(LifeSiteNews) — The left-wing American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists (ACOG), considered one of the United States’ foremost authorities on women’s health, formally endorsed unlimited abortion-on-demand this week, the culmination of a long history of increasing pro-abortion bias.
“Abortion is safe. It improves and saves lives, and it must be available without restrictions, without limitations and without barriers – just as any other critical part of health care,” declares a joint letter published August 30 in The Washington Post, by ACOG interim chief executive Christopher Zahn and Society of Family Planning (SFP) interim director of advocacy & public affairs Jenni Villavicencio.
The subject of the piece was to respond to the pro-life arguments of a previous op-ed in the Post by Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway and Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America president Marjorie Dannenfelser, who urged Republicans to take more aggressive stances against abortion. Their “misleading information,” Zahn and Villavicencio claimed, “does nothing to advance compassionate, accurate discussions about abortion as an essential part of health care.”
The letter does not actually address specific claims made by Conway and Dannenfelser, but rather links to a pair of amicus briefs ACOG joined against Texas and Mississippi pro-life laws summarizing various pro-abortion claims, and an ACOG issue brief condemning crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), nonprofits that exist to provide alternatives to abortion.
Last year, the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) published a detailed fact-sheet directly addressing ACOG’s most common claims about abortion and abortion “misinformation,” including the procedure’s safety level, whether it is necessary to save mothers’ lives in medical emergencies, how many OB/GYNs participate in it, the need and impact of abortion regulations such as informed consent requirements, the risks of unsupervised chemical abortions, and abortion’s toll on mothers’ mental and emotional welfare.
ACOG “has actively opposed doctors who do not agree with the group’s radical positions, and it refuses to represent the diversity of professional views in the OB/GYN community as a whole,” AAPLOG said at the time, including “rarely survey[ing] their members about their position and opinions on abortion,” and that its own positions fall well outside of the mainstream, including “ignoring the wealth of evidence showing significant harms to women from abortion, such as adverse mental health outcomes and an increased risk of preterm birth in future pregnancies”; “refus[ing] to support ultrasounds prior to abortions”; and “oppos[ing] restrictions on partial-birth abortions.”
Nevertheless, Zahn and Villavicencio conclude with the declaration, “Abortion is safe. It improves and saves lives, and it must be available without restrictions, without limitations and without barriers – just as any other critical part of health care.”
The letter represents how far the ACOG has gone in substituting abortion ideology for women’s health. For years, the group has filed amicus briefs on behalf of pro-abortion causes such as forcing Christian businesses to subsidize abortifacient birth control, and maintained that doctors have a “duty” to provide abortion referrals regardless of their ethical objections.
In 1965, the ACOG redefined “conception,” the start of pregnancy, to refer not to the beginning of the child’s existence at fertilization but instead to the point where an already-conceived embryo is implanted in the uterus. The change, which helped obfuscate what exactly it is that abortifacient pills prevent, was made at the urging of Planned Parenthood “experts” who sought to make contraception more culturally palatable.