(LifeSiteNews) – In June, CNN published what was billed as an exposé titled “Google earned $10 million by allowing misleading anti-abortion ads from ‘fake clinics,’ report says.” The referenced report was released by the so-called Center for Countering Digital Hate, a pro-abortion, pro-LGBT organization touting itself as a “human rights group” that exists for the purpose of pressuring authorities to censor speech they disapprove of. Like the Southern Poverty Law Center, they simply compile reports of people or organizations expressing views they oppose, press release their reports to friendly media, and then use the media coverage (by orgs like CNN) to call for government to take action.
The purpose of their Google “exposé” was to target crisis pregnancy centers offering women alternatives to abortion. As the CNN report noted: “Some searching for ‘abortion clinics near me’ on Google instead found results directing them toward so-called ‘crisis pregnancy centers’ that may try to talk abortion-seekers out of treatment and offer medically unproven abortion pill reversal techniques, according to the report.” Notice here that a) they consider women being talked out of abortion as an inherently bad thing and b) that they lie about abortion pill reversal techniques. Babies have been born after medical professionals successfully intervened partway through an abortion pill regimen – that is not in question.
This type of activism is particularly hypocritical in a moment where both activists and the progressive press are demanding to know if government and the pro-life movement are willing to step up and help women living in the “abortion deserts” where abortion is largely illegal or unavailable. It also ignores the fact that a majority of women eventually regret having abortions, and thus giving counselors an opportunity to persuade them to choose life and to give them the resources to facilitate that choice should be considered an objectively positive thing by everyone. As Bridget Ryder noted in The European Conservative this month, “when faced with the question, most women would rather not have aborted, and most experience feelings of sadness, guilt, and regret after the fact.”
That is according to a study titled “The Effects of Abortion Decision Rightness and Decision Type on Women’s Satisfaction and Mental Health” published in the journal Cureus in May, a publication of the scientific publishing company Springer Nature Group and conducted by David C. Reardon of the Elliot Institute in St Peters, Missouri; Katherine A. Rafferty of the University of Iowa at Ames; and Tessa Longbons of the Charlotte Lozier Institute in Arlington, Virginia. According to the study of 226 post-abortive women: “Sixty percent [of women] reported that they would have preferred to give birth of they had received more support from others or had more financial security.”
As Ryder noted:
Of the 226 women surveyed who had had abortions, 33% identified the abortion as wanted, 43% as accepted but inconsistent with their values and preferences, and 24% considered the abortion unwanted or coerced. Only women who had considered the abortion wanted and consistent with their values associated positive emotions and gains in mental health after their decision to abort. “All other groups attributed more negative emotions and mental health outcomes to their abortions,” researchers found.
Abortion activists frequently cite a study conduced by the pro-abortion Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health from 2015 which claimed that 99% of post-abortive women experience no regret; the authors of that study refused to share their data with Reardon and the other researchers for an independent analysis. That, for any researcher not motivated by their own ideological ends, is a red flag.
This new study underscores the desperate need for more crisis pregnancy centers and other pastoral resources, not less. The fact that abortion activists are willing to target existing centers to deny women access to their assistance when the majority of them, if they choose abortion, will likely later regret that choice is disgusting.
