"Pro-abortion slogan #10: Abortion is safer than childbirth Summary of the Pro-Life Response. (1) Clarification: The chances of dying of childbirth are miniscule. You say that the chances of dying of an abortion are also tiny. We can rarely tell who will die of either cause, so why base important life decisions on these statistics? (2) Extrapolation: If abortion really is safer than childbirth, doesn't this mean that every pregnant woman should get an abortion? If not, why not? (3) Parallelism: The risks of a woman dying from swimming, skiing, bicycling or travelling by car or airplane are much greater than those associated with either abortion or childbirth. Does this mean women should never do anything!? So what?! The pro-lifer must ask his opponent to clarify his statement. Why is he asserting that abortion is safer than childbirth? This pro-abortion 'childbirth vs abortion' argument is nothing more than a verbal feint, and is analogous to saying that every woman should have both breasts removed due to an increased chance of dying from breast cancer! In reality, the death rate for childbirth is 5.4 per 100,000 pregnancies, and the death rate for abortions is 33% higher at 7.2 per 100,000 pregnancies. This is due to two reasons. First, the figure usually quoted by pro-abortionists for abortion mortality is about 3.0 per 100,000. However, this number does not include women who die of abortion related complications after they leave the abortuary. If these deaths are factored in, the actual abortion mortality ratio is about 7.2 per 100,000. Secondly, the standard pro-abortion figure for childbirth mortality is about 10.0 per 100,000. However, this figure includes deaths from miscarriage and ectopic pregnancies (which are not relevant), and deaths from abortions! For detailed information on abortion and maternal mortality, see the article 'Maternal Deaths' in the 'RST' Directory on the Pro-life Library Compact Disc. Pro-abortion slogan #11: What about....? [rape, incest, deformities, economics, etc] Summary of the Pro-Life Response. (1) Parallelism on rape: Do you favor the death penalty for rape? No? Why, then, do you favor the death penalty for the innocent child? (2) Clarification on incest: Abortion just helps cover up the crime so that the perpetrator can continue his molestation of the victim. (3) Extrapolation on birth defects: Do you support the elimination of handicapped adults and children? No? Then why do you support the killing of handicapped unborn babies? The most effective way of refuting the 'what about?' slogan is by parallelism. This consists of simply applying the pro-abort's logic to human beings, eg. We don't kill the guilty rapist, so why should we kill the innocent child resulting from the rape? We don't kill teenaged Down's Syndrome children - why should we kill them when they're unborn? You say you can't afford another child? Why don't you just kill the children you have now? That would really improve your financial situation! Whatever the excuse, when one group of people decides that another group of people is somehow inferior or not worthy of life, they are falling into the trap of eugenicist thinking. Once we begin to loftily judge which children are fit to live and which are not, we have no way in the world of stopping the slaughter. It is a short step from here to ending the lives of 'defectives' that are already born. This is already occuring in western countries. More than 2,000 'defective' newborns are being quietly put to death in the United States every year. Some 'doctors' have referred to this as 'A second chance at abortion' or 'fourth-trimester abortion'. Pro-abortionists uses the 'hard cases' of rape and incest to drive the wedge that eventually opens the door wide to unlimited abortion. They inevitably push for more and more exceptions to this rule until they achieve abortion on demand. This is the basis of the anti-life strategy of gradualism or incrementalism." “Pro-abortion slogan #12: Every child a wanted child! Summary of the Pro-Life Response. (1) Clarification: This slogan means that children do not have any intrinsic value. (2) Extrapolation: When unborn children are treated as property, this attitude naturally transfers to born children. Have you noticed the tremendous increase in the numbers of newborns being beaten to death or dumped by their mothers? This kind of murder is a direct result of thinking that only ‘wanted’ children should live. (3) Refutation: The ‘pro-choice’ movement promised us that abortion would eliminate child abuse. What else did the ‘pro-choice’ movement lie about? Is there a more pathetic term in the world than ‘unwanted child’? What kind of cold hearted, soulless human being would even think that an ‘unwanted child’ could exist? What brings greater joy and innocence to the world than a sweet little baby? This slogan assigns worth to a human life based purely on the whim of another person. This logic could just as easily be applied to born children. The pro-abortionist who uses this slogan is therefore indirectly advocating the disposal of unwanted born children. They might talk about ‘battered children’ as being ‘unwanted’. To this, the pro-lifer might reply that there are no such things as unwanted children; there are only unwilling parents. In its 1974 ‘A Speaker’s and Debater’s Guide’, the National Abortion Rights Action League (now NARRAL) stated that `Legal abortion will decrease the number of unwanted children, battered children, child abuse cases, and possibly subsequent delinquency, drug addiction, and a host of social ills believed to be associated with neglectful parenthood` because ‘unwanted children’ would be eliminated. The Reality. Every pro-life knows just how much abortion has allegedly ‘decreased’ child abuse and drug addiction. Australia suffers greater levels of these evils now than it ever has in its history. The rate of child abuse in the United States is now three times higher than it was in 1973, when abortion was legalized. Pro-abortion slogan #13: Outlawing abortion will create a new class of criminals! Summary of the Pro-Life Response. (1) Parallelism: According to this ‘logic’, we should legalise any behavior that ‘happens anyway’, such as murder, rape and child molestation. (2) Refutation: Women were never prosecuted for obtaining abortions. This is another pro-abortion myth. (3) Parallelism: A woman who hires a hit man to whack her husband is not a victim, and neither is the woman who hires a hit man to slaughter her unborn baby. The general idea behind this slogan is that women will always get abortions, so if abortion is criminalised, pro-lifers will force them to get illegal back-alley abortions. In other words, the pro-abortionists are saying that if a law is commonly flouted, the law should be discarded. Some pro-abortionists even claim that legalization would promote ‘respect for the law’. How ridiculous! If people know they can ignore the law and it will be changed as a result, how does this promote ‘respect for the law’?! If people willfully break a law and injure themselves, their injuries are due to their own illegal and irresponsible behavior. If a motorcyclist ignores a helmet law and scrambles his brains in a crash, his injuries are due to his own negligence. If a junkie shoots up and dies of an overdose, he is solely responsible for his own fate. If a woman is truly innocent of knowledge about the nature of her unborn child and dies because of an illegal abortion, the double death is heartbreaking – but those who are ignorant of the dangers of driving without a seatbelt or hiking near cliffs while drunk or using illegal drugs sometimes pay with their lives as well. The pro-abortionists commonly paint a vivid picture of prisons crammed with suffering women who have had illegal abortions. This is a scenario that has never happened, and it never will happen. No woman has ever been prosecuted for having an abortion in Australia or the USA. Punishment is invariably aimed at the abortionist, not the patient.”