PRO-ABORTION HYSTERIA.(Survey)

In recent months, the pro-abortion lobby and its fellow travelers in the media have sounded loud alarms about abortion rights in the United States. Let's not "turn back to the days of unsafe illegal abortions," they say. And "women will die again" if Roe v. Wade were overturned, they darkly warn. "In just six years American women's rights moved perilously close to those in much less-developed nations," writes Bonnie Erbe, a PBS TV host and columnist for the Scripps Howard News Service (3/13/2006). Or take this statement from the Philadelphia Daily News (3/22/2006): "So please don't say that those who want to preserve Roe favor unlimited abortion. It just isn't true." Did the editorialist cite any legal limits actually prohibiting the right to have an abortion? No, and he or she couldn't.

Combine the legal weakness of the Supreme Court's abortion decisions with a sense that the Court may be changing its approach to abortion rights, add the realization that the public is not pro-abortion, and it becomes clear why the pro-abortionists are more alarmed than ever.

A recent Zogby poll, based on a very large sample size (30,117 respondents, margin of error +/- 0.6%), reinforces this alarm.

Forty-six percent of the public agree that the right to have an abortion is "guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution"after all, that's what they have been told again and again. Yet, practically the same number, 45%, disagree.

Only 18% agree with the notion that "nominees to the Supreme Court should be confirmed only if their position on abortion is pro-choice." An overwhelming majority, 71%, disagree.

Again we are hearing the "women will die" argument over and over. Let's examine it.

* First let's remember that the pro-abortionists have a history of lying on this very point. Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a co-founder of NARAL, wrote in Aborting America (p.193), "How many deaths were we talking about when abortion was illegal? In N.A.R.A.L. we generally emphasized the drama of the individual case but when we spoke of [statistics] 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 But in the 'morality' of our revolution, it was a useful figure so why correct it with honest statistics?"