COLUMN: Pro-life flier filled with errors, inconsistencies
Aside from being an anti-Semitic racist, among other things, Republican hopeful Pat Buchanan vowed last Friday that if he were to become president of the United States, he would end all abortions in the country, even in cases of rape and incest.
He said, "I don't care about the circumstances of the child's conception, you want to execute somebody in the case of rape, execute the rapist and let the unborn child live."
Later that same day, many of us opened our Threshers to have a 12-page color advertising supplement of propaganda against abortion fall into our unsuspecting laps.
I applaud the Thresher for its tradition of perpetuating free speech and hopefully stimulating a few hours of campus-wide discussion; however, I would like to point out some errors and inconsistencies in the anti-abortion arguments.
Abortion is an issue about which we will be hearing a lot more as the '96 election ensues and the various arch-conservative Republicans try to woo the "religious right."
There is a moral question involved and a political question, and the details provide for a wide spectrum of opinions.
Morally, it has been difficult to agree on when a life begins and when one has a right to life. Because of this disagreement, one cannot argue a political position from a particular religious or moral point of departure because not everyone can agree on what constitutes it.
Therefore, politically one must consider when abortions should be legal. In this regard, the government has the duty to protect the rights and safety of the mother.
The advertising supplement naturally provided only a biased view against abortion presenting figures but leaving out crucial details that would discredit their arguments.
Many of the stipulations were not cited, and it was therefore impossible to cross-reference their validity. Other statistics were presented in a very misleading fashion.
That the newsprint medium is a generally trusted source of information fooled readers into accepting unsupported claims.
For example, on page 9, whereas it is asserted that the birth control pill will "fail to suppress ovulation 50 percent of the time!" Rice for Choice points out that it is closer to 3 percent of the time, and I was able to substantiate this value (less than 4 percent) in a report by the Ontario Center for Religious Tolerance.
The supplement mentions repeatedly that recent studies show that abortions double the risk of breast cancer. Rice for Choice points out that the supplement fails to mention that the study stated that this result was only in cases with a family history of breast cancer.
The medical procedures (page 9) describing abortion may sound gruesome the way they were described, but these descriptions exaggerate the gore.
Any common medical procedure can be described in such a gruesome manner that it would be unfit for television. Keep in mind that the fetus cannot feel a thing, and although the pain to the mother varies per patient, pain is minimized with anesthetics and is usually described as less painful than giving birth.
The advertising supplement provides a small quiz with biased questions -- calling abortions the leading cause of death in the U.S.
Some people do not consider the unborn fetus a living entity, so obviously they would disagree with this statistic. However, even with the point of departure that a fetus is living, the supplement is ignorant to the fact that 50-70 percent of all pregnancies result in miscarriages, making that the leading cause of death in the United States.
Using logic, the statistic in the flier is wrong and misleading.
Many other assertions utilize statistics that are totally irrelevant and included solely to mislead the public to believe there is numerical support for the claim.
The propaganda is guilty of intentional misrepresentation of data and quoting people without citing sources (too bad they are outside the scope of the Honor Council).
Various religious, philosophical and medical opinions disagree on the transition from human non-life to human life and at what point this life has moral standing such that it would be morally wrong to kill it.
Many people designate an abrupt event for the point at which non-life becomes life.
For example, some say life begins at birth when a child can breath on its own.
Others amend that conception to cover any time when the fetus is viable, which could include the fifth month of gestation when a fetus could live with life-support, or it could preclude infants that would surely die if left alone.
Still others believe that a right to life is acquired gradually because one cannot deny that a single sperm is alive and could develop to a full human in the right conditions.
There is thus a continuum of life.
The abortion supplement in the Thresher asserts the commonly stated position that life begins at conception but then it goes on to use biology to support this belief about the fertilized egg which, on page 4, Dr. Lejeune called, "`The most specialized cell under the sun.' No other cell will ever again have the same instructions in the life of the individual being created."
There exists no consensus on what constitutes life. But all the arguments presented in the supplement are based on the belief that life is of full moral standing begining at conception.
All the subsequent arguments depend on that premise and there is no room for compromise.
Sheffy Gordon is a member of the Rice Young Democrats and a Jones College sophomore.
This item appeared in the Opinion section of the March 1, 1996 issue.
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