NBC News’ Julie Ainsley spoke with a woman who was 9-months pregnant that called the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe V. Wade “horrible” and said she doesn’t know how to protect her unborn child if they won’t “have the options that they need to make bodily choices.”
This is a long blog post and no doubt the least popular of the lot I’ve been writing lately. I didn’t intend for this to be a series, but after continuing to read pro-abortion arguments based mainly in emotion, misconception, and even prejudice, I felt the record needed to be set straight.
Before getting into the main topic, I want to make a few points. First of all, according to National Right to Life (PDF), between 1973 and 2019, a grand total of 63,459,781 abortions were performed. Barring twin and triplet pregnancies, that means 63,459,781 human lives were ended in their mothers’ wombs. For comparison, between 40 million and 50 million people died in all of World War Two. During the Vietnam War: as many as 2,000,000 civilians on both sides and some 1,100,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters died. The U.S. military has estimated that between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died.
63,459,781 lives and that’s only up until three years ago. Let that sink in.
Now a bit of a history lesson. During the 1960s and ’70s, there was this thing called the sexual revolution. The version of feminism that was active at that time (it’s changed a lot since then) acknowledged that women enjoyed sex as much as men, but because only women could get pregnant, they had to deny their enjoyment unfairly. After all, men couldn’t get pregnant, so they could have consequence-free sex. Not so women.
Then in the mid-1960s, the birth control pill, and in the early 1970s, abortion access nationwide made great strides in equalizing men and women on the sexual playing field. Women could enjoy sex freely and spontaneously just like men, and if the pill failed (or if it caused high blood pressure in some women which was subsequently discovered), then abortion was still available. Women could have consequence-free sex just like men. All was cool.
I’ve been trying to figure out why both men and women have been experiencing panic attacks, unbounded rage, a super-sense of self-righteousness, and terror at being sent back to the “dark ages” or into a real life Handmaid’s Tale. Those people are absolutely certain that the Christian church and the Republican party had the ultimate goal of “forcing” pregnancy and child birth on women, thus turning women into serfs or slaves to men, as well as second-class citizens. All this because the rights to administer the abortion industry (yes, it’s big business) have been shifted from the nation to the states.
It’s been a long time since 1973. I was barely out of high school when Roe vs. Wade made “abortion rights” possible “from sea to shining sea.” I don’t remember thinking much about it at the time. After all, I was just a kid. Besides, at that age and in that point in time, I went along with the social and political beliefs of my age mates. Abortion was cool, or so I was told. It was just another thing in my cultural background like “give peace a chance” and “all you need is love.”
Approximately two generations of women have been born into and grown up in a world were access to abortion on demand was a given. It was taken for granted. If you had an unwanted pregnancy, you could get an abortion. Planned Parenthood was always available, and there were other low-cost abortion clinics a young woman could go to.
I even remember a young woman I worked with asking me to go to the abortion clinic with her so she could have the procedure. Her boyfriend refused to take her. Wanting to be a good and compassionate person, I agreed. That was probably around 1975.
I mentioned marketing abortion. You’d think it would be unnecessary, but you’d be wrong.
Planned Parenthood has entire marketing campaigns (when you go to that page, beware the ads asking you to donate), particularly around abortion.
Prominently displayed near the top of the page are the words There are no “bad” reasons to get an abortion.
For centuries, abortion in America was viewed as an unspeakable crime. How, then, after less than a decade of activism, did unrestricted abortion become enshrined as a constitutional right in the largest Christian nation on earth?
The answer is very simple: marketing. The campaign to legalize murder is the most successful marketing story of the twentieth century.
Okay, the language isn’t “pro-choice friendly,” but it’s not meant to be. Also, once abortion was legalized across the nation, it had to be promoted in a positive light. After all, as the article states, historically, there was a huge stigma around unwanted pregnancies and abortions. Women had to be sold on the idea that it was now acceptable and even desirable (it’s a short article if you want some of the details of the advertising scheme).
gaebler.com puts a very positive spin on what it takes to successfully market an abortion clinic. There are even professional journals discussing Abortion Services marketing policies.
That’s right. Abortion is a “service” just like any other service being offered by a business organization. In order to turn a profit, you have to not only make the customer aware your service exists, but where to find providers, and why you should want and even need their services.
Since the Supreme Court rendered their decision (213 page PDF), there has been a continual wail across news and social media on how for many, many women, the sky has fallen and their lives are now utterly ruined.
A few years after Roe v. Wade, Congress enacted the Hyde Amendment. The Hyde Amendment blocks federal funds—Medicaid—from being used to pay for most abortions. It can pay to terminate pregnancies that are a result of incest or rape. It will also pay for abortions if the life of the mother is endangered. However, this ban does not prevent states from using their own money to pay for abortions.
The Hyde Amendment is not a permanent law. Since its enactment, it has been attached as a permanent “rider” to the Department of Health and Human Service’s congressional appropriations bill. And it must be renewed annually. In addition, only Congress can repeal it, and Biden has asked Congress to look into doing so.
With a Biden presidency, it seems that federal funds may soon be available to pay for abortions. And we already know that Planned Parenthood is counting on Biden’s help. The organization spent $45 million to get him into office.
Read the entire article for the details, but according to a 2015 Forbes article:
…concluding that taxpayers subsidize about 24% of all abortion costs in the US. Federal taxpayers pay 6.6%. The remaining 17.4% is paid by state taxpayers. Forbes estimates that this is the equivalent of taxpayers paying for about 250,000 abortions a year.
There’s some suggestion that since Federal money can’t be used by Planned Parenthood to pay for abortions, PP puts everything into a different “pot,” then plays a shell game with their overall budget so that governmental funds can be applied to abortions.
A former abortion worker says that it’s typical to get between $250 and $500 per abortion from a patient:
In my practice, we were averaging between $250 and $500 for an abortion, and it was cash. That’s the only time as a doctor you can say, either pay me up front or I’m not going to take care of you. It’s totally elective… Either you have the money or you don’t. And they get it.
So, abortions are business, not someone who cares about a frightened, vulnerable women who is terrified about what being pregnant may mean for her future.
Nationwide, the overall abortion rate—according to both the CDC and the Guttmacher Institute—is declining. However, abortions at Planned Parenthood are increasing—and so is the organization’s market share. In 2005, Planned Parenthood accounted for 32 percent of abortions reported by the CDC and 52 percent of abortions in 2016. In 2005, Planned Parenthood accounted for 22 percent of abortions reported by the Guttmacher Institute and 39 percent in 2017.
“Abortion is the only surgery for which the surgeon is not obligated to inform the patient of the possible risks of the procedure, or even the exact nature of the procedure. Indeed, abortion providers are the only medical personnel who have a “constitutional right” to withhold information, even when directly questioned by the patient.”
I was planning on going into what happened to the pieces of an aborted baby after the “procedure,” but this is a long enough write up and I think I’ve made my point.
In summary, from 1973 forward, the abortion business had to overcome the stigma attached to unwanted pregnancies and abortion. Thus they began a massive marketing campaign that has grown to enormous proportions in the past fifty years.
Abortion went from an option to shouting your abortion, making it not just “guiltless,” but an actual desired outcome a woman could be proud of and “shouting” it from proverbial rooftops.
Profits from abortions have blossomed, not only through government funding (the shell game), but from the sheer number performed. Yes, the overall number has been on the decline for years, but Planned Parenthood has been thriving on providing more or less exclusively, this one service (yes it provides others, but which one offers up the most profit?).
Women over the past fifty years have become accustomed to “abortion on demand.” Abortion was a given, part of the background noise. But more than that, a colossal marketing campaign has convinced women for half a century that they absolutely, positively, without doubt or barrier, MUST have access to abortion. Every time those “rights” have been threatened, they have been told convincingly that their lives would crumble to dust if access to that “service” was restricted, even in the slightest.
No wonder women and the men who support abortion are literally freaking out in rage and terror. It’s all the fault of Christians who want to shove their religion up a women’s uterus. It’s all Trump’s fault just because he loaded the Supreme Court with Republican Christians. It’s all the Republican party’s fault because they want “Handmaid’s Tale” type control over women for no other reason than they just do.
Oh, here’s a TikTok video taken from twitter of an actual person “freaking out.” Having looked into this other videos, this is kind of his “thing,” but I think it’s illustrative of what I’ve been discussing (click on the image to play):
I’m upset about Roe v Wade. Videos of women crying across the country. Lives being ruined by 6 GOP justices. Republican thugs dancing in the streets, celebrating the end of women’s rights. What do we do now? I’ll tell you what we do. We DON’T give up. We stay LOUD! And we VOTE! pic.twitter.com/tIktebv8XF
The incredible power surge of terror and panic that is being expressed by perhaps millions of people in America didn’t come out of nowhere. It came out of a decades-long, calculated, and well-crafted marketing campaign organized by the billion-dollar abortion industry. It was specifically designed to convince women and men that abortion is the essential service of the 20th and 21st centuries, and without that one service, every woman’s life now or in the future, would be the equivalent of slavery. In reading many of the comments in news and social media, in viewing the videos of screaming and raging people having major league, adult-level tantrums, that marketing campaign has been devastatingly successful.
More’s the pity, because that this point the vast majority of those people are responding to the imperatives of the abortion industry. They have all been well and successfully played. This is exactly what the abortion industry been planning and counting on.
Oh, there’s one more point, and it’s the worst one of all.
I had an online “conversation” with someone on a comic strip recently who said that an unborn child, while human, was not legally a person until it was outside the mother’s body. While inside the mother’s body, even up to the point of birth…
As long as a fetus is INSIDE the host, it is the host’s moral right to eject it.
Screenshot from Disqus
No, I don’t believe every or even (hopefully) most pro-choice people believe that. But I suspect those who are called “advocates” and “activists” for “abortion rights” do believe that the mother’s life, well being, and so forth are so important, that an unborn child is just a disposable widget until after the child exits the mother’s body, even if that exit is only moments away.
I have an even greater fear. When will born children start losing more of their rights, particularly the right to live?
Talking about the death penalty. In Australia we no longer have it. Those who campaigned to abolish it called it state sanctioned murder. I’m only asking where the compassion is when it comes to innocent babies.
"When you awake in the morning, learn something to inspire you and mediate upon it, then plunge forward full of light with which to illuminate the darkness." -Rabbi Tzvi Freeman
Morning Meditations 
State sanctioned murder said those against anti capital punishment. Funny to realise how selective we are about compassion.
“…against anti capital punishment.” Did you mean “…said those who are for capital punishment?” Your statement is confusing.
Talking about the death penalty. In Australia we no longer have it. Those who campaigned to abolish it called it state sanctioned murder. I’m only asking where the compassion is when it comes to innocent babies.