Studies show that, in recent times, there has allegedly been a decrease in the number of abortions. Last week the Guttmacher Institute—the research arm of Planned Parenthood Federation of America—reported that “the national abortion rate declined to 16.9 abortions per 1,000 women ages 15-44 in 2011. Between 2008-2011, the abortion rate fell 13 percent, resuming a long-term downward trend that stalled between 2005-2008.”
Following on the release of the report, Americans United for Life (AUL) president Charmaine Yoest noted: “It is impossible really to know the true abortion rate, given that abortionists are not required to report on the chemical and surgical abortions that they do. Their reporting is totally voluntary, and in fact California does not report at all.”
Commentator Michael Cook told the readers of BioEdge that “abortion is on the skids” in the USA.
But what is the real takeaway from the reports, the numbers, and the spins on the story? Actually, there are a couple of things that are absolutely relevant in our quest to end the aborting of babies.
The first is, Stop Planned Parenthood International’s director Rita Diller explains, that Guttmacher did not point out “that its own revised national numbers, when compared to Planned Parenthood 2011 abortion numbers, reflect that Planned Parenthood committed 31.6 percent of all abortions in the United States in 2011. Yes, Planned Parenthood committed one out of every three abortions in the United States in 2011.”
The lesson here is clear. Much more must be done to defund the abortion giant. PPFA currently receives millions of our tax dollars to ply its deadly trade, and this report should provoke outrage among those who are freely funding the organization with our money while claiming to have a pro-life voting record.
You cannot be pro-life and support funding for Planned Parenthood. Period.
The second thing that should be understood about the latest Guttmacher report is that it is false, plain and simple. We know that the surgical and medical abortion numbers are skewed due to discrepancies in reporting. But we also know the vast majority of abortions are never acknowledged or reported in the first place by any agency, public or private.
Every time a baby dies because of the clinical action of the birth control pill, IUD, or other contraceptive method, he dies in silence. His existence, let alone his death, is totally ignored. Every time a baby dies in an in vitro fertilization clinic or at the hands of a human embryonic stem cell researcher or a geneticist, he dies in silence. His existence is of no consequence to anyone.
Bogomir Kuhar, one of the founders of Pharmacists for Life, explains this fact in a January 21 e-mail in which he attempted to correct a reporting error:
The actual nationwide aborted baby body count is more like 300 million lives. . . . You are forgetting the murdered Holocaust victims of the pill, mifepristone, Plan B, ella, IUDs, Norplant, Implanon, Depo Provera, hCG vaccines, methotrexate, Cytotec/misoprostol, and unnumerated tens of thousands of killed preborns via all artificial means of creating life (e.g., IVF, SCNT, etc.).
Please don’t minimize their deaths by ignoring them in the stats. For calculations you can trust that show the Abortion Holocaust is 4-5x that under-reported surgical-only figure by pro-life sources, click here and see Infant Homicides through Contraceptives.
It is a tragedy when a single innocent human being is murdered, be it at creation or any point thereafter. This is why we are called to demand a full accounting, to educate our fellow Americans, and to work diligently to amend the United States Constitution in such a way that every innocent person is respected and protected by law and in the culture.
While the numbers lie, babies die.