VICTORIA, British Columbia, March 11, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) — In some cultural backwaters, like Victoria, the stagnant, mouldy trope about “back-alley” or “coat hanger” abortions still thrives. Last week a community centre art show caused a furore by at first rejecting a painting showing a woman bloody from a coat hanger abortion because it was too “edgy” for a family-oriented venue. But the city’s Left-Feminists roared and the mousy amateur curators squeaked compliantly.
The show was about protest and as such provided a kind of mind map of the West Coast Left: Americans are bad, according to several works. One shows Prime Minister Stephen Harper in front of a flag combining the American and Canadian flags. Aw guys, do we have to be so nuanced? I can’t quite figure out what that one means.
Another piece juxtaposes scenes of pristine nature and—wait for it—resource extraction. Again: if you’ve got something to say, why not say it?
So the coat hanger painting by Anne Hansen has certainly found a home in Cedar Hill in terms of unsubtlety. But Stephen Harper the secret American, and oil and mining are bad for trees—these are at least contemporary clichés. The coat hanger is an old cliché.
Worse, it is a lie and a well-known one. It originated with the claims of early abortion campaigners that 5,000 to 10,000 American women died annually in the 1960s and 1970s getting illegal abortions. One of those who helped put out these numbers, abortionist Bernard Nathanson, has long since fessed up in his 1977 book Confessions of an Ex-Abortionist. Those abortion activists simply made up the numbers.
Wrote Nathanson: “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 overriding concern was to get the laws [against abortion] eliminated, and anything within reason that had to be done was permissible.”
The same group of early crusaders claimed there were a million illegal abortions a year in the U.S. when, says Nathanson, they knew it was below 100,000. And the number of deaths was not 5,000 to 10,000, but around 250, though by the time abortion was legalized by the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, it was down to 39, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Why so low? Because as Planned Parenthood itself admitted in 1960, “90% of all illegal abortions are presently done by physicians.” Not back alleys, but back offices. Not coat hangers, but surgical instruments. Plenty of deaths, to be sure, but of babies, not mothers.
Nonetheless, the idea is still promoted by Planned Parenthood and other pro-abortion groups that legalizing abortion in Third World countries will reduce the mortality rate among women of child-bearing age by around 14 percent.
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There is no reliable basis for this claim. In 2010, when the World Health Organization was still promoting the number of annual maternal deaths worldwide at 535,000, with illegal abortions accounting for 78,000 of those, an independent research institute at the University of Washington released the results of its own years of study. It found 342,000 maternal deaths. Oops, with breathtaking speed WHO produced a new report and a new number: 358,000, though it didn’t bother revising the abortion count downward to match or explaining the sudden plunge.
The lead research at the University of Washington, Dr. Charles Murray, told me at the time, “With maternal mortality, we actually have more information than many other major causes of death. We don’t, unfortunately, have information in all cases about the specifics of the maternal death.” Nonetheless, Murray did have an explanation for the reduction in maternal mortality, which I reported at the time in the National Catholic Register this way: “[Murray] attributes the decline to a matching fall in the fertility rate, improved health care, rising incomes (that translate into better access to health care, better nutrition and better education) and, possibly, better trained birth attendants.” No mention of “reforms” providing more access to abortion, you will note.
The contention that legalizing abortion lowers maternal mortality rates is further refuted by studies conducted by a Chilean-American team in 2012 that followed Chile’s mortality rate through restrictive, then more restrictive, then less restrictive abortion regimes. The level of restriction proved irrelevant: what mattered was education levels among women, and access to hospitals and maternity services.
The same team, led by Dr. Elard Koch, has just come out with a new study, comparing 14 Mexican states with constitutional protection for the unborn with 18 Mexican states with varying degrees of permissiveness, over 10 years. It found that the more restrictive states had a maternal mortality rate 23 percent lower, and a post-abortive mortality rate “up to” 47 percent lower than the permissive states. The authors of the study did not claim restrictions reduced the mortality rates, merely that the legality or illegality of abortion was irrelevant.
Given how thoroughly debunked the whole illegal abortion death claim is, and given that there hasn’t been a coat hanger abortion in Canada since the Supreme Court decriminalized abortion in 1988, wouldn’t an edgier picture have been one that depicted the million-plus unborn babies killed in their mothers’ wombs since then? Just sayin’.