“Access to abortion services is an essential part of women’s health!”

“Abortion is healthcare, not a crime!”

“You should not use your personal values as a way of interfering with women’s healthcare services.”

I’ve heard slogans like these used more times than I care to remember. These slogans are now being trotted out by the World Health Organisation as it is World Health Day. A number of pro-abortion rights bloggers have initiated a mini blogswarm over this issue. Labelling something “healthcare” gives the impression that by opposing it, your in some way opposed to good the good health of the people who seek access to it. Calling abortion a healthcare service automatically makes those who oppose abortion into opponents of healthcare. And who wants to be in that boat? But is it actually true?

Are abortion services a matter of healthcare provision?

The first thing to say is that even if abortion provides health benefits to the women who have them, this is not a sufficient reason to provide abortion services. After all, there are people whose health might be improved if they did not have school-aged children in their care, but this is not in itself an adequate reason to provide termination services to these people so that they can choose whether or not to remain parents of school aged children. Dressing such a grizzly scenario up in the language of healthcare would only make things more sinister and dystopian.

But what’s really interesting here is that the abortion rights lobby here in new Zealand has, for many years now, been well aware that abortion services are not, as a rule, about women’s health. Of all abortions carried out in New Zealand, the number that are actually carried out because of a danger to the mother are a minuscule fraction of the total. By contrast, over 95% of all abortions are carried out on the notoriously dubious grounds that the pregnancy (not future parenthood, but the pregnancy itself) poses a serious risk to the mother’s mental health. This is the ground that has seen abortions approved because the expectant mother fears getting pimples when she is pregnant, or is worried because she does not currently have enough seatbelts in her car for another baby car seat (as much as you might like to believe otherwise, there are not fictional examples).

In fact, for a number of years the Abortion Supervisor Committee has lobbied parliament to loosen abortion law in New Zealand precisely because all these abortions are carried out on the basis of a legal criteria that the other simply does not meet. What we are told by the ASC is that since the law is simply not being followed, this proves that the needs of women have changed and so the law needs to change with them.

So wait a second. If women are having abortions, but not because of any physical or medical risk posed by the pregnancy, and not because of any mental health risk posed by the pregnancy, then on what basis can abortion be considered a healthcare service? If the New Zealand abortion lobby has continually argued that abortion should be a matter of choice regardless of healthcare concerns, then why do they keep referring to abortion as healthcare? Someone’s trying to have their cake and eat it too. If abortion is a matter of health, then let’s see the abortion lobby in the country call to see abortion restricted to cases where health is genuinely at risk – which would reduce abortion numbers to less than 5% of what they are now.

Come on ALRANZ. Let’s see if you have the integrity. You’re going to have to make up your mind: Should abortion be an issue of healthcare, and restricted accordingly, or should it be a matter of personal choice that can be morally evaluated quite apart from the tar-baby of interfering with health issues? It’s not both.

Glenn Peoples

Other blogs on this issue:

• National Public Health Week & Abortion – Matt V. at The A Word
• If Abortion is Health Care, then Health Care is Dead – The Culture Vulture
• Abortion: Not Health Care – Insights from Eire – Prolife New Zealand
• World Health Day: Abortion is Not a Health Issue – Dr. Matthew Flannagan, PhD
• Madeleine is Right, Abortion isn’t a ‘Health’ Issue, It’s a Moral Issue – Dr. Jim West, ThD
• “Abortion – Not Healthcare” – Lydie Moore, Stand Up Girl
• Abortion: It’s a Health Issue AND a Crime – Jim McVeagh, MD
• On World Health Day tell the world, “Abortion is not health care” – JillStankek.com

Justin Bieber is now a blip on the radar when it comes to the abortion issue. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone he made some fairly casual and yet politically inflammatory comments, setting himself apart from the popular liberal celebrity milieu:

“I really don’t believe in abortion,” Bieber says. “It’s like killing a baby?” How about in cases of rape? “Um. Well, I think that’s really sad, but everything happens for a reason. I guess I haven’t been in that position, so I wouldn’t be able to judge that.”

You might think it’s stupid to care what a celebrity says about abortion. Sure, logically that’s true. Of course, it doesn’t stop the screaming hordes from lapping up Eddie Vedder’s pro-abort tirades. And that’s the point. For better or worse, fans dig what their idols say. And Justin Bieber’s fans are young teenage girls – and that’s why it matters what he says about abortion. This fact is not lost on the critics of Bieber’s comments:

What Justin Bieber must not understand is how this anti-choice statement, however nonchalant (and naive) it might have been, is going to travel at lightning speed around the Internet, and all his bazillion teen-aged girl fans are going to ponder it. I don’t have a problem with girls pondering this topic, of course. Please ponder it!

However, how do we talk to our teens about abortion after their favorite teen idol makes such a strong statement against it?

What’s interesting about this worry is that advocates of abortion rights never, as far as I know, raise the concern that pro-choice celebs like Vedder or Whoopi Goldberg might skew the view of young people grappling with the issue. I suspect that avenue of complaint is something of a one-way street.

Hat tip to Bryan Kemper for this one.

EDIT (Hat tip to Andy Moore for this update)

Apparently Rolling Stone originally toned down Bieber’s comments, weakening their pro-life stance. As Lifenews reports, the magazine has issued an updated version, claiming that certain parts of the young pop star’s sentences were removed due to an “editing error.” The version initially published suggested that Bieber thought that rape would count as a reason for abortion. But the corrected version reads: “Um. Well, I think that’s really sad, but everything happens for a reason. I don’t know how that would be a reason. I guess I haven’t been in that position, so I wouldn’t be able to judge that.” The bold section was omitted from the version first released.

Or take Bieber’s general opposition to abortion, as first quoted: ” ‘I really don’t believe in abortion,’ Bieber says. ‘It’s like killing a baby?’ ”

What Bieber actually said was much more direct: “I really don’t believe in abortion. I think it [an embryo] is a human. It’s like killing a baby.”

Accidentally edited or toned down? Beats me.

In my recent post showing how Live Action has exposed Planned Parenthood clinics abetting child prostitution, we observed people working for Live Action acting undercover. That is, they were acting as though they were people that they weren’t really. A man posed as a pimp when he wasn’t actually a pimp, and a woman posed as a prostitute when she wasn’t really a prostitute. They did this because had they announced up front that they represent Live Action and they wanted to know how staff members would respond if they were confronted with child prostitution, they would either have been told to leave, or they could rest assured that the answer given would reflect the desire to present Planned Parenthood in the best possible light, and therefore may not have been correct. Live Action therefore intentionally led Planned Parenthood staff members to believe things that were not true in order to get the truth that they would otherwise not have uncovered.

Working undercover in this way is of course nothing new. Police detectives work undercover posing as potential buyers of illegal drugs, spies work undercover in order to obtain sensitive information from enemies and so on. Less controversial still are examples like the “mystery shopper” who is paid to go into a store and pose as an everyday customer in order to assess the level of customer service, or football players who “fake” a pass, pretending that they are going to pass the ball one way when in reality they are not going to hold onto the ball and run for the other end of the field.

In spite of the relatively widely accepted practice of going undercover in all sorts of different ways, some have raised an objection to Live Actions’s conduct in doing what they have done. A spokesman for Planned Parenthood raised the objection first, attacking Live Action for “lying.” However, criticisms have also come from sources much closer to home for Live Action, the group spearheaded by pro-life spokesperson Lila Rose, who is a Catholic (this becomes relevant later when we look at her recent critics).
Read the rest of the entry »

The other day I met Jill Stanek in Dunedin as she was traveling through New Zealand on the Pro Life Tour. Jill has a pretty horrific story to tell – but she’s not the only one by any means who has seen this. Watch the clip below where she is interviewed by Bill O’Reilly and explains “live birth abortion,” a procedure where a living and often perfectly healthy but very premature baby is born so that it will die:

Becoming the most liberal senator in the USA, Barack Obama voted against the Born Alive Infant Protection Bill, which stipulated that all children born alive have the same constitutional rights as anyone else (while not denying that they should be afforded those rights earlier).

The reality is that I think when it comes down to the fundamental factors that make abortion wrong, an abortion at nine weeks has those factors no less than one of these live birth abortions at twenty weeks. This infanticide in the name of late term abortion is no less homicide than the killing of a foetus at nine weeks. But there’s still an obvious aggravating factor in these late term killings, and it’s this: Unbelievable callousness. People are willing, in scenarios where it is impossible to feign ignorance about the development of the child, where the child is present right in front of your eyes, where they hold the child, watch him or her move and struggle to breathe, where they wrap it in a blanket, where in some cases they even have the child baptised (!!!), deliberately kill that child, contend that no wrong is done, no unjust death has occurred, and that the cost is acceptable to pay the toll of reproductive freedom. Waving that banner, pursuing that holy cause – The idol is so important to some that they will, with full knowledge and understanding, literally sacrifice children to it.

This one has more relevance to my American readers than to others. Expose Planned Parenthood is an organisation that has the goal of exposing the conduct of the Government funded Planned Parenthood.

Make no mistake about it, Expose Planned Parenthood are opposed to liberal abortion laws. But the way they expose Planned Parenthood is not by pointing out that they facilitate killing unborn children. That’s not news. It’s the fact that Planned Parenthood in many cases conducts itself as though the ends justifies the means, and no ethical question is so serious that it can’t be ignored.

Here’s a recent example of Planned Parenthood effective aiding and abetting (as far as its employee knew) underage prostitution.

And here Lila Rose discusses the exposé on CNN.

And lastly, Planned Pimphood’s response:

Notice the main response: It’s not that what Live Action have recorded is misleading. it’s not that what they are saying is false. It’s not that they haven’t made a damning case against planned parenthood. The “main point,” Planned Parenthood says, is that Live Action hold “extreme” political views (that is, they oppose abortion). What an amazing defence, the good old ad hominem.

Admittedly this hasn’t been done in New Zealand. Back in the mid-late nineties an organisation I was involved in had a young woman go into a Family Planning Association clinic in Hamilton, New Zealand, seeking an abortion, making it very clear that she did not meet any of the legal criteria, and on multiple occasions FPA were prepared to flagrantly break the law. But this footage takes it to a new level.

EDIT: After I thought I was clever coming up with the title of this post, Bryan Kemper pointed out to me that he had already coined the phrase “planned pimphood.” This is NOT over, Bryan!

On the afternoon of Friday the 19th of November 2010 there was an explosion in Pike River coal mine, 50km north-east of Greymouth, on the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island. Initially I heard mixed reports about how many men were trapped inside. Two managed to crawl out, and eventually it became clear that there were twenty-nine still underground, about two and a half kilometres inside the mine. Nobody yet knows what actually triggered the explosion, but in deep coal mines there’s a lot of methane gas and coal dust, so any source of ignition is a real danger. Tests were done indicating that presence of toxic and flammable gas was still high, and there was a risk of further explosions, so no rescue team was able to be sent in for a number of days.

On Wednesday the 24th November, even as the time frame for when a rescue effort could be made was being discussed, there was a second, enormously larger explosion, certainly ruling out the possibility that these men could have survived. Twenty nine miners lost their lives. Thirteen children are now without a father.

Since then there has been a third blast, but this is more or less irrelevant as far as the fate of these men is concerned. This is a national tragedy and the thoughts and prayers of the nation – and certainly mine – are with the families of those involved.

When I say that it’s a national tragedy, I’m not just talking about the fact that it really is an awful loss for our nation (although of course it is), I’m also talking about the very public phenomenon of treating this like a tragedy. It made front pages everywhere. Outpourings of grief and support are coming from all quarters. The news broadcasts were saturated with the story – and still are. Parliament observed silence to mark the terrible event. It’s appropriate to mourn over this and to make it a tragedy that will be remembered.

I cannot begrudge those who mourn when tragedy strikes. They have a right to mourn. At the same time, it eats away at my respect for our status as a nation of humane people that as a nation we don’t bat an eyelid over the fact that on the day of the first explosion at Pike River, approximately forty-eight babies were killed. By the end of the day of the second explosion, that total had risen to about two hundred and eighty-eight. These were not accidents or workplace hazards. These were mothers who had made the choice to end the life of their unborn children rather than allow them to emerge.

Imagine a mine in New Zealand in which nearly fifty men entered every day, never to emerge alive again. Then imagine that they didn’t emerge because the mine owner made the choice that they wouldn’t. If you have a hard time trying to understand why pro-lifers make such a big deal over abortion, look at what our entire nation did when we lost twenty nine men. Last year abortion claimed over seventeen and a half thousand in New Zealand. The average was just over forty eight per day.

Yes we should mourn for those who are tragically lost – but we shouldn’t leave any out. Every single day is Pike River, and nobody mourns.

UPDATE: Shortly after posting this I became aware of Andy Moore’s excellent blog post on this same theme.

Some people – generally those who openly identify with what is nebulously called “the left,” think it’s an old chestnut that there’s a “liberal bias” in mainstream media. That claim, they might suppose, is just a case of whining conservatives who don’t like the media telling it like it is. Anyone can pontificate on generalities. I’d rather give you an example.

This time the credit goes to the Verum Serum blog (a fantastic blog I have recently discovered) for bringing this example to my attention. Remember George Tiller? He was an abortionist who carried out very late term abortions – literally killing babies at a point in their lives where other babies of the same age were being delivered in maternity wards. He was shot dead by a man who opposed what he was doing, and he became the darling of the media for a while. He served, in the minds of many, largely thanks to this coverage, as a reminder of the dangerous “right wing” ideology simmering beneath the surface of the pro-life movement, and his death was used as a justification for accusations against conservatives as being “neo Nazis,” some pro-choicers going as far as to advocate killing pro-lifers and their families in retribution to even things up a little.

It’s likely that you had heard of George Tiller. Now think fast – who is Jim Pouillon?

Unless you already had a special interest in the abortion issue (or you have read or heard comments about him from someone who has such an interest), I’m pretty certain that you don’t know who Jim Pouillon is. He was a pro life advocate who was shot dead for holding a sign. Apparently his message in defence of the unborn irritated somebody.

Mainstream media outlets Time, the LA Times, the New York Times and the Washington Post, combined, gave the death of George Tiller a total of sixty separate pieces of writing, using up 46,556 words. That’s the size of a master’s thesis. By contrast, these same media outlets printed twelve stories that mentioned the shooting of Jim Pouillon (Time included none at all, compared with at least nine stories on George Tiller’s shooting), using up 5,339 words. Comparing this murder to the murder of George Tiller In coverage space, that’s a ratio of about 1:8.7. These media outlets thought that it was almost nine times more important to make sure you knew about an abortionist being shot than to tell you about the murder of a pro-lifer. In the LA Times and Washington post the average was even worse, a 1:20 ratio.

This is to say nothing of the intensely negative stance taken towards Poullion (a stance bordering on depicting the man as more or less deserving what he got) with the overflowing admiration for Tiller. These stats alone say nothing about the way that such stories recalled past acts of violence against abortionists or abortion clinics, but are completely silent on any other acts of aggression towards pro lifers. When Mr Pouillon was shot dead in the street, no newspaper implied that it was time for pro choice advocates to “go into damage control mode.”

John’s comments from Verum Serum are so apt (bold and italtics are mine):

It’s impossible to look at the numbers, not to mention the tone of the coverage itself, and avoid the obvious conclusion that the press has a dog in this fight. The reporters writing these stories are nearly all pro-choice. So are the editors assigning the stories and writing the headlines. As a result, right-wing violence garners a lot more media coverage. It’s not a conspiracy, just confirmation bias in action.

And it extends far beyond this story. Did you know that a Crisis Pregnancy Center in Arizona was burned out just before Christmas? Probably not since not a single major media outlet covered the story. But if someone sets fire to an abortion clinic you can bet it will be national news.

Sadly, the MSM’s story selection eventually forms a kind of conventional wisdom, one that suggests “right-wing” is the natural prefix for “extremism.” In contrast, examples of left-wing violence are just a blip, a local crime story with no national implications worth mentioning if the story is mentioned at all.

A recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Otago has found that there exists a demonstrable connection between having an abortion and later suffering some sort of mental illness.

The report concluded: “This evidence raises important questions about the practice of justifying termination of pregnancy on the grounds that this procedure will reduce risks of mental health problems in women having unwanted pregnancy.

“Currently there is no evidence to support the assumptions underlying this practice, and the findings of the present study suggest that abortion may, in fact, increase mental health risks among those women who find seeking and obtaining an abortion a distressing experience.”

Read the full story here.

Over at the blog, “the Christ Seminar,” a common but plainly fallacious argument about the Bible and abortion has reared its head. At the time of writing this post, wordpress.com is having technical problems and I can’t post a comment in reply just now, so I’ll make the point here instead.

The claim made in the blog entry “The (lack of) biblical arguments again abortion” is, you guessed it, that the Bible says nothing that amounts to a condemnation of abortion – killing the unborn. In the post and the comments, the author makes two specific claims: 1) That the Bible does not directly mention killing the unborn and in doing so condemn the practice, and in reply to a commenter, the author adds, 2) While the Bible condemns homicide in general, it is silent on whether or not the unborn count as human beings, so we cannot say that they are included in the biblical prohibition on homicide.

To think that the biblical condemnation of homicide applies to those who are not yet born, the author says, is to drag in extra-biblical claims.

Firstly, I think the Bible actually does have something directly to say about the status of the unborn and the morality of killing them, but I’m actually going to address what is a fallacious argument from silence in the author’s blog and comments.The fallacious argument is that since the Bible does not expressly state that the unborn are included in the prohibition on homicide, we should conclude that they are not included in the biblical prohibition on homicide.

Here is the comment I was unable to post (but will try later, when it will hopefully be up and running again). It illustrates just how misguided the argument is:

Good point, Max

While we’re at it, let’s apply your reasoning to a similar situation: The killing of those between the ages of 8 years old and 8 1/2 years old.

The fact (or lack thereof ) that they are fully human is an extra-biblical fact. The Bible is silent about it. We cannot just beg the question and assume that the biblical prohibition on homicide applies to them without begging the question.

I was shocked to realise this given the dogmatic views of some people that such killing is “unbiblical” or “condemned by the Bible,” but like I you I follow an argument to its conclusion, like it or not. In spite of what child protection reactionists might think, The Bible says absolutely nothing specifically about it being wrong to kill homo sapiens between the ages of 8 and 8 1/2. Damn any extra-biblical claims to the contrary.

This may seem like an absurd way to interpret biblical texts. It is, of course. That’s because nobody should read the Bible while intentionally suppressing their own knowledge of the world. We know that nobody ceases to be human at eight years old, only to resume their humanity at eight and a half. Does the Bible need to say this?

The Bible “says nothing” about shooting people with automatic weapons. It does condemn murder, and we, like sensible people, are supposed to combine biblical instructions with our knowledge of the world, like so:

1. The Bible says we shouldn’t kill human beings (setting aside explicit biblical exceptions like executing murderers or defending oneself).
2. Our knowledge of the world includes the knowledge that if we shoot somebody with an automatic weapon, we will kill him.
3. Therefore, biblical instructions indicate that we should not shoot people with automatic weapons.

We would think a person to be just silly if he said that we were “begging the question” by just assuming that shooting people with automatic weapons is a species of what the Bible condemns.

Take another example: The Bible says in Luke 24:13 that some of Jesus’ friends, after Jesus had been crucified, were traveling from Jerusalem to Emmaus. But does the text say that they were traveling toward the West? No. So should we reject the claim that “the Bible says they were traveling West”? Is it begging the question to say that they were traveling West? Clearly not. The Bible says they were traveling from Jerusalem to Emmaus, and our knowledge of the world includes the knowledge that Emmaus is West of Jerusalem. It is quite proper, therefore, to say that the Bible indicates that these friends of Jesus were traveling toward the West.

Likewise, it is just silly to accuse people of begging the question when reasoning from the Bible when they say:

1. The Bible condemns killing human beings.
2. Our knowledge of the world includes the knowledge that unborn children, in any relevant sense, are human beings.
3. Therefore biblical instructions indicate that we should not kill unborn children.

If a person wishes to take issue with 2) and rebut it, that is fine. Go ahead and do that. This would change the conclusion about what biblical instructions do or do not require. But as it stands, the objection to the pro-life reading of the Bible is frankly ridiculous.

I just added this as my Facebook status, but it’s worth mentioning here too:  How is it that a black President can get a Nobel for no reason other than potential for future events, yet that same potential doesn’t even count when considering whether or not an unborn child should be allowed to continue LIVING?*

Whether anybody knew it or not, any potential that Obama has now, he also had before he was born. What’s ironic is that if Obama does not renounce this prize, and if he continues to hold his pro-choice stance on abortion, it suggests that he thinks potential counts for him but not for others.

* I mention the fact that Obama is black because I think that unfortunately, this was a big part of the reason for his popularity and why people pin so much hope to him for “change.”

Glenn Peoples