Useful Abortion Lies by Salvo

Can You Tell a Falsehood from an Agenda?

Recently, we blogged on the "Born That Way" lie for which science shows no evidence. Never mind that it should never have been accepted without proof in the first place. Should you accept everything you hear as true until proven otherwise?

Some "truths" are accepted without proof just because certain people are speaking them, while other things that really are true are denied by persistent lying? Sometimes even after a lie has been investigated closely and disproven, it keeps coming back to life, like Dracula every morning, because it supports someone's agenda. Even a boatload of wooden stakes can't lay it to rest.

One persistent lie is that thousands of women died every year from illegal abortions prior to Roe v. Wade. That was not only never proven, in fact, the statistics show the lie to be a whopper. But in 2019 Planned Parenthood trotted out the old pony and said again that "thousands of women a year died" before Roe v Wade.

But did you know that even the slightly liberal Washington Post has a fact checker, who blasted the claim as bogus?1 Here is just a taste of a longer and detailed assessment:

… [Christopher] Tietze and Sarah Lewit wrote in Scientific American magazine in 1969. "The total number of deaths from all causes among women of reproductive age in the U.S. is not more than about 50,000 per year. The National Center for Health Statistics listed 235 deaths from abortion in 1965. Total mortality from illegal abortions was undoubtedly larger than that figure, but in all likelihood it was under 1,000."

Tietze and Lewit (a married couple) were later honored by Planned Parenthood, so they were not influenced by any bias against abortion.

Under 1,000? By how much? Roe v Wade was decided in 1973; look at the deaths from illegal abortion the year before:

In 1972, the number of deaths in the United States from legal abortions was 24 and from illegal abortions 39, according to the CDC.

Stanley Henshaw, who from 1979 to 2013 researched abortion statistics at the Guttmacher Institute, which favors abortion rights, said he agreed with Tietze's assessment in 1969.

In the 1960s, the officially recorded number of deaths from illegal induced abortion was under 300 per year.

The Post's fact checker concluded about the "thousands" per year:

These numbers were debunked in 1969 — 50 years ago — by a statistician celebrated by Planned Parenthood. There's no reason to use them today.

So, what gives? Why are they being used? Because they work. Most people when they hear a Planned Parenthood leader or abortion advocate make the claim, they assume, well it must be true. Just like they assume at least 10 percent of the population is "gay" and that they were "born that way,"--because they've heard it said often enough.

I think this is one statement that needs no independent fact checker: Repetition does not establish a fact. The evidence for that is all around us. Forgetting this is not healthy for any society, nor for women in general. And "thousands died" is just one of many lies surrounding the cult of abortion. More on that later.