Scare tactics resurface

Let's see how many lies and misrepresentations the abortion enthusiasts at MoveOn.org can cram into a 30-second ad:

Only decades ago, women suffered through horrifying back-alley abortions.

1. Most criminal abortions were performed by doctors. Estimates by Planned Parenthood's Mary Calderone, and pro-choice researcher Nancy Howell-Lee, indicated that over 90% of women found doctors to perform their abortions, and of the remaining 10%, probably half of them were performed by trained non-physicians, both paramedical (nurses or midwives, for example) and lay (as the Jane Syndicate in Chicago).

2. And it wasn't "women" who submitted to those abortions. Nancy Howell-Lee's research indicated that whether a woman sought out an abortionist, rather than avoiding that risk, depended upon whom she turned for help. If she turned to somebody we would now describe as "pro-choice", or if she turned to somebody who placed other concerns than the woman's well-being first, then yes, they'd end up arranging an abortion. Women whose friends and family, and whose babies' fathers rejected abortion, where highly likely to avoid the risk of abortion and instead chose to give birth.

3. Criminal abortions were not, by and large, the deplorable and filthy quacks so popularly presented in abortion advocacy lore. As Planned Parenthood's Mary Calderone pointed out in 1960, "Call them what you will, abortionists or anything else, they are still physicians, trained as such; and many of them are in good standing in their communities. They must do a pretty good job if the death rate is as low as it is." And just one year earlier, in 1959, Planned Parenthood's Alan Guttmacher said, "They have to be good to stay in business, since otherwise they would be extremely vulnerable to police action."

4. If you want to see horrifying abortion practices, you need look no further back than last year, when Kermit Gosnell's filthy and deplorable Philadelphia abortion mill was raided. And Gosnell was merely the most recent, and most widely publicized, of a seedy lot. Dangerous abortion mills that would fit well into any "back alley" scenario thrive best when prochoice extremists hold sway, as they did in Pennsylvania. It is, and has always been, the prolifers trying to shut these places down, while prochoice activists either looked the other way or actually stepped out in defense of dangerous quacks.

or they used dangerous methods when they had no other recourse

As Nancy Howell-Lee pointed out in her research, the women who turned to dangerous self-abortion techniques tended to be mentally unstable women for whom the abortion attempt was more an attack on themselves than a rational attempt to dislodge an unwelcome fetus. Psychiatric journals of the time note many such cases and their relationship to other forms of self-harm.

so when the Republican party launched an all-out attack on women's health

Do be serious! Are they really trying to claim that abortion is the totality of "women's health"? All the care for heart disease and cancer and the flu and fibroids and broken bones and appendicitis -- not to mention mental health treatment for women prone to self-injury -- evidently are somehow NOT "women's health" in the abortion lobby's eyes. If you have abortion, you have everything you could ever want or need.

pushing bills to limit access to vital services

Funny how they don't get specific. Which they're wise, of course, not to do, since even most prochoicers oppose forcing taxpayers to foot the bill.

we have to ask, "Why is the GOP trying to send women back -- to the back alley?"

We've covered this before. The danger to women is the dubious oversight of abortion practitioners that prochoice extremists are so keen to provide. Any woman reaching for a coathanger needs mental health services. And it's despicable for abortion advocates to try to use sad cases of mental illness to convince us to abandon women to the likes of Kermit Gosnell and his ilk.

It's as if they're deliberately trying to set up another Rosie Jiminez situation, to literally scare another woman into a deadly situation that they can then try to milk for tax dollars.