June 16, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – An international group of physicians has said that the nearly universal acceptance of abortion in obstetric medicine has created a professional atmosphere of censorship, and ultimately inaccuracy, in the peer-review medical literature.
At their inaugural symposium held in Washington DC in January 2010, members of the International Working Group for Global Women’s Health said they want to challenge the “abortion first” assumption that drives most obstetric practice around the world. Physicians from Peru, Chile, the US and Britain presented papers on the harm done to the integrity of the medical world by the abortion ideologies.
The ongoing “censorship of the mounting evidence of the harms of abortion on women leads to a certain suspicious monotony, deadly to scientific inquiry,” the group said in their initial report.
In an extensive report, published in the spring edition of the journal Linacre Quarterly, Dr. Donna J. Harrison, director of Research and Public Policy at American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said that although the most important health issue for obstetricians is “the health of the mother and child from conception through parturition and lactation” the medical literature is “fraught” with pro-abortion “assumptions.”
“The current prevailing view is that somehow abortion is an outcome equivalent to or superior to live birth,” Dr. Harrison said in an address.
“So strongly is the ‘abortion is better than live birth’ opinion held, that many leading peer-reviewed journals dismiss evidence-based medicine articles which challenge pro-abortion ideology.”
“The ‘abortion first’ approach to maternal health hijacks critically important financial and medical resources, diverting these resources from the interventions which would do the most to decrease maternal mortality.”
Most international medical organizations such as the World Health Organization, International Planned Parenthood Federation and the UN Population Fund, vigorously maintain that “safe abortion” – that is, legalized abortion – is an absolute necessity for reducing maternal mortality, particularly in developing countries.
But the causes of maternal mortality in childbirth are well known, the report said: hemorrhage, hypertension, infection, and obstructed labour. These are countered not by killing the child before birth, but by “skilled birth attendants,” adequate medical facilities near the mother’s residence and adequate access to drugs and antibiotics.
Yet ongoing efforts to force countries to legalize and expand abortion are draining the resources necessary to provide these, especially in developing countries where foreign aid is crucial to provision of medical services.
At the Washington symposium, Monique Chireau, M.D., M.P.H. Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology Duke University School of Medicine, said that five factors are at work in the deliberate campaign in the first world to globalize abortion:
1) Developed nations are expanding abortion abroad “through linkage of funding to women’s health agendas promoting abortion”. 2) Activism in research legislation has pressured developing countries to legalize abortion. 3) Around the world rapid shifts in political power have resulted in instability of cultural mores, “leaving nations vulnerable to population control ideologies.”
Another factor is the manipulation of language within medical research literature. Dr. Chireau said that the use of “imprecise and quasi-legal definitions of critically important terms,” such as “abortion,” “unsafe abortion,” “spontaneous abortion,” and “induced abortion,” has allowed for “ambiguous and contradictory conclusions in research and statistics.”
The fifth factor is the rapid expansion around the world of “technological changes,” such as increased portability of abortion machines and the introduction of abortifacient drugs, commonly called “medical abortion”.
The acceptance of the abortion ideology has resulted, she said, in the proliferation of “skewed” and “deeply flawed” data, misleading definitions, and manipulated results. All of this has affected public perceptions and therefore policy and funding decisions.
If the ultimate goal is the safeguarding of women’s health, Dr. Chireau continued, it is necessary for the scientific community to “refute inaccurate data or inappropriate use of statistics and to publish high-quality research”.