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Pro-abortion protestors in Seattle on May 3, 2022. David Ryder / Getty Images

(LifeSiteNews) – Since the fall of Roe v. Wade on June 24, the mainstream press has offered up a nonstop stream of nightmare scenarios that they claim will result from pro-life laws in red states across America. As I noted in this space back in May, one of their favorite accusations is that women who suffer miscarriages will be charged with murder under the suspicion that the natural deaths of their pre-born children were actually a result of abortions. To validate this claim, stories from Latin American countries where abortion is illegal are posited as proof. 

Over the coming months and years, we are going to see a torrent of these stories put forward as fact by abortion activists and journalists (I repeat myself). To undermine support for pro-life laws, abortion activists seek out hard cases and complicated situations, and then brazenly lie to the public about what actually occurred. This is how abortion activists persuaded a majority of the Irish people to vote against the 8th Amendment—by insisting that the law had resulted in the death of Savita Halapannavar, an egregious lie that nonetheless had the desired effect. This is what abortion activists are doing in developing countries around the world as we speak. 

I want to urge pro-lifers to be cautious when abortion activists make shocking and at times horrifying claims. In many, if not most cases, they will be lying for the express purpose of decreasing support for protections for children in the womb. They are fundamentally untrustworthy. Those willing to kill babies in the womb will not hesitate to lie for the cause. 

READ: Reports of pregnant 10-year-old girl crossing state lines for an abortion raise questions

A recent case in point would be the tragic story of 21-year-old Lesly Ramirez in El Salvador, who was recently sentenced to fifty years in prison. According to the activists at the Citizen Group for the Decriminalization of Abortion, who defended her in court, Ramirez suffered a miscarriage at five months on June 17, 2020. Abortion activists around the world promoted the story as an example of the extreme cruelty of pro-life laws; pro-abortion protestors rallied in favor of her cause.  

But Lesly Ramirez was not sentenced to prison on a simple suspicion that the miscarriage had been an abortion, which is illegal in El Salvador. Ramirez was prosecuted and convicted of giving birth to a baby girl and then stabbing her in the neck six times. (Her attorneys plan to appeal her conviction).

The Daily Mail reported that at “least four women are imprisoned and another five have been charged in El Salvador in Cases similar to Ramirez’s, according to the Citizen Group for the Decriminalization of Abortion.” But as Salvadoran psychiatrist and former director general of the Dr. Robert Masferrer Institute of Forensic Medisine of El Salvador, Dr. José Miguel Fortín-Magaña Leiva has pointed out, this “is totally false.” 

“As former director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine and as a doctor, I can assure you that the foregoing is totally false,” he stated. He noted that although sentences are sometimes given out in abortion cases, “it can be for community service instead; and therefore there’s not a single case of women imprisoned for that reason.” The crimes being highlighted, he continued, are cases in which women “committed aggravated homicide” and “murdered their child, once it had been born by the natural process.” These crimes, he pointed out, were perpetrated “by suffocation, strangulation, striking with a rock, drowning, or simply abandonment.”  

READ: Study exposes how liberal media uses biased research to legitimize abortion

When we hear stories of women being denied treatment for miscarriage (a claim leveled at the pro-life regime in Malta recently); or women being jailed for miscarriage or even abortion; or women dying as a result of pro-life laws, we should research these claims carefully and respond with the facts.

The media loves to run with these stories to assist abortion activists in their relentless crusades to eliminate protections for pre-born children. These lies, as the saying going, get halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on—and we are about to be inundated by such stories, day in, day out. We should be prepared to answer.  

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Jonathon Van Maren is a public speaker, writer, and pro-life activist. His commentary has been translated into more than eight languages and published widely online as well as print newspapers such as the Jewish Independent, the National Post, the Hamilton Spectator and others. He has received an award for combating anti-Semitism in print from the Jewish organization B’nai Brith. His commentary has been featured on CTV Primetime, Global News, EWTN, and the CBC as well as dozens of radio stations and news outlets in Canada and the United States.

He speaks on a wide variety of cultural topics across North America at universities, high schools, churches, and other functions. Some of these topics include abortion, pornography, the Sexual Revolution, and euthanasia. Jonathon holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in history from Simon Fraser University, and is the communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.

Jonathon’s first book, The Culture War, was released in 2016.

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