The headline to Steph Herold’s post at the pro-abortion site RHrealitycheck.org is, “What Contributes to a Positive Abortion Experience?”As is so often the case, once pro-abortionists unfairly and haughtily dispose of pro-life objections, in making their case they reveal much more than they know.
Let’s deal briefly with what Herold calls the “evidence-free” pro-life beliefs that “abortion clinics and even abortions themselves hurt women.” Like Herold, they simply ignore all the contrary evidence that women ARE hurt at abortion clinics, evidence we’ve written about many times.
They quickly slide over to insist that “study after study show[s] abortion is safe, and that the best science of the last several decades proves that abortion does not cause any mental health problems.” That simply isn’t true, as we’ve discussed here (“Major new study from Denmark reveals significantly higher maternal death rates following abortion compared to normal delivery”) and here (“Worldwide Research Conclusively Demonstrates How Abortion Hurts Women”).
That aside, “What Contributes to a Positive Abortion Experience?” As always, consider the source, in this case a study from the University of California at San Francisco. Dr. Randall K. O’Bannon, NRLC’s director of education, aptly describes UCSF as “the nation’s abortion training academy.“
Herold’s opening statement is unintentionally revealing about the work of Dr. Diana Taylor et al.
“What they found is pretty astounding: Nearly three-quarters of participants reported that their abortion experience was better than they expected.”
Why is this “pretty astounding”? According to Herold
“This speaks to both the high quality of care at abortion clinics and also to the stigmatization of abortion. Other studies show that patients may believe that abortion clinics are unsafe medical establishments, which may be why they rate their quality of care so highly—they were expecting to receive low-quality care.”
Just ask an objective third party this question. Does it really make sense that “stigmatization” largely/wholly explains the women’s anticipated level of care (“unsafe”)? Or is more likely what they heard from other women and/or a sense that this is what they “deserve” because of what they are doing to their unborn babies?
So what were the factors? Herold writes
“The researchers discovered that the main contributors to women’s rating of their abortion care experience were treatment by the clinician performing the abortion, treatment by clinic staff, timeliness of care, and levels of pain during the abortion procedure.”
As she immediately points out this is not unique to abortion.
But, of course. So if this only documents the obvious, why bother to write it at all? Because the study and the story are in service of a different agenda which we encounter at the end of Herold’s post:
“They also found that women’s satisfaction ratings did not change based on the type of clinician providing the abortion. This supports the growing body of evidence that physicians aren’t the only types of clinicians that can and should be performing abortion procedures.”
The “growing body of evidence” is produced largely by the likes of UCSF to make the case that more and more categories of non-physicians should be able to perform various kinds of first-trimester abortions—with the utterly predictable next step being to include more kinds of first-trimester abortion and more types of non-physicians.
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Dr. O’Bannon has debunked this myth on several occasions, most recently here. It is not safer for women to have non-physicians performing abortions.
Then why? Because what it is trying to accomplish is to reverse the downward trend in the number of abortions.
Remember, for abortion advocates, any day that does not increase the number of dead babies is a lost day.
LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. This post originally appeared in his National Right to Life News Today —- an online column on pro-life issues.
