There’s a weird meme (weirder than usual, I mean) running around the anti-choice community: that abortion clinics routinely lie to potential abortion patients and otherwise try to “force” them to have abortions they do not want. A variation is that they promote birth control as a way of generating unintended pregnancies among those sexually active hussies, in order to then get the abortion business that will result. Other versions have to do with a wave of deaths, child abuse, or sexual assault taking place in or abetted by abortion clinics, which the clinics somehow manage to hush up. The common theme is that pro-choice activists and caregivers are engaged in massive deception to deliberately increase the number of abortions given, for ideological or financial reasons.

For instance, the infamous Bernard Nathanson is now quite visible on the anti-choice lecture circuit claiming that, in the early days of NARAL, he and others knew that the commonly-cited figure of 5-10,000 deaths by illegal abortion per year was much too high - or that in fact he personally made it up - but they used it anyway because it was an effective scare tactic.

The statistics that we gave to the American public about illegal abortions annually; the statistics we fabricated regarding the number of women dying from illegal abortions annually; all of thes ematters were pure fabrication and still persist to this very day.

I confess that I knew the figures were totally false, and I suppose the others did too if they stopped to think of it. But in the “morality” of the revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics. The overriding concern was to get the laws eliminated, and anything within reason which had to be done was permissible.

[variously attributed to Nathanson’s books, Aborting America or Hand of God]

And, today, there is this bizarre post from the deranged blog Extreme Truths (tagline: “Satanic sacrifices require Blood of The innocence. Every baby killed during Abortion is a Sacrifice to Satan!” [sic capitalization, spelling, and color]):

“Cindy” . . . is 15 and is 4 months pregnant. Fearing her parents disownment she sets off to get an abortion. While in the clinic she tells the counselor she has reservations and doesn’t really want an abortion. The counselor tears up the consent form. This is whaere it gets interesting and the lies start!

“……They hooked me up with a lady that was willing to do a embryo transplant and adopt my baby. However on that day I did an ultra sound and we found out the baby had died. The doctor said I should continue with the abortion procedure since it would be the fastest way to remove the baby’s body to prevent infections. For a wonderful 25min I thought my baby was going to live and be happy. Then it was dead. I was in a lot of pain after the procedure, but my boyfriend was really supportive. He took care of me and I soon recovered. Now I see cry sometimes, but I guess it was for the best. At least I know my baby is in a better place.”

[And further:]

“In my facilities, I always gave option counseling. Of course you make the abortion the most appealing. . . . The longer I was in it, the less I cared, so I really didn’t really care what my conscience said. My conscience was totally numb anyway. . . . It’s typical — I would give them an option and then shoot it down. The only option you didn’t shoot down, obviously, was abortion.”

Former clinic owner Eric Harrah quoted by Dr. Jack Willke and Brad Mattes

“I was trained by a professional marketing director in how to sell abortions over the telephone. He took every one of our receptionists, nurses, and anyone else who would deal with people over the phone through an extensive training period. The object was, when the girl called, to hook the sale so that she wouldn’t get an abortion somewhere else, or adopt out her baby, or change her mind. We were doing it for the money.”

–Nina Whitten, chief secretary at a Dallas abortion clinic under Dr. Curtis Boyd

“If a woman we were counseling expressed doubts about having an abortion, we would say whatever was necessary to persuade her to abort immediately.”

–Judy W., former office manager of the second largest abortion clinic in El Paso, Texas

“The counselor at our clinic would cry with the girls at the drop of a hat. She would find theirweakness and work on it. The women were never given any alternatives. They were told how much trouble it is to have a baby.”

–former abortion worker Debra Harry, quoted in the film “Meet the Abortion Providers” 1989

[etc.]

Apparently the above are from a long list of “outrageous” quotes circulating on the Web, mostly from a small set of magazine articles. Taking them at face value, what they amount to is a couple of dozen people involved in providing abortions over the last 20 years or so who say they violated the spirit of the informed consent procedure. (Most of the other quotes are to the effect that the providers felt uneasy about doing the work, or simply “shocking” descriptions of procedures taken from the medical literature.) This is a very serious matter, but it hardly amounts to an indictment of abortion as a practice or of the community of providers as a whole. It is hardly even very surprising that there would be some bad apples in such a large community over such a long period of time.

It has become a standard tactic of the anti-choice right to accumulate “embarrassing” stories about abortion providers as a way of discrediting the profession. Every time an abortion clinic worker gets into some kind of trouble, or a clinic fails a health inspection, anti-choicers trumpet this as evidence that the entire field is somehow sleazy. There are many Web sites “memorializing” the deaths of women following legal abortion, none of which ever note the much larger number of deaths that would be expected if all women seeking abortions were forced to carry their pregnancies to term against their will. (There is a “Blackmun Wall” site dedicated to all the women supposedly killed by Harry Blackmun as the result of the abortions he - by himself - legalized. My suggestion that they congratulate Blackmun on the thousands of net lives he saved by protecting those women from much riskier unwanted pregnancies was not received with enthusiasm.) The seemingly-obsessive Christina at Real Choice frantically notes every abortion-related adverse incident she can find and advertises their anniversaries on her blog. (How would you like your medical history and death publicly recounted in every detail by someone who disapproved of your choice of treatment?) The “lying” quotes are just part of this tactic - an accumulation of further evidence that all abortion providers are bad and all abortions are dangerous, because some ex-abortion providers said they themselves were bad, or some abortions turned out badly. But, aside from this crude and stupid inference (”enough anecdotes becomes a statistic”), it is the question of this “widespread lying” meme that interests me.

One thing I note about Nathanson and the people quoted in the various magazine articles is that they all attribute their duplicity to a previous time when their beliefs about abortion were the opposite of what they are now - that is, they lied or manipulated patients back when they were pro-choice, but of course they are telling the truth about that now. We are expected to take their word that they are telling the truth now, about what they said back then, when they supported the thing that they oppose now. We are supposed to believe they were lying about abortion when they were for it, but are not lying about lying about abortion now that they oppose it.

Well, clearly they were all lying at some point . . . but when?

In Nathanson’s case, we know the answer. He is, of course, the producer of the egregiously fraudulent anti-abortion film “Silent Scream”. Nathanson himself has acknowledged the film is inaccurate. So, Nathanson was certainly a liar after he became anti-abortion, and we have only his (anti-abortion) word for it that he was a liar before then. We also know that the thing he says he lied about - 5,000 or more abortion deaths per year - was not actually false. (It was, by best estimates, true 30-40 years before Roe v. Wade, though the numbers had dropped drastically by the time of that decision. So, it was certainly wrong to imply that illegal abortion deaths were that high in 1972, but not wrong that they had been within the lifetimes of women who lived then. The numbers were certainly not “pure fabrication” - they came from documented epidemiological research - or “totally false” - they were true, but the chronology was lost or distorted.) So, here, Nathanson is lying about what he claims he lied about before. Possibly he was as dishonest as a pro-choicer as he now is as an anti-choicer, but that’s hard to tell, because we know he is at least in part lying about having lied.

It is impossible to document the veracity of the claims made by the other anti-choice activists, and so it would be unfair to accuse them of lying. But we do know they have the same conflict of motives that Nathanson suffers from: they are (now) anti-choice, and by their own description are willing to lie in the service of what they believe in. Why would we possibly assume they are telling the truth now (about having lied before)?

Whether the various “outrageous” quotes going around from supposed ex-abortion-providers are true or not matters little. They are not an indictment of abortion or the abortion-services community even if true. But more than this, we know that some of the people offering these shocking confessions are, in fact, confirmed liars in their roles as anti-abortion activists. We know that the anti-choice community in general is mind-bogglingly duplicitous (establishing anti-choice “pregnancy centers” that advertise as abortion clinics; flogging the discredited film Silent Scream after its own producer has admitted its flaws; inventing bizarre or undocumented side effects of abortion such as “Post-Abortion Trauma Syndrome” and breast cancer, and so on). And we know that all the people who “confess” that they are both liars and anti-choice are . . . anti-choice liars.

I see no reason to imagine that any of this material is true, at least in the absence of corroboration. And, again, no reason to imagine that it matters whether or not corroborated. The “confessions” of anti-choice activists are simply moral ultrasounds - distracting images intended to shock us out of supporting choice, but which mean nothing to the actual issue at hand.

Sam Brownback has always been one of those fuzzy-headed dim bulbs who cannot see any issue except in terms of his own personal experience. How he regards anything is largely a matter of how it personally strikes his severely limited, and apparently uneducable, imagination. He belongs on a front porch in the Ozarks with a piece of straw in his mouth, but, sadly, he’s got a seat in The World’s Greatest Deliberative And Sometimes Folksy Drawling Body. He pulled his intuition-driven ignorance out for display in the Roberts hearings, with a heartwarming paen to mentally disabled elevator operators and fetuses, whom he (no doubt rightly) regards as cognitively equal to himself:

BROWNBACK: . . . [W]e talked a lot about the disability community, and well we should, and the protection needed for the disability community. And that’s important, because I think it really helps people that need help, but it helps the rest of us to be much more human and caring.

Senator Kennedy is helping me with a bill because a number of children never get here that have disabilities. Unborn children prenatally diagnosed with Down’s Syndrome and other disabilities — I don’t know if you know this, but there was a recent analysis, and 80 percent to 90 percent of children prenatally diagnosed with Down’s Syndrome never get here — never get here. They’re aborted in the system.

And people just say: Look, this child’s got difficulties. And we even have waiting lists in America of people, today, willing to adopt children with Down’s Syndrome. And we will protect that child — as well we should, under the Americans with Disabilities Act and other issues — when they get here.

But so much of the time, and with our increased ability of genetic testing, they don’t get here. Diagnosed in the womb, system that encourages this child to be destroyed at that stage — and this is all in the records.

And we are the poorer for it as a society.

All the members of this body know a young man with Down’s Syndrome named Jimmy. Maybe you’ve met him, even. He runs the elevator that takes the senators up and down on the Senate floors. His warm smile welcomes us every day. We’re a better body for him. . . .

And Jimmy said to me the other day after he hugged me; he said “Shhh, don’t tell my supervisor. They’re telling me I’m hugging too many people.”

And, yet, we’re ennobled by him and what he does and how he lifts up our humanity and 80 to 90 percent of the kids in this country like Jimmy never get here.

What does that do to us? What does that say about us. And I would just ask you, Judge Roberts, to consider — and probably you can’t answer here today, whether the individuals with disabilities have the same constitutional rights that you and I share while they’re in the womb.

ROBERTS: Well, Senator, I appreciate your thoughts on the subject very much [blah, blah, evasion, evasion, . . .]

This is idiocy at its finest.

Let’s take another look at the money quote:

“individuals with disabilities have the same constitutional rights that you and I share while they’re in the womb.”

Disabled fetuses have the same constitutional rights as Sam Brownback or even citizens of normal intelligence?

A brief digression: Here we know Roberts is jerking the Senate around, because there’s a clear and unambiguous answer to the question: “No.” Fetuses do not have the same constitutional rights as citizens because they are not persons in either the philosophical or the legal sense. There is, of course, a multi-prong movement underway to write fetuses into the law as if they were persons, in every place possible, in the apparent hope that enough saying so will make it true - but there is as yet no definitive law to change the unbroken historical precedent that they are not legal persons. The fact that Roberts could not bring himself to speak this simple truth shows how much pandering he’s doing.

But that Brownback could - apparently in all seriousness - ask this question shows how clueless he is. Obviously, Brownback is maneuvering to create legal personhood for fetuses. But I am tempted to take him at his word when he says that what motivated him on the issue is the plight of disabled fetuses (if it makes sense to talk about mental disability in an organism with no organized cognitive processes). He seems to really believe that it constitutes some sort of discrimination not to give birth to a disabled child. This makes sense only if you believe the fetus is a person (otherwise there’s no one to discriminate against), but it’s not clear whether Brownback means all fetuses are persons, or only disabled ones are - a particularly bizarre turn of the imagination. More to the point, he just seems to be so confused he doesn’t know what to think, and can’t work through the issue by himself. (Snarky thought: I wonder if Brownback holds up little notes to his aides that say “I may need to ask a question about bioethics”?)

The implications of Brownback’s stumbling intuitions are particularly offensive: not only that women have some sort of obligation to gestate an unwanted fetus, but that they have an even greater obligation if that fetus has some sort of diagnosable “disability”. And presumably this “argument” extends to more severe, non-cognitive disabilities as well (at least, we agree that live-born, independent persons with disabilities have fully equal moral standing with all other persons, so, if we are going to grant moral standing to disabled fetuses, there are no obvious grounds for distinguishing between them on the basis of degree of disability). Thus, women are, by his lights, morally obligated to gestate, against their will, even hopelessly doomed, or at the very least horribly compromised, fetuses. In other words, Brownback’s heartwarming affection for Jimmy the huggable elevator operator turns women’s medical necessity on its head: no longer is severe deformity or even unviability a justification for terminating a pregnancy, but it is now a kind of civil rights argument forcing the woman to carry a pregnancy against her will. The worst cases would then be the ones that most greatly erode women’s autonomy. And, of course, if you are required to carry a pregnancy that is essentially hopeless, out of regard for poor little Jimmy, obviously you would be required to carry one that could potentially result in a healthy infant.

Someone smarter than Brownback could be accused of being crazy like a fox - stumbling his way to reducing women to breeding machines for both healthy babies and anencephalic monsters alike. In fact, he’s probably just too dumb to understand the meaning of what comes out of his own mouth, but the end result would be the same if anyone took him seriously.

I have to say, too, that he does no favors to the disabled community with this drivel, either. For a group of full moral persons fighting for acceptance on equal terms with other such persons, it is not an advance to be lumped with undeveloped fetuses. I know there are disability-rights groups who object to the abortion of fetuses with diagnosed disabilities because they think it erodes the position of, or our respect for, full persons with similar conditions, but even so, to claim that disabled fetuses have a right against abortion because they are just the same as disabled persons makes those persons indistinquishable from the fetuses. (Talk about infantalizing the disabled! Brownback is fetalizing them!)

Hat tip: Uncle Sam’s Cabin