Abortion Butchers Women, Both Pre- and Post-Roe

posted at 1:08 pm on August 23, 2010 by Cassy Fiano
[ Abortion ]   

Originally posted at David Horowitz’s Newsreal:

It’s long been predicted by the pro-abortion extremists that if Roe v. Wade is overturned, women will have to go back to being butchered by seedy abortions in back alleys. There are hysterical stories consisting of coat hangers and women bleeding out because evil right-wingers wouldn’t let the kindly abortionists practice out in the open. The truth, of course, is much less hysterical. But what pro-abortion feminazi with an agenda to push would ever admit to that? Well, Amanda Marcotte, femisogynist extraordinaire, let the truth slip in a recent column written for pro-abortion website RH Reality Check.

Marcotte was applauding the television series Mad Men for featuring a character, Joan, who had gotten two abortions in the 1960s. These abortions were illegal at the time. And, says Marcotte, this is historically accurate, because the back alley abortionist myth is just not true.

In your usual overly dramatic Hollywood fare, this would have been an occasion for raising the stakes by implying that Joan was subject to a mythical back alley butcher who left her infertile for life. But instead, the doctor shrugs and suggests that the odds are that the midwife did a good job, and certainly everything that he could see was in good working order. He points out that she got pregnant after the first abortion, and so he has every reason to believe she’s fine.

Believe it or not, this was historically accurate. In the sixties, many doctors performed abortions for their regular patients and charted them as something else. If you got an abortion from someone who wasn’t your regular doctor, odds are that it was still a safe abortion. And, as I’ve written about before, the myth of the back alley butcher is mostly inaccurate. It’s tempting for pro-choicers to invoke it in an attempt to remind people of the high human cost of banning abortion, but in the end, portraying abortion providers as “butchers” mostly helps the anti-choice cause by stigmatizing the compassionate, hard-working people who have helped women in need, whether or not that help was legal.

So pro-abortion fanatics are twisting the truth to push their pro-abortion agenda? Not so fast, says Marcotte. She quickly reverts back to the typical pro-abortion hysteria, assuring us that before abortion was legal, women were indeed mutilated from botched abortions.

Which isn’t to deny that illegal abortion meant the mutilation and often death of countless women. It’s both true that when abortion was a crime most providers were professional and that hospitals had an overwhelming number of septic abortion cases. As historian Rickie Solinger points out in her book Beggars and Choosers, this is because women who didn’t know where to find a black-market abortion provider often resorted to trying to abort themselves, causing injury or even death. The coathanger is the symbol of women’s desperation when they have no access to abortion.

And Marcotte is not alone in pushing the hysteria.

Salon’s resident feminazi, Tracy Clark-Flory, was pushing the same story earlier this week about pre-Roe abortion butchery. Apparently, LAPD found the remains of some dead babies in a basement in Los Angeles. This, of course, must be evidence of back alley abortions gone wrong! (Even though organizations like NARAL insist that they aren’t babies, just clusters of cells.)

So which is it? Pre-Roe abortions were safely performed by kindly law-breaking abortionists or women were dying from botched, self-induced abortions? Funny how she can’t quite keep her story straight. Of course, it’s not like it really matters. Either way you slice it, abortions must be kept legal, according to the pro-abortion radicals like Amanda Marcotte. Whatever the narrative, whatever the facts, the agenda is the same: abortion must be legal and widespread. Femisogynists will argue up and down that pre-Roe abortions were just so dangerous, but now that it’s legal, abortion is somehow “safe”. Unfortunately, the reality is quite different. Even today, with abortion legalized, there is no such thing as a “safe” abortion.

It’s interesting that pro-abortion advocates decided to call themselves pro-choice. If it was really about choice, and not about being specifically pro-abortion, then the feminazis wouldn’t be OK with the blatant lies and manipulation that are so commonplace in the abortion movement. If it was about being pro-woman, then one might think that the femisogynists would want women to be completely informed about the risks associated and where they were with the pregnancy. Planned Parenthood, for example, has been caught multiple times lying to women about whether or not the heart has started beating yet and how developed the baby is. Even worse is the evidence of Planned Parenthood’s willingness to cover up the statutory rape and sexual abuse of minors in order to sell abortions. Does this bother the femisogynists? Nope — there’s been not a peep about it. They don’t care as long as women are getting abortions. It isn’t about choice, because for them there’s only one choice, and that’s abortion. Any amount of lies and manipulation is allowable for them if it leads to more abortions.

Yet pro-lifers are the ones labeled anti-woman.

OK, you might be thinking. So women are sometimes tricked into abortions. Surely abortion isn’t harmful to women who know the facts and aren’t lied to, right? Not so much. There are myriads of risks associated with abortions that femisogynists just don’t want women to know about. It triples the risk of breast cancer, and increases the risk of future miscarriages. Women who have abortions have higher rates of depression and substance abuse, and are also more likely to commit suicide. One organization, Operation Rescue, launched a program called Abortion Whistleblower to document botched abortions and abortion abuses. They’ve found that botched abortions have become an epidemic. They also were able to compile a list of what they call abortion’s bad boys, abortionists convicted of crimes ranging from rape and sexual abuse to murder, manslaughter, fraud, and corruption. There were filthy clinics, falsified medical records, and even one instance of cannibalism.

Safe, legal, and rare, huh? It doesn’t exactly seem like we’ve come all that far from the pre-Roe days that the abortion extremists warn us about. And it doesn’t seem like being pro-abortion equals being pro-woman. In fact, the truth seems clear: you’d be hard-pressed to find something more harmful to women than abortion, but what does an abortion extremist like Amanda Marcotte care about that? There’s an agenda to push. Abortions were either perfectly safe pre-Roe or they left women butchered out of desperation, depending on what works better to sell abortion. It’s pathetic how far the femisogynists will go to further the cause of abortion. It’s even more pathetic how they claim to be doing it in the name of women — the very people who end up getting hurt the most.

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Follow Cassy on Twitter and read more of her work at CassyFiano.com and Hard Corps Wife.

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