Learn the Facts About Abortion

The numbers are frightening.

Every fourth baby conceived in the United States is deliberately destroyed in our nation’s busy abortion businesses. Every day 3,500 developing babies are killed! Almost 1.5 million are killed every year! Our nation has the highest abortion rate in the Western world, and half of the American mothers seeking abortions have already aborted at least one child before. 

In a recent Harris Poll widely reported by the media, 52% of Americans said they support Roe v. Wade, which was described by the poll as “the U.S. Supreme Court decision making abortions up to three months of pregnancy legal.”

Of course, the question was intentionally misleading, as were the news media’s reports of the poll. If the poll had been honestly worded, the majority would have opposed most abortions, but the deliberately deceptive question described Roe as the decision “making abortions up to three months of pregnancy legal.”

In the United States abortion is legal up to — and, with partial-birth abortion, past — the moment of birth. In the Harris Poll in which the majority claimed to support Roe v. Wade, 71% said abortion should not be legal in the second three months of pregnancy, and 86% said that abortion should not be legal in the last three months of pregnancy.

A majority of Americans claim that they do not personally support abortion, but they do support Roe because abortion should be legal “during the first three months” and “for serious reasons.” But a majority of Americans are unaware that Roe does not limit abortion to “serious reasons.”

Although a few limits were imposed by Roe, on the same day those limits were stripped away by Roe’s companion decision Doe v. Bolton, which said that abortion is legal up to the moment of natural birth for a variety of reason, serious and frivolous (such as “a woman’s feeling of well-being”).

Americans who do not support late-term abortions for reasons of convenience are deliberately misled about the law. A survey conducted by Princeton University for the Center for Gender Equality found that only 30% support abortion on demand, and even that number is questionable. In cases of rape, incest or to save life of the mother, only 34% support abortion. According to Planned Parenthood’s Alan Guttmacher Institute, “rape” or “incest” are listed as the reason for fewer than 1% of abortions. “Mothers’ health” is used to justify fewer than 3% of abortions, and the “health problems” are rarely identified and never questioned.

So what reasons are used to justify the remaining 95%? Most often mentioned are that the mother “is unready for a baby,” she “can’t afford a baby,” or she “thinks a baby could change her life.” Another 20% “are not mature enough” or “have all the children they want.”

Even these figures would change with further education. In a recent Zogby Poll, 61% of Americans said abortion should not be permitted after the fetal heart begins to beat. Obviously, few were aware that the fetal heart begins to beat at the end of the third week of pregnancy. That is before many women begin to suspect they might be pregnant. (The beating heart is the first thing that can be seen on a sonogram.)   

The news media’s report of the poll figures was deliberately disingenuous, not only contrary to what Americans really believe but contrary to fact. Americans are repeatedly assured that abortion is “rare” and “safe,” but almost 50 million abortions since Roe v. Wade is not “rare.” And medical statistics prove that abortion is never “safe.”

In 1986, a National Institutes of Health study of 40,000 women (half of whom had had an abortion and half of whom had carried their first baby to term) found that mothers who aborted their first baby later lost babies during pregnancy or birth twice as often as mothers who had carried their first babies to birth. Mothers who aborted their first baby later experienced an 85% increase in miscarriages, a 67% increase in premature births, a 47% increase in labor complications, and an 85% increase in delivery complications as compared to mothers who carried their first baby to term.  

Rare? No.

Safe? No.

Legal? Yes, abortion is and will remain legal until the news media tells Americans the truth.

Joseph Collison is the director

of the pro-life office for the

Diocese of Norwich, Connecticut.