Republicans are on an obsessive crusade to defund Planned Parenthood and to rob women of their right to choose. The arguments against abortion aren’t valid and can be disproven.
While there are too many myths and falsehoods to cover in one article, let’s take a look at some of the most common lies the anti-choice crowd uses to push their anti-woman agenda.
Myth 1. Abortion isn’t safe.
The argument that abortion is a dangerous procedure is a favorite fear tactic among the “pro-life” crowd.
Researchers for the Centers for Disease Control and Guttmacher Institute have concluded that giving birth is far likelier to kill a woman than having an abortion. In the words of researchers, “risk of death associated with childbirth is approximately 14 times higher than that with abortion.”
Their research reveals that first-trimester abortions have a complication rate of less than .05 percent – which makes them one of the safest procedures available. In fact a colonoscopy puts one’s life more at risk than having an abortion by a factor of 40 times.
Myth 2. Abortion is used as a form of birth control.
The fact is abortion is not cheap. Since Republican lawmakers have used TRAP laws (Targeted regulation of abortion providers) to shut down clinics all over the country, the procedure is becoming increasingly harder to access and requires a great deal of time and money.
Aside from co-pays, premiums, transportation costs, possible hotel costs (some states require mandatory waiting periods) and time off from work, an abortion in the first trimester can cost $451, and late term abortions can be as high as $3500.
The Guttmacher Institute conducted a study and found that 31% of women who live in rural areas traveled more than 100 miles to receive abortion services, and 74% traveled more than 50 miles to access services.
If a person were to use abortion as their only method of contraception, statics show they would become pregnant two to three times a year and would then have two to three abortions per year. Those numbers don’t add up with the stats on who actually gets abortions.
Myth 3. Women regret their abortions
The argument that women who choose to terminate an unwanted pregnancy suffer from “post-abortion syndrome” has been proven false.
75 percent of women polled suggested the benefits outweighed any harm, and 95 percent of the women polled said they felt as if they made the right choice.
Myth 4. Abortion causes breast cancer.
This claim has been disproven time and again, but anti-choice extremists love to throw it out there in yet another attempt to scare women out of choosing abortions.
The American Cancer Society concluded:
“After adjusting for known breast cancer risk factors, the researchers found that induced abortion(s) had no overall effect on the risk of breast cancer. The size of this study and the manner in which it was done provide good evidence that induced abortion does not affect a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer.
Another large cohort study was reported on by Harvard researchers in 2007. This study included more than 100,000 women who were between the ages of 29 and 46 at the start of the study in 1993. These women were followed until 2003. Because they were asked about childbirths and abortions at the start of the study, recall bias was unlikely to be a problem. After adjusting for known breast cancer risk factors, the researchers found no link between either spontaneous or induced abortions and breast cancer.”
The Collaborative Group on Hormonal Factors in Breast Cancer at Oxford College in England studied the results of 53 different studies of roughly 83,000 women with breast cancer conducted in 16 countries and concluded that “the totality of worldwide epidemiological evidence indicates that pregnancies ending as either spontaneous or induced abortions do not have adverse effects on women’s subsequent risk of developing breast cancer.”
Myth 5. Abortion is murder
A fetus is not a baby. It is a developing mammal in humans and develops at the end of the second month of gestation.
A baby is a human being that has BEEN BORN. There’s a key difference: development. A fetus is unable to exist on its own during gestation.
Anti-choice extremists are trying to ban all abortion based on junk science claiming fetuses are capable of pain.
Physicians for Reproductive Health are on record as saying, “And what we know in terms of the brain and the nervous system in a fetus is that the part of the brain that perceives pain is not connected to the part of the body that receives pain signals until about 26 weeks from the last menstrual period, which is about 24 weeks from conception.”
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