The admission by a prominent abortion advocate that he lied about the number of babies killed during the called “partial-birth abortion” is surprising only in its candor. Ron Fitzsimmons, executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, said he misled the public because he feared the truth would damage the abortion rights cause.
Recalling a November 1995 appearance on ABC’s “Nightline,” Fitzsimmons said, “I lied through my teeth” when claiming the procedure was rarely used and that the only women who sought such abortions were those whose lives were in danger, or whose unborn children were severely damaged. President Clinton used nearly identical language in explaining his veto of a bill that would have outlawed the procedure.
Legal abortion was conceived in a lie. Norma McCorvey, “Jane Roe,” claimed to have been raped. She later admitted lying in order to make her case more compelling to the Supreme Court. The justices who made abortion legal believed testimony that thousands of women were dying from illegal abortions, a “fact” asserted by the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), but later acknowledged to be false by top NARAL official Dr. Bernard Nathanson, who was at the time operating the nation’s largest abortion clinic in New York.
To maintain a policy of abortion on demand, proponents have had to continue telling lies. Planned Parenthood, which consistently argues for maintaining the abortion status quo, once told a different story. In 1965, a Planned Parenthood pamphlet called “Plan Your Children” said of family planning: “Is it abortion? Definitely not. An abortion kills the life of a baby after it has begun. It is dangerous to your life and health. It may make you sterile so that when you want a child you cannot have it. Birth control merely postpones the beginning of life.” Was Planned Parenthood lying then, or is it lying now?
On December 11, 1993, NARAL’s Kate Michelman was quoted in the Philadelphia Inquirer as saying: “We think abortion is a bad thing. No woman wants to have an abortion.” Five days later a NARAL statement claimed that Michelman “has never said—and would never say—that ‘abortion is a bad thing.’” But reporter Jodi Enda taped the interview and stood by the quote.
Sandra Cano, the “Mary Doe” in Roe’s companion case, Doe vs. Bolton, stated that she never wanted an abortion and signed paperwork she thought was related to a divorce she sought from an abusive husband. The American Civil Liberties Union lawyer that Cano believed was helping with her divorce claimed that her client applied for an abortion but was turned down. Cano says she was lied to and that the lawyers handling the case did not explain to her what was happening and why.
During the partial-birth abortion debate last year, in which proponents claimed it is rarely done, the Bergen County Record reported that doctors in one New Jersey clinic perform 3,000 abortions annually, half of them the partial birth variety. Rather than admit the truth, abortion proponents attacked the professionalism of the reporter.
Also last year, pro-abortion groups claimed that anesthesia takes the life of the unborn child before the procedure in which its brains are sucked out. Though many physicians denied the claim, the media continued to spread the falsehood as if it were true, as if that would somehow make the procedure more ethically tolerable.
Then there are the daily lies told to women that their unborn child is not a baby, just tissue, and that having an abortion will solve the problems that lead them to seek one. And let’s not forget the lie about no one being available to care for the child or the woman after birth.
Another bill needs to be introduced immediately that would outlaw partial-birth abortion before the public forgets that Fitzsimmons has added his name to a growing list of pro-abortion liars.
Los Angeles Times Syndicate