Prolife news
Now that I am back after a weeks holidays where I managed to get stranded on a tropical island, it is interesting to see signs of desperation on the pro-abortion side of things. Planned Parenthood and its shill, the Guttmacher Institute. It seems they have to resort to obviously dodgey statistical shennanigans in order to try and scare people into being pro-abortion.

PRI [The Population Research Institute] says the study “uses the common statistical chicanery of grossly exaggerating the number of abortions taking place in the United States before Roe. ‘In the 1950s and 1960s, it is estimated that 200,000 to 1.2 million women each year had illegal abortions in the United States, many of which were under unsafe conditions,’ it says. ‘According to another estimate, which extrapolated data from North Carolina, 699,000 illegal abortions occurred nationwide in 1955 and 829,000 illegal procedures were performed in 1967.’

However, Ramesh Ponnuru is quoted by PRI as responding, “The upper end of that estimate isn't remotely plausible. The number of reported abortions in 1974, when Roe had made them all legal, was 899,000. The number in 1975 was 1 million. Are we really supposed to believe that the number of abortions fell when abortion became legal? (And then immediately started to climb for a decade and a half?)”

Perhaps they want to return to the glory days where they could make up all sorts of statistics about the number of deaths from illegal abortions and were not called on it immediately. Ramesh has his full reply at the National Review and The Fact is.org has comments. From the National Review Article

The institute's take on abortion's effect on women's health is also open to question. Look at the graph on page 13 of the report. The title of the graph reads "Deaths from abortion declined dramatically after legalization." (They're referring to maternal deaths.) But the graph itself shows that those deaths were dropping fast before any state had legalized abortion. And if the graph had started in the 1940s, it would have been even clearer that antibiotics, not liberal abortion laws, caused that decline in death rates.

Yep. These guys at the AGI are pathetic.

In other abortion news, Amnesty International (UK) has approved pushing abortion as a human right. Joe Carter, on the other hand, is confident abortion will become a non-issue like slavery, as we are moving towards criminalising it again.

A century from now Americans will consider it absurd and ridiculous to think that the Constitution guarantees the right to abortion, much less embryo-destruction, euthanasia, and infanticide. Until that time comes, though, Ponnuru’s tightly argued, imminently persuasive book will remain essential reading for anyone concerned with the politics of bioethics.

- posted by Alan Grey @ Monday, May 08, 2006