births not pregnancies to determine the maternal death rate per 100,000. Since pregnancies is a larger number than live births and some pregnancies end in miscarriage or still birth, they inflate the number using live births (174). The assertion that abortion is safer than childbirth was challenged many times in the years before Roe using Soviet Bloc, Denmark, and Sweden data, all having legalized abortion long before America was considering it, that showed abortion mortality rates exceeded that from childbirth. The Justices ignored such facts (170-171).
