By Hilary White
TORONTO, August 22, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – It appears that the campaigners for legalised abortion did their work well, back in the 1970’s when they invented a set of standard propaganda slogans to be disseminated through the media. For forty years, the same five or six grossly false assertions, familiar to pro-life people everywhere, have manipulated the discussion on abortion and all related issues.
These slogans are so solidly entrenched in the public mind that they are frequently presented as facts without any perceived need for documentation or proof.
The slogans were illustrated in a column yesterday in the Toronto Sun by Mindelle Jacobs. While pro-life people around the world are protesting the decision of Amnesty International to support abortion as a human right, Jacobs’ column supporting Amnesty’s decision reads like a vintage propaganda piece circa 1972.
Under the headline, “Do women matter to Catholics?” Jacobs writes, “I suspect that many good-hearted Catholics will quietly continue supporting Amnesty, realizing that the Catholic church’s [sic] unwavering condemnation of both birth control and abortion is causing profound misery to the world’s most impoverished families.”
The Church has indeed called on the world’s Catholics to boycott Amnesty, a move that has infuriated feminist abortion supporters and anti-Catholic secularists alike. But some women are applauding the Church’s stand.
The spokesman for the Silent No More Awareness Campaign, a women’s organisation not affiliated with the Catholic Church and whose members have all been harmed by abortion, had strong words refuting Jacobs’ assertions.
Georgette Forney, a co-founder of Silent No More, told LifeSiteNews.com, that to demand abortion for women in the third world is thinly disguised racism. “It’s motivated by a racist desire to wipe out third world populations. There’s nothing in these cultures that would allow the mothers to murder their children.”
“We’ve been to countries like Nigeria and Uganda and they tell us that abortion is a foreign concept in the developing world,” said Forney, whose daughter has recently returned from a visit to Zambia.
The assertion that abortion is better for women than childbirth, Forney said, is based on “a lot of misinformation and misguided agendas” and the real solution to poverty and hunger in the developing world is economic development, entrepreneurship and financial independence for families. “Let’s help mothers in the third world find ways of finding more food for their children; let’s not abort the mouth,” Forney said.
But Jacobs leaves no abortion cliché unturned, even bringing out the always unproven, exaggerated tragic imagery of “tens of thousands” of women dying from “unsafe” abortions. Jacobs writes that “tens of thousands of women die annually from botched abortions because they don’t have access to the safe, legal procedures women in the privileged West enjoy.” What she doesn’t mention is that many women still die or are maimed or psychologically traumatized by “safe, legal” abortions in the West.
This propaganda of large numbers of illegal abortion deaths was debunked, however, by the man who later admitted to having fabricated it. Bernard Nathanson, a former abortionist and a leading figure in the campaign to legalise abortion in the US, after his conversion to pro-life, said that such gross deceptions were deliberately created and disseminated through the media to trounce opposition to legalisation of abortion. The claims were made out of thin air.
“Repeating the big lie often enough convinces the public,” revealed Nathanson. “The number of women dying from illegal abortions was around 200-250 annually. The figure we constantly fed to the media was 10,000. These false figures took root in the consciousness of Americans, convincing many that we needed to crack the abortion law.”
Read related coverage at WorldNet Daily:
Ex-abortionists expose America’s greatest scandal
https://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=30216