Getting past the myths to the facts can be all but impossible whenever a pro-lifer discusses with a pro-abortionist the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision in 2022 that overruled 1973’s Roe v. Wade.
The most pervasive abortion myth is that Dobbs outlawed the procedure that has been used to terminate—i.e. kill—more than 60 million unborn boys and girls since Roe.
In fact, where Roe effectively nationalized the abortion issue, Dobbs restored the principle of federalism by ruling the legislatures in each of the 50 states should decide for their particular jurisdictions.
The map of where abortion is allowed and when has definitely changed since Dobbs, with 19 states having acted to either ban or restrict the procedure. That nearly half of the states have done so is clear evidence that, Roe notwithstanding, there was no national consensus on the abortion issue prior to Dobbs.
The pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute expects a total of at least 24 states will have restricted or outlawed the procedure entirely in the near future. It is impossible now to peg the total precisely because there are ongoing legal challenges to several of the new state measures.
Kansas provides an important snapshot of federalism and republican democracy in action with the recent decisions of its governor and state legislators. Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, has thrice vetoed restrictive abortion laws.
But the Republican supermajorities in both the Kansas House of Representatives and Senate voted to override Kelly’s veto to enact the “Born-Alive Infants Protection Act,” which, according to Liberty Counsel:
Requires emergency care by any “health care provider present” for infants born alive after a failed abortion. The bill requires medical providers to treat babies born alive after a failed abortion with the same level of care as they would any other newborn of the same gestational age.
Legislators overwhelmingly overrode the governor’s veto in the House 87 – 37 and in the Senate 31 – 9 surpassing the two-thirds majority needed. The “Born-Alive” law will go into effect on July 1.
The Kansas action spotlights one of the enduring myths propounded by pro-abortionists; namely, that so few babies survive an abortion procedure as to be an irrelevant consideration in the debate.
But Liberty Counsel points to data that shows there are many babies that somehow, miraculously remain alive after the abortionist has completed the grisly work:
Critics of the law at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists claim the idea of newborn neglect is not something that really exists in modern medicine and is a “fabricated political concept.”
However, infants surviving abortions against all odds are not a “fabrication.” Even though most states do not keep track of the number of babies who survive abortions, data from just seven states between 2020 and 2022 found reports of 34 babies who were born alive in botched abortions.
The Center for Disease Control (CDC) reports that at least 143 babies were born alive after an attempted abortion between 2003 and 2014—a number derived from only eight states that reported this information.
To appreciate the incredible reality of baby boys and girls who survive an abortion procedure, consider this video from Focus on the Family:
Liberty Counsel also corrects another pro-abortionist myth: that the procedure represents a tiny sliver of all the “services” performed by Planned Parenthood (PP), the nation’s largest abortion provider.
Note that PP was originally known as the American Birth Control League at its founding in 1916 by the eugenicist Margaret Sanger in Brooklyn, New York. Eugenics, the long-discredited “science” of selective breeding of favored human characteristics, was popular in the early 20th century and was most prominently applied by Hitler and Nazi Germany to Jews and other “sub-humans” during the decade prior to World War II.
The Dobbs decision was delivered on June 24, 2022. Despite the decision, PP reported that it provided 374,155 abortions in 2021-22, the “reproductive rights” group’s second-highest annual total ever.
In the recently released 2021-2022 fiscal year annual report titled, “Relentless,” Planned Parenthood refers to abortions as “health services.” Planned Parenthood said it performed 374,155 abortions last year. That means Planned Parenthood killed 1,025 babies in abortions every single day even though the abortion giant claims its main focus is merely “women’s health care.” In other words, Planned Parenthood kills one baby in an abortion every 84 seconds.
To hear PP tell it, providing abortions represents a mere four percent of all the health services it provides to women. That four percent figure is the result of dividing the abortion total by the total of all services provided, 9.1 million. As Liberty Counsel explains:
This means when a woman visits a Planned Parenthood facility to obtain an abortion, she is also given a pregnancy test, an STI test, a cancer screening and contraception. Therefore, the abortion procedure would be considered 20 percent of the “services” she received.
This is why the group lists its annual “services” as much higher than the number of patients it saw last year (2.13 million). Using this deceptive formula, the report manipulates the data to make it appear as if abortion is a tiny percent of its “services,” though a much higher percentage of actual patients who visit Planned Parenthood facilities are there, first and foremost, to obtain an abortion.
In other words, that four percent datapoint is an artful illustration of the maxim that there are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.
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