Yes, you read that headline right. The Heritage Foundation, a hyper-conservative think tank tweeted this:
Forcing States to Recognize #GayMarriage Could Increase Number of #Abortions http://t.co/OLgUQAWRqZ pic.twitter.com/3HnCE5HMFn
— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) April 20, 2015
A link from The Daily Signal (TDS), which is the media division of the Heritage Foundation, conservasplained how gay marriage will mean more abortions.
An amicus brief filed by over 100 “marriage scholars” use fear and twisted logic to make their case – because how else could gay marriage be tied to increased abortions? And by the way, how does one become a marriage scholar?
The brief takes on the same old fear-based arguments about marriage we’ve been hearing from the right and TDS reported as follows:
. . . redefining marriage in genderless terms—which is legally necessary to permit marriage by same-sex couples—undermines the existing social norms of marriage in ways that are likely over time to reduce opposite-sex marriage rates. For example, an “any-two-adults” model of marriage implicitly tells men (and women) that a child doesn’t need a father (or mother), thereby weakening the norm of gender-diverse parenting. Other norms, such as the value of biological bonding, partner exclusivity, and reproductive postponement until marriage, will likewise crumble.”
They even provide a inaccurate chart showing data on Spain’s genderless marriage rates to push their anti-gay, anti-woman agenda:
Heritage tried to use the chart to prove that gay marriage is to blame for a reduction in heterosexual marriage. This is wrong for a number of reasons. Heritage most likely used these statistics from Eurostat for their numbers which clearly shows that Spain’s marriage rate had been declining for decades. The drop from 2000 to 2010 is no larger than the drop from 1970 to 1980. Portugal actually saw a larger decline in marriage rate from 2000 to 2010, and they did not legalize same sex marriage until 2010. Additionally, their y axis runs from 3 to 5.5 which makes the decline seem higher than it actually is. Either way, if you have eyes, you can see that the marriage rate in Spain started to decline before gay people were allowed to marry.
The flawed logic utilized by Heritage gets even weirder when they try to prove that gay marriage will lead to more abortions. Using fuzzy math, they multiply current rates of abortion to married and unmarried women and make a huge leap by predicting that in the next 30 years, there will be 900,000 MORE abortions. This chart shows that Spain’s abortion rate has been increasing since 1945.
If you’re scratching your head and feeling confused, you’re not alone. Aside from making the assumption that married women will have fewer abortions than women who have boyfriends, these “marriage scholars” are asserting lesbians are going to be terminating pregnancies left and right – because you know how many times lesbian relations lead to pregnancy.
Conservative logic is an oxymoron.
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