By Terry Vanderheyden
WACO, Texas, March 11, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A pro-life flag display stolen from the campus of the country’s largest Baptist university was replaced with a hand-written sign claiming that “Abortion saves 7,000 adult lives every day.” The figureÂpresumably referred to the number of women they claim would die from “back alley” abortions and pregnancy complications if abortion were once again prohibited.
Baylor University’s pro-life student organization, Bears for Life, erected the display of 3,500 pink and blue flags Monday along with signs reading, “In loving memory of 3,500 children aborted daily in the United States.” The flags were stolen sometime Tuesday evening, according to associate professor of economics John Pisciotta, who is also faculty sponsor of Bears for Life.
“The flags were pink and blue to say they were a little boy and little girl – it was very powerful yet respectful,” Dr. Pisciotta said. “It doesn’t surprise me that there are people who are upset by raising the topic of abortion.”
Baylor is the largest Baptist University in America. “We’ve had over 40-million abortions, and this has influenced the lives of a lot of people,” Dr. Pisciotta added, as reported by local news sources. “I just think for a university supposedly committed to free speech that this is pretty poor behavior on the part of some of our students.”
The 7,000 deaths figure used by the pro-abortion activists who removed the flags and signs reflects typicalÂabortion activist tactics.
Raising the spectre of huge numbers of women dying from “back-street abortions” has been a key pro-abortion tactic in scaring legislators into legalizing abortion in countries around the world. While it is difficult to obtain accurate statistics on the number of women dying from this, it is known that pro-abortion figures are usually grossly exaggerated.
Pro-life convert Dr Bernard Nathanson, co-founder of the National Abortion Rights Action League (N.A.R.A.L.), has admitted that abortion advocates consistently lied about maternal deaths from illegal U.S. abortions.
In his book Aborting America, Nathanson wrote: “In N.A.R.A.L., we generally emphasized the drama of the individual case, not the mass statistics, but when we spoke of the latter it was always “5,000 to 10,000 deaths a year.” I confess that I knew the figures were totally false, and I suppose the others did too if they stopped to think of it. But in the “morality” of our revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics?
The former chief statistician for Planned Parenthood and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Dr. Christopher Tietze,Âwrote in the 1969 edition of Scientific American, at a time when abortion was still prohibited in the U.S., “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.”
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