Lies, damn lies and abortionists' statistics

“An investment in contraceptive services can be recouped at least four times over by reducing the need for public spending on health, education and other social services”.

UN’s Population Fund (UNFPA) marking "World Population Day"

At least four times eh?

And just think how much money governments would save in social services by getting rid of their entire populations.

Ah, I see someone's already thought of that.

I often have to admonish pro-life people to not accept these kinds of stats on face value. People, even experienced people, are all too eager to start on the defensive, justifying where we should be attacking. Something important to remember is that abortion-lovers lie. It kind of goes along with the necessary justifications for killing babies. They seem sometimes to believe the lies, but I imagine it's only because they're going mad. They are notorious for making up statistics. On the spot.

cf. Bernard Nathanson, talking about starting the abortion movement in the '60s.

"Knowing that if a true poll were taken, we would be soundly defeated, we simply fabricated the results of fictional polls.
We announced to the media that we had taken polls and that 60 percent of Americans were in favor of permissive abortion. This is the tactic of the self-fulfilling lie. Few people care to be in the minority. We aroused enough sympathy to sell our program of permissive abortion by fabricating the number of illegal abortions done annually in the U.S. The actual figure was approaching 100,000, but the figure we gave to the media repeatedly was 1,000,000.

"Repeating the big lie often enough convinces the public. The number of women dying from illegal abortions was around 200-250 annually. The figure we constantly fed to the media was 10,000. These false figures took root in the consciousness of Americans, convincing many that we needed to crack the abortion law.

I remember once getting a phone call from someone in Norway who was going to make a presentation to the government on dropping abortion/contraception from his country's overseas aid programmes (yes, Norway has those, who knew?). He wanted to know how to counter the claims of some parliamentarian who had made some incredible claim that "tens of thousands" or "hundreds of millions" (or something) of women in Africa (or somewhere) died every year from "unsafe abortions". He wanted to know if there were reliable figures so he could present them.

I was surprised that I had to explain to him that the numbers quoted by these people are made up. The thing to do is not to look around for the "real" number. That is playing their game. It is accepting their whole lie and trying to disprove it in little bits. It's a lie, people. What do we do when we think someone is lying? We call them on it.

We smile sweetly and say, (with as much contemptuous sarcasm as we can muster) "Oh, really? 'tens of millions' eh? Wow! that's a lot. Can I see some documentation for that? Cause that's quite a lot for a set of countries whose entire human population doesn't add up to that. Quite a feat to accomplish, especially in those countries with a high rate of AIDS. Funny how in, say, Burundi, by your claim, the entire female population has been wiped out by 'unsafe abortions' when there is still a recorded AIDS rate of x% among women. If they've all died of 'unsafe abortions', how can there still be any left to be dying of AIDS?"






Google: Cartesian mind/body split, Humanae vitae, Dualism, Optimum Population Trust, Eugenics, Malthusian economics.