Before Elizabeth Peelle and I confronted Gregg Cunningham (Mr. Anti-Choice)
on Hallerin Hill�s radio show in January 1998, Ellen Smith researched the
Internet for the talking points being used by abortion phobes on the radical
right. This material she found is voluminous. I review some of it here
because I think TFC members should be made aware of what our ideological
adversaries are disseminating.
My source is mainly "The Pro-Life Activist�s Encyclopedia", written by Brian Clowes and published by The American Life League.
It is truly the size of an encyclopedia, with 140 chapters and six appendices. Some 80% of this is about opposition to abortion, though there is also considerable venom devoted to homosexuality, euthanasia, pornog-raphy, and communism. If you want to see it, it may be accessed at http://www.all.org/plae/contents.htm.
My focus is on Chapter 16, "Pro-Abortion Slogans and How to Handle Them." Slogans seem to be a big concern of the author�s-- the chapter is over 40,000 words in length. The author says: "It is almost always impossible to discuss a life issue with a committed anti-life activist without having him resort to slogans. This is the essence of the anti-life bumper sticker mentality." It is evident, however, that he thinks that bits of rear-bumper advocacy (such as the anti-choice entries "Abortion stops a beating heart," "Save the baby humans," and "It�s not a choice, it�s a child") are important, because the chapter presents a long list of pro-choice slogans and tries to refute them one-by-one.
I think it is important to listen to what the anti-choice crowd says. We aren�t going to educate them, and they aren�t going to convert us, but there is a large body of abortion-neutral citizens out there who are exposed to both our story and that of the anti-choice zealots. If the opposition has a logical-sounding response to one of our talking points, we ought to quit using it. If their response is lame, our slogan is a winner.
"If you don�t believe in abortion, don�t have one - -- This pro-choice slogan perfectly expresses my libertarian mind set, saying "Do what you want yourself, but stay out of my business!"
The trouble is, the anti-choicers have a response which sounds logical enough to make that slogan less useful. To them, "We demand the freedom to choose!" promotes anarchy, not choice. They reply, "Clinic bombers could claim the Freedom to Choose bombing clinics. Rapists could claim the Freedom to Choose rape. Those who dislike homosexuals could claim the Freedom to Choose beating up sex perverts."
This response typifies the standard anti-choice ploy of demanding for the embryo all the protections that our society affords an adult or child. But, if you have to explain that, you may have lost your listener.
"If you can�t trust me with a choice, how can you trust me with a child?" I think that this pro-choice slogan resonates well at all sorts of levels. For one thing, it brings up the specter of forcing motherhood willy-nilly on women and girls who, through age or other circumstances, are incapable of dealing with it.
The encyclopedia bombs out on this one, claiming that it means, "If you won�t let me kill my children when I want to, I won�t be a good mother to the ones that I don�t kill!" The thoughtful question means nothing of the kind and I think that the general public would realize that the anti-choicers have no answer to it."s8-
"Pro-family, Pro-child, Pro-choice" The Encyclopedia devotes thousands of words to rebutting "Pro-family, Pro-child, Pro-choice," which the author clearly hates.
The main retort to "Pro-child" is to suggest that if pro-choice people were truly pro-child, we would have more children. The Encyclopedia says that "pro--lifes" have an average of 3.4 children, but "pro-aborts" only 1.3. (Apparently "pro-child" is to be defined as dedicated to overpopulation.)
Little is said about "pro-family," other than that to suggest that it is not "pro--family" to allow women to choose abortions without their husbands� per-mission.
Regarding "pro-choice," the Encyclopedia asks: "What does a child think when he knows that he exists in a pro--choice family only because he was wanted by others...not because he had any intrinsic value at all?" (We can respond that kids get their security from the warmth they feel from nurturing parents, not from a convoluted analysis of their parents� politics.)
And finally the Encyclopedia asks, "How can pro-choice also be pro-child, when pro-choice means the extermination of 1.6 million children per year?" This is, of course, based on their insistence that embryos are "children", a distortion which colors virtually everything they say.
"Abortion is safer than childbirth" Where facts are inconvenient, it appears that the anti-choicers have no compunction about lying.
The "s16-Encyclopedia"s0- calls "Abortion is safer than childbirth" a "pro-abortion slogan." I don�t think of this as a slogan because it is the truth. Childbirth has about nine times the mortality rate of abortion. However, both numbers are low, and safety is certainly not a basis for choosing to abort.
The "s16-Pro-Life Encyclopedia"s0- attempts to refute the inconvenient facts, claiming that abortion has serious health hazards. It says the mortality rate for childbirth is about 5.4 per 100,000 pregnancies (for once, this is close to the truth). The mortality rate for abortions is about 0.6 per 100,000, but the "s16-Encyclopedia"s0- argues that if you count abortion--caused deaths that occur well after the abortion, the death-from-abortion rate is 7.2 per 100,000.
The "s16-Encyclopedia "s0-doesn�t say what these alleged deaths are due to, but Gregg Cunningham clarified it on Hallerin Hill�s program: "Having an abortion greatly raises the probability of getting breast cancer, so abortion-caused deaths continue to occur long after the abortion itself."
Is there any scientific basis for such a claim? Dr. Bill Nelson kindly researched the extensive literature on the subject. Most of the work shows no correlation.
Especially impressive is a Danish paper: Melby, Wohlfahrt, et al., in the January 9, 1997 issue of the "s16-New England Journal of Medicine"s0-. Their test sample consisted of all Danish women born from April 1, 1935 through March 31, 1978, amounting to some 1.5 million women. In a country with universal health care, all breast cancers and all abortions are a matter of public record, so such a study as this is both accurate and easy.
The authors identified 10,246 women with breast cancer and 370,715 induced abortions among 280,965 women. After adjustment for known risk factors, induced abortions were not associated with an increased rate of breast cancer.
The same lack of effect was found in several other studies from around the world, and (according to the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League) the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, and other medical authorities have concluded that no link has been established between abortion and later development of breast cancer.
A Dutch study was the only one that showed a positive correlation between abortion and breast cancer. This study depended on interviews with 918 breast cancer patients vs. a group of controls. Each woman was asked her history regarding abortion.
"Case-control" studies such as this one have a higher chance for inaccurate results than "cohort" studies like the one in Denmark, because healthy women and women with cancer report their medical histories differently. When healthy women are asked personal questions about topics as sensitive as abortion, they tend not to be entirely truthful, but women being treated for cancer are strongly motivated to give their doctors very accurate information.
The Dutch study found an apparent link between abortion and breast cancer among women from Roman Catholic areas (where abortion is not socially accepted), but not from areas where abortion is more socially accepted.
Because it is not reasonable to assume that abortion leads to breast cancer in one area but not the other, it is logical to conclude that the apparent effect was due to selective recall, not differences in disease risk.
I�ve taken a substantial digression on this issue, but this is one slogan-related area where I believe our adversaries are more informed than we are, and take advantage of our lack of knowledge to push fake science."
"No mandatory motherhood" -- The "s16-Encyclopedia"s0- attacks this pro-choice slogan, which is indeed our basic position.
The anti-choice response pretends that mandatory motherhood would occur only if the woman were forcibly impregnated. "Prolife people demand a woman carry a child to term only after she becomes pregnant," they say, and "every pregnant woman in the United States has chosen to be a mother by engaging in intercourse."
Indeed, she has not. If a woman is a candidate for an abortion, desire for motherhood was probably not her objective on the occasion when she was impregnated."s8-
"Keep your laws off my body" or "Keep your rosaries off my ovaries" They have a hard time with these. Their main rebuttal is: "The right to privacy and control over one�s body does not in any way imply the right to destroy another person�s body." This is pretty much the same story as is found throughout the whole party line -- they are prematurely granting personhood to the early product of fertilization. In effect, they try to divert the argument from "When does human life"s0- begin?" to "When does "s16-life"s0- begin?"
No pro-choice person argues that the embryo or fetus isn�t alive -- indeed, obviously the ovum is alive even before fertilization. Instead, we tend to argue that the embryo or fetus isn�t yet a person. The author of the "s16-Encyclopedia"s0- attempts to answer that by saying that the fetus�s DNA is unmistakably human, so it must be a person. Well... a human lung cancer�s DNA is unmistakably human too. Should that prevent us from cutting it out?
Should we pay attention to this bilge?
Yes I think we should know what the anti-choice factions are saying
and be ready to answer it. You never know who�ll pick it up and quote it
to you.
Last Modified December 25, 1999.