By Vanissa W. Chan
February 4, 2002 (as featured in The Collegiate Times, Thursday, February 7th, 2002)
As a general statistic, it would be assumed that I am pro-choice. It doesn’t take a convincing survey to determine this. Ask any woman on campus if they are pro-choice or pro-life, and the majority of them, provided you aren’t at a church or republican party gathering, will say something along the lines of, “Of course I am pro-choice. I am for women’s rights.” If you ask for their argument, many will say something like, “Oh, I would never have an abortion myself. I don’t believe abortion is a good thing at all. However, just because I wouldn’t have one doesn’t mean I should take that right away from another woman.”
I will not hesitate to say that I am a pessimist. I believe the general mass of the people use their brains as little as possible so that they conserve energy for more brainless activities. Knowing this, I can come to a conclusion as to why women, on a general scale, are more likely to be pro-choice than pro-life.
First of all, the title in which “abortion rights” fall under are “women’s rights.” Wouldn’t it be against the grain, and almost misogynistic not to be for women’s rights? Furthermore, the title itself is seductive and is meant to give women the idea of self-empowerment. Historically, the women’s rights movement was legitimate probably until the abortion issue joined the team in 1967, the year of the first state-legalized abortion. The aftermath is nothing more than a farce; a seductive title to lure more women to stand behind the movement in order to secure the necessary manpower, and eventually rise above all other human beings, whether man or woman, born or unborn.
Roe v. Wade was an epoch in history that was as tragic as it was a travesty of justice. Pro-abortionists pushed for abortion rights as if it would have been holocaustic, claiming that thousands of women (some even had the nerve to claim millions) died from “back-alley” abortions performed by sketchy, unsanitary scum doctors with their infamous tool, the coat hanger. The plea was for the country to legalize abortion out of compassion for these desperate and dying women who viewed their pregnancy so inconvenient it was worth risking their lives. The reality is as contrasting as the colors of black and white.
Years later, leaders of the pro-abortion movement would sorely admit that the statistic of illegal abortion fatalities was falsified and widely exaggerated in order to bring the U.S. Supreme Court Justice to their knees. The year before Roe v. Wade, while pro-abortionists claimed that thousands and possibly millions of women were dying of illegal abortions per year, the actual number, provided by the U.S. Bureau of Vital Statistics, was a mere 39. In the years of the late 60’s, the N.A.R.A.L. (National Abortion Rights Action League) paraded around, holding a megaphone to the public announcing that 60% of Americans believed in legalizing abortion, including the majority of the Catholic population (claiming the majority of the Catholic population was pro-choice was outrageous and alarming due to the idea that Catholics were generally unmoving in their pro-life stance; N.A.R.A.L. claimed that the idea of Catholics being predominantly pro-life was due mainly to the hierarchy of the Church, and that individual Catholic opinions were moving towards pro-choice, labeled as a more sophisticated, enlightened, and progressive view). Their goal was to arouse the public with statistics that affirmed their pro-life opinions were minority, and that legalizing abortion was a national pursuit rather than one that was miniscule. The mass, being naïve and easily persuaded by the guise of a national organization and women’s rights, absorbed the statistics that held no ground.
The claim of the “back-alley” abortions performed with coat hangers was also false; the majority (87%) of illegal abortions in the 1950’s and 1960’s were performed by licensed physicians in good-standing (as reported by president of Planned Parenthood, Dr. Mary Calderone).
Almost thirty years later, the number of abortions would increase on an exponential scale, a number so high that those who pleaded to legalize abortion in front of the U.S. Supreme Court would convert to pro-life and cry for mercy. The response to those 39 women who died out of the 100,000 illegal abortions (as opposed to the exaggerated 9-digit number pro-abortionists claimed) performed in 1972 would be the destruction of 1.5 million unborn children per year, a number that is clearly holocaustic. Yet, pro-abortionists continue to campaign with their unreasonable arguments, their posters splashed with lies so that they can further their self-righteous movement to conveniently remove unwanted children at a stage of life in which they cannot fend for themselves. How many Choice pamphlets do you see advertising abortion as birth control? More than likely, you will see that pro-abortionists focus on stories that will evoke emotion, such as pregnancy as a result of incest or rape. Yet, abortion statistics show that these cases are rare compared to what abortions are primarily used for: birth control. Again, pro-abortionists fail to utilize representative claims to back their stance (not to mention any argument that is fused with logic), because if they did, no one would be pro-choice! About the only reasonable argument they have is that the fetus isn’t a life, for which if that were the truth, their plea would be legitimate. The answer to this much-debated question is as simple as this: if you were aborted, you wouldn’t be here.