It’s been said that the way a question is framed is enough to get the answer you are looking for. If I ask, “Do you believe a woman has a right to do what she wants with her own body,” most people would say “yes.” But if I ask, “Do you believe that a woman has a right to kill her pre-born baby,” I suspect the results will be different.

A story is told that during the days of the Cold War a two-car automobile race took place between the United States and the former Soviet Union. An American newspaper reporter described the result of the race this way: “American car beats out Soviet competitor.” The Russian newspaper reported the same automotive contest from a slightly different perspective: “Soviet car finishes second; American car is next-to-last.”

Both papers reported the same event. Both accounts were factually true, up to a point. In order to put the best face on Soviet technology, the facts were positioned in a pre-determined way to obtain a certain result. The outcome for the Soviets was inevitable in order to create the illusion that Communism is better than capitalism. The lesson is obvious: “It’s not that two bits of data contradict one another; it’s that the same bit of data can be read in (at least) two ways.”1

There’s a report using information from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute that claims abortion is safer than giving birth. Safer for whom? Certainly not safer for the pre-born babies being aborted. The report assumes the non-personhood of the preborn baby and therefore does not consider that any harm is being done. Since the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, we’ve had more than 50 million pre-borns harmed.

Dr. Randall K. O’Bannon of the National Right to Life Committee gets it right when he “says what the new study doesn’t point out is that when there is an abortion, there is a death — that of the unborn baby.”

Of course, the pro-abortionists are only referring to the health of the mother. Even here, the definition of “safe” is up for grabs, as the following makes clear:

Approximately 10% of women undergoing induced abortion suffer from immediate complications, of which one-fifth (2%) were considered major. However, the majority of complications take time to develop and will not be apparent for days, months or even years. . . .

According to the best record based study of deaths following pregnancy and abortion, a 1997 government-funded study in Finland, women who abort are approximately four times more likely to die in the following year than women who carry their pregnancies to term. In addition, women who carry to term are only half as likely to die as women who were not pregnant. (Click here for more details on this important study.)

There are “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Which one do you think the pro-abortion industry is using?

1. David Murray, Joel Schwartz, and S. Robert Lichter, It Ain’t Necessarily So: How Media Make and Unmake the Scientific Picture of Reality (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1001), 86. [↩]