Abortion Myths
Learn
- Human Development
- Abortion
- The Abortion Industry
- The Abortion Industry Overview
- Planned Parenthood Facts
- Planned Parenthood Racism
- Roe v. Wade
- Legal Analysis of Doe v. Bolton
- Women Killed by Legal Abortion
- Today’s Abortionists
- Why We Don’t Need Planned Parenthood
- A “Right” to Abortion?
- David Daleiden & the Undercover Videos
- Evidence of Planned Parenthood Targeting Minorities
- How to Defend Your Stance
- Why Should You Care?
- The Basics: Talking About Abortion
- Abortion & Social Justice
- What About Rape?
- Life & Health of the Mother
- “My Body, My Choice”
- For Pro-Life Men
- Fetal Abnormality
- Right to Refuse
- Animal Rights
- Abortion and Overpopulation
- You’re Not Really “Pro-Life” If…
- Sample Questions & Answers
- Videos & Further Reading
- Birth Control
- Abortion Alternatives
- Other Life Issues
- Term Paper Topics
Planned Parenthood is an extremely wealthy and well-connected propaganda machine and they are the primary message-drivers for the abortion industry. Because they earn their revenue by destroying preborn human beings, they invest a lot of time and money into muddying facts about human development, the reality of abortion, and their business model and operations. Likely every pro-life advocate has encountered these abortion myths. Learning how to debunk them can change hearts and minds about abortion.
Abortion Myths
In every annual report Planned Parenthood releases, they make sure to include a cute little graph that proves their favorite fib - abortion is only 3% of what we do. This myth is easily disproven. Their annual report does so itself. In essence, Planned Parenthood hides their abortion count by lumping it in with other services.
Watch a video here that explains the 3% myth.
If a pregnant woman visits Planned Parenthood for an abortion, she is not simply sold an abortion. She is given a pregnancy test. She receives "counseling," an ultrasound, an abortion, and maybe even birth control on her way out. Planned Parenthood reports that about 14% of their annual offerings are "Other Services," whatever that means. By the time all is said and done, the abortion was only a small percentage of what she got from her visit.
In reality, about 96% of Planned Parenthood’s “services” to pregnant women are abortion. For the past decade, abortions have increased, other “services” have decreased, all while they continue to receive more money from taxpayers.
Planned Parenthood committed 354,871 abortions in 2019-2020. And that’s just the number they felt like reporting, which is completely at their discretion, given that there is no national abortion reporting law. That’s…
- 354,871 per year
- 6,806 per week
- 972 per day
- 41 per hour
- 1 baby killed every 89 seconds
Abortion data is slow to be reported, but Guttmacher Institute (Planned Parenthood's research arm) says that there were 862,320 total abortions committed in America 2017. Planned Parenthood reported they committed 345,672 in 2018. At that count, Planned Parenthood has roughly 40% of America's total market share on abortion.
So long as the Hyde Amendment remains intact, tax dollars are not permitted to directly fund abortion. Planned Parenthood, which receives over $600 million annually from the federal government, has a simple way around that pesky rule.
Watch a video here that explains how Planned Parenthood uses tax money for abortion anyway.
Planned Parenthood has a tight relationship with the financial concept of "fungibility." The formal definition of this term is "of the nature that one part or quantity may be replaced by another equal part or quantity." It means that receiving a boatload of tax money frees Planned Parenthood up to use their other money for abortion.
To illustrate the concept with an example, consider a teenager who has a part-time job and gets an allowance from her parents. Thanks to the job, she has $100 in her bank account, the balance of which must not dip below that amount. The teen has her eye on a pricey new outfit and her $100 allowance will be handed to her soon, but her parents instruct that the allowance cannot be used on the outfit and must go towards more practical purposes. In adherence to their wishes, their daughter thus spends her $100 job earnings on the outfit instead and deposits the $100 allowance in the bank. In other words, the allowance effectively freed her up to use her other money. She didn't technically break the rules... but if not for the allowance, she wouldn't have been able to buy the outfit.
In Planned Parenthood's case, the relationship is clear - the more of our tax money they receive, the more abortions they commit.
It is the 21st century and this is pure farce. Science has been settled that the biological life of a mammal begins the moment the ovum and sperm of its parents unite. At that moment, a completely new, unique, self-directed organism is created which only needs time and nourishment to continue developing to its next stage. Abortion myths thrive on muddying facts like this.
This is no different than a toddler who only needs time and nourishment to develop to her next stage: adolescent. And no different than an adolescent who only needs time and nourishment to develop to her next stage: adult. And so on.
So if 96% of biologists are correct and the life cycle of a human being begins at fertilization, the challenge moves away from biology and towards philosophy. Gestating humans are alive... but are they valuable like born humans are? If you answer yes, welcome aboard.
This one is a trick question. There is no national abortion reporting law. We will never know exactly how many babies have been aborted since abortion was legalized in 1973, just as we do not know the actual number aborted per year for this reason.
The CDC itself admits on its 2018 Abortion Surveillance Report:
- This report summarizes data on legal induced abortions for 2018 that were provided voluntarily to CDC by the central health agencies of 49 reporting areas (47 states, the District of Columbia, and New York City, excluding California, Maryland, and New Hampshire).
Abortion data is provided voluntarily and excludes three states, including the largest pro-abortion state in America. In order for anyone to analyze how many lives have been lost, we are at the mercy of the entities doing the killing for data. And they are frequently caught committing reporting infractions.
Abortion is a notoriously unregulated industry. Regular (non-abortion) ambulatory surgical centers (ASCs) are overseen and inspected by state medical boards or health departments.
According to ACFAS:
Ambulatory surgical centers (ASC) are subject to an interlocking series of state, federal and voluntary regulation and accreditation standards. They are designed to ensure that patients receive safe, quality services.
- State licensure: In 46 states, ASCs must be licensed under state law. Each state sets forth its own licensure requirements, but typically they require initial and ongoing inspection and reporting.
- Third party accreditation required in 28 states: In 28 of the 46 states, accreditation by a third party is required as part of licensure. The three accreditation bodies recognized are Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care (AAAHC), American Association for Accreditation of Ambulatory Surgery Facilities (AAAASF), and JCAHO.
- State certificate of need laws: 25 states have “certificate of need” laws that apply to ambulatory surgical centers. Under these laws, any party seeking to open an ASCs must demonstrate a need for the new service and construction.
Sadly, many abortion facilities go uninspected by governmental authorities for years (or even decades). Here are just a few examples of many:
- In Las Vegas, Nevada, an abortion facility called the Birth Control Care Center is under scrutiny for alleged repeated violations of the health and safety of its clients. Most notably, the facility appears to be administering anesthesia as well as dispensing drugs, including opioids, despite not being licensed to do so.
- Near Sarasota, Florida, Southwest Florida Women’s Clinic employed an 87-year-old abortionist who displayed signs of mental and physical impairment. He'd been described as “out of it” and his hands shook dramatically due to age. Sources on the ground note that allegedly, a woman has run out of the facility during a procedure with him, blood still running down her leg.
- Kermit Gosnell operated an abortion facility in Philadelphia that was not inspected for nearly two decades. It wasn’t until a federal drug raid that his "House of Horrors" was exposed. In his trial, Gosnell and various co-defendant employees were charged with eight counts of murder, 24 felony counts of committing illegal abortions beyond the state of Pennsylvania's 24-week time limit, and 227 misdemeanor counts of violating the 24-hour informed consent law. The murder charges related to an adult patient, Karnamaya Mongar, who died following a botched abortion, and seven newborns said to have been killed by having their spinal cords severed with scissors after being born alive during attempted late-term abortions.
Read more HERE and HERE about how abortion facilities get away with adhering to a different set of standards than actual medical centers.
"Pregnancy tissue" consists of a uterine lining and a placenta, both of which exist to nourish the third and most important part: a gestating human being. Referring to a preborn human using sub-human terms is a deliberate manipulation which incorrectly compares the child to a body part... something that is scientifically false.
Abortion is the intentional destruction of a living human being. It is not a removal of tissue, such as an operation to remove a tumor or a mole. A preborn human is not akin to one of the mother's body parts, nor are they an unnatural intruder such as a parasite. Humans create other humans via gestation, just like all mammals, and that preborn human is exactly where he or she is supposed to be. An abortionist is not successful unless a living homo sapien is now deceased.
Abortion hijacked feminism around the time of America's sexual revolution. Because abortion is so heinous, it couldn't gain momentum or succeed on its own as a movement, so abortion supporters had to parasitically attach to another tangential issue. Thus, modern feminism became pro-abortion.
The original feminists (and many others pre-1960s) saw abortion for what it was - a grisly act of violence that pitted women against children. Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul, and other founding "mothers" were pro-life, firm in the belief that women's empowerment could not be bought with the blood of our children.
Abortion is a human rights issue. It may be a biological reality that female mammals are the sex designed to gestate and birth offspring, but abortion, like all other human rights violations before it, deals with dehumanizing a particular group of people and committing violence against them.
When the Center for Medical Progress started releasing undercover videos they took of Planned Parenthood trafficking fetal body parts, Planned Parenthood scrambled like never before. Then-president Cecile Richards was invited on every liberal news outlet to "defend their honor," yet all she ever had to say was "Those videos were highly edited."
David Daleiden, the pro-life activist who spearheaded the project, recorded hours and hours of footage while undercover as a fetal tissue procurer. That is how undercover investigation goes. The videos his organization released were only edited for time, given that very few of us are interested in sitting down to view a 22-hour video.
But they stuck with the "highly edited" line until it blew over. After all, what else could they have said? They were caught as red-handed as possible. Take careful note that they never once refuted any of the content of the videos, either when the videos first came out or throughout the whole criminal trial they took up against Daleiden.
Every American, pro-life or pro-choice, should watch the undercover footage of Planned Parenthood executives haggling over the price of aborted baby livers and brains and discussing the Lamborghini's they planned to buy with the profits.
In seven states in the U.S., abortion is legal until the moment of birth for any reason. Nearly 13,000 late-term abortions happen each year (according to the CDC, which as has been stated, receives incomplete reporting). When abortion supporters claim that "late-term abortions don't happen," they likely mean that they hope they don't because that reality is extremely disturbing.
Not only do late-term abortions happen, but institutions that commit abortions and train abortionists are very cavalier about them. In 'the good old days,' promoters of abortion in the second and third trimesters claimed they only happened in cases of true emergency or suspected gross anomaly (both of which are also wrong).
The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, an institution that does commit abortions and train abortionists, is an example of the shift in late-term abortion acceptance. These images are pulled from their online library of medical terms:
Note that under "Risks," they list "failure to end the pregnancy." Induction abortion means the baby is delivered, so it's different than chemical abortion where failure to end the pregnancy means the baby is still alive inside the womb. With an induction abortion, failure to end the pregnancy means the baby is delivered alive. Which begs the insane question... then what happens?
Read this account of a nurse who saw babies survive induction abortions and were left to die.
Note also their list of possible reasons for seeking a late-term abortion. They openly admit that the reasons women have these abortions is because they didn't know they were pregnant or couldn't get an abortion sooner. They don't even mention maternal health emergencies, yet we are so often told we need third trimester abortion because of women's health emergencies.
*Note on terminology: it's common to see pushback on the vocabulary used here: "late-term abortion." The argument is absurd. People in favor of abortion are immediately triggered by this term. KFF, an abortion-friendly research firm, wrote:
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"[...] the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) has written that “late-term abortion” has no medical meaning and should not be used in clinical or legal settings. As such, we will refer to abortions occurring at ≥21 weeks gestation as abortions later in pregnancy, [...]"
What, you may ask, is the difference between "late-term abortion" and "abortion later in pregnancy?" Literally nothing. It's a distraction from talking about what abortion later in pregnancy actually entails.