You’ve got to hand it to the Left. Liberals love abortion, but when they’re outraged about something else and that something else somehow involves pregnant women, they act as if it’s the horror of horrors.
Witness their latest eyebrow-raising claim: Pro-life people aren’t really pro-life because they’re not speaking out about how police in Ferguson are using “miscarriage-causing” tear gas.
Here’s a tweet that is going viral today:
Police in #Ferguson are spraying civilians with miscarriage-causing chemicals. https://t.co/n40e2BB4yI pic.twitter.com/WEpYuMV4ID
— Annie Shields (@anastasiakeeley) August 19, 2014
The tweet links to a story in The Nation, a pro-abortion magazine with the bold claim: “Tear Gas Is an Abortifacient. Why Won’t the Anti-Abortion Movement Oppose It?” Here’s the thesis:
They were right: though rigorous studies are few, there is evidence that tear gas is an abortifacient. In 2011, Chile temporarily suspended its use after a University of Chile study linked it to miscarriage and fetal harm. Investigating the use of tear gas in Bahrain in 2012, Physicians for Human Rights found that local doctors were reporting increased numbers of miscarriages in exposed areas. And UN officials have connected tear gas to miscarriages in the Palestinian territories.
This means it’s likely that police in Ferguson, Missouri, have been spraying abortion-causing chemicals on crowds of civilians. Recently in The Nation, Dani McClain wrote about the killing of black youth as a reproductive justice issue, one that goes to the heart of the rights of parents to raise their children in peace, safety and dignity. She’s correct, of course, but if the anti-abortion movement were actually concerned about the well-being of the unborn, then the violence in Ferguson would be a pro-life issue as well.
So for those of you keeping score at home, the destruction of 1.5 million babies annually in abortion is perfectly fine, but using tear gas that may potentially hurt an unborn child, admittedly even though there are few studies proving that to be true, is a horrible outrage.
Does tear gas even cause miscarriage? It appears not.
The effects of CS tear gas showed no harm during pregnancy in several animal studies. (4,5) One study also mentioned that there were no teratogenic effects associated with exposure to CS during pregnancy, even when injected intraperitoneally.
It sounds like the real hypocrites here are those left-wingers who will do anything to try to make hypocrites out of pro-lifers when they still have a redwood-sized log in their own eye.
If liberals are really so worried about forced abortions, perhaps they ought to join the pro-life movement in speaking up against forced abortions in places like China or India. But, no, that’s not politically correct.
