The Guttmacher Institute, the pro-abortion think tank founded by Planned Parenthood, has recently put out new abortion estimates for the first half of 2023 that have lit up the mainstream media…but a mountain has been made out of a molehill. This report — and the drastic overreaction to it — are yet another example of the abortion lobby attempting to minimize pro-life wins as many are deploying the estimates to pretend that pro-life laws have made no real impact in saving lives.  

But is this true? Charlotte Lozier Institute scholar Dr. Michael New says no. 

In a piece for the National Review, he breaks down the top three reasons why pro-lifers shouldn’t be discouraged by the media’s misleading take on these abortion estimates: 

1. The actual accuracy of the Guttmacher abortion estimates is seriously questionable.  

Since the United States has no national abortion reporting law (a serious flaw considering the highly dangerous risks abortion pose for women, not to mention the preborn), the Guttmacher Institute’s abortion estimates weren’t based on comprehensive, required surveys. Instead, samples of abortion facilities were utilized, and Dr. New points out that Guttmacher provided confidence intervals which had a great deal of potential variance, making the concluding data not very trustworthy.   

With such variation and lack of data, there’s a lot of shoulder shrugging instead of sure facts going on within these estimates.  

(To read more about why everyone — pro-life or not — should agree on a national abortion reporting law, click HERE to read another Students for Life of America blog.)   

2. We can’t just assume all the abortion increases in more pro-abortion states were due to abortion travel from women in more pro-life states.  

The abortion lobby appears to have forgotten the age-old wisdom of “what assuming does to you and me” as like fools (to use a nicer term) they infer that all abortion increases in pro-abortion states must be from women coming over from states with life-affirming laws. 

Instead, however, Dr. New points out three different reasons. 

Abortion increases have unfortunately been a national trend since 2017, and as some states have made it even easier Post-Roe to obtain abortions, the door is open for more to occur. Additionally, through serious neglect of women’s health and safety, multiple government agencies, including the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, have made Chemical Abortion Pills more accessible.  

(To learn more about the leniency of our government officials in the approval and pushing the Chemical Abortion Pills, click HERE to read a Fox News op-ed by SFLA President Kristan Hawkins entitled “Abortion is an Emergency, but Dangerous in a Different Way Than What Biden Claims.”)  

3. To the abortion lobby’s chagrin, there has been “plenty of reliable data” showing that post-Dobbs pro-life laws have saved many lives.  

It’s a sad thing to be on the wrong side of history which mourns over new lives being born — as CNN did just recently —yet that is exactly what we’ve seen with the abortion lobby as countless studies proving the efficiency of pro-life laws have come out. In his op-ed, Dr. New gives three such examples: studies by the #WeCount project, his own November 2022 Lozier Institute study, and most recently, a June 2023 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association.  

Clearly, the Pro-Life Generation needs to take the mainstream media’s interpretation of the abortion landscape with a grain of salt because it’s sadly oftentimes deception rather than information. Let’s not be fooled by a clever loser — lives are being saved by pro-life laws every day.  

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