Life Links 5/24/12

Abortion advocates are attempting to find the bright side of the record low (41%) percentage of people who self-identified as pro-choice in a recent Gallup poll. Abortion Gang member KushielsMoon and NY Times Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal play a similar note.

Rosenthal:

But only 20 percent of Americans say they think abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. A majority, 52 percent, think it should be legal under certain circumstances, and 25 percent say it should be legal in any circumstance. In other words, there are more pro-choice absolutists than pro-life absolutists, and far more people who take a middle position than absolutists on either side.

KushielsMoon:

Now, this might sound like a serious problem to some pro-choice advocates. However, one needs to look further into the polling to see the real situation.

52% of Americans believe that abortion should be legal under some circumstances. An additional 25% believe it should be legal under any circumstances. Together, that means a whole 77% of Americans support abortion being legal. In contrast, only 20% believe abortion should always be illegal (and that's down 2% from last year!).

Obviously, this is a case of people not understanding what "pro-choice" and "pro-life" really mean.

Or maybe it's a case of you not actually reading the complete poll results as Ramesh Ponnuru explains.

Here are the latest numbers: As of May 3–6, 20 percent of Americans think abortion should be "illegal in all circumstances," 39 percent say it should be "legal only in a few circumstances," 13 percent say it should be "legal under most circumstances," and 25 percent say it should be "legal under all circumstances."

The vast majority of opponents of legalized abortion have been willing to bestow the "pro-life" label on politicians who do not take the position that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. George W. Bush, for example, favored exceptions to a ban for cases where pregnancies threatened the mother's life or resulted from rape or incest. One might say, then, that his position amounted to thinking that abortion should be legal "only in a few circumstances." The two relatively life-protective positions get a combined 59 percent, the two less-protective positions get 38 percent.

Robin Marty attempts to prove that if abortion is difficult to get, women will go to desperate lengths to end their pregnancy by highlighting a British woman who died after drinking concentrated vinegar in a home abortion attempt. One large problem with this argument is abortion is readily available in Great Britain and paid for by tax dollars. So the example undercuts Marty's argument because it shows that some women, regardless of how much access there is to abortion, will do stupid, dangerous things.


Planned Parenthood is opposed to forced abortion so much that they issued a press release regarding Chen Guangcheng after he already made it safely to the United States. Gee, thanks.


The Daily Mail is reporting that an abortionist in Spain has been ordered to pay child support on a child he failed to kill.

A Spanish judge ordered the unnamed gynecologist to pay £780 a month maintenance to the boy's mum after he bungled a termination at a clinic in Majorca.

She checked in for an abortion in April last year when she was eight weeks pregnant - and returned three months later for another thinking she was carrying a second child.

Tests revealed the gynecologist had misread an ultrasound and the unborn baby thought to have been aborted was still alive.