Coathangers no longer apply
The Herald, Thursday, March 9, 1989
America’s abortion lobby has darker things on its mind than a concern for women’s rights,
WASHINGTON correspondent Geoffrey Barker last month wrote that President Bush's support for the pro-life position "sits uncomfortably with his appeal for a kinder, gentler and more tolerant America".
In his article, Barker implies that being pro-abortion and being gentle and kind go hand in hand. Perhaps Barker should meet Edward Allred.
All red owns the largest abortion clinic chain in California. With three houses, two ranches and two aeroplanes, the multimillionaire says business is great.
And he’s expanding - you need to if you’re going to control the population.
"Population control is too important to be stopped by some Right-wing, pro-life types," Allred said. "Take the new Influx of Hispanic immigrants. Their lack of respect for democracy and social order is frightening. I hope I can do something to stem that tide."
Alfred said that If the state stopped funding abortions, he might continue giving free abortions to poor women "for the social good".
Journalist Pete Hamill, who has been a PR man for the abortion industry, says that black women should be threatened with even greater economic hardship if they would not abort their children.
Are these the people who will create a kinder, gentler, more tolerant America? Is President Bush wrong, as Geoffrey Barker implies, to back pro-life lobbyists?
Many minority groups say no on both counts. Black Americans for Life sees abortion as a form of genocide. They cite people like Allred and Hamill, and disclose statistics showing two black babies are aborted for every white baby.
President Kay James says blacks are more opposed to abortion than whites because they know what It is to be stripped of rights.
Referring to the 1857 Supreme Court ruling that black people were not legal "persons", she says: "We understand what it means to have some people in black robes saying ‘you’re not a person’."
Hundreds of Jewish Rabbis in the US have also condemned abortion.
They also say their people know what it is to be considered unwanted and expendable.
The thousands of members of Women Exploited By Abortion don’t think that cutting, scraping, dismembering and poisoning in a woman’s own womb Is akin to kindness and gentleness either.
Barker’s "radical Right-wing" and "screaming protester" stereotype the current US pro-life movement in a grossly inaccurate way. Anti-abortionists are not confined to the Right.
Barker has ignored the pro-life Left in America which Includes Liberals for Life, the Pro-Life Non-Violent Action Project, Pro-Lifers for Survival and Feminists for Life.
The majority of pro-life proponents do not scream and shout insults. US reports on the ‘Operation Rescue" protests describe them as peaceful and non-violent.
The coathanger illustration used in Barker’s column may have been a nice graphic, but it Is misleading. More accurate would be an illustration of a suction apparatus or salt solution bottle.
Hilgers and O’Hare’s 1981 study "Abortion Related Maternal Mortality: An In-Depth Analysis," concluded:
"While maternal deaths due to criminal abortion seem to be decreasing, they have been replaced almost one for one by maternal deaths due to legal abortion." It is not true that thousands of women died at the hands of back-alley abortionists, as is commonly believed.
Dr Bernard Nathanson, former abortionist and abortion-right lobbyist turned pro-life advocate, helped circulate back-alley death figures of between 5000 and 10,000 a year.
In his autobiography Aborting America, he writes: "I confess I knew the figures were totally false...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 US Bureau of Vital Statistics show that fewer than 200 maternal deaths a year resulted from illegal abortions in the late ‘60s. The Centres for Disease Control recorded 39 deaths in 1972 - the year before legalisation - and 25 legally induced abortion deaths in 1974.
Barker, it seems, has not taken this evidence into account. A truly caring society would be one which ceased trying to eliminate poverty by eliminating the poor, where "wantedness" was not the criteria by which life or death was chosen, and where women were offered alternatives of dignity and hope, rather than having to yield to the forces of despair.
Melinda Tankard is a freelance writer who recently visited the United States.