The push to legalize abortion in Ireland continued this week with an undercover project that claimed to show pro-life pregnancy counselors lying to women.
The undercover video from The Times showed clips of a conversation between a pregnancy center counselor and the undercover reporter. The description “heavily edited” comes to mind.
In brief clips, the video showed a counselor at The Women’s Centre on Berkeley Street in Dublin explaining the possible risks of abortion and unborn babies’ ability to feel pain. She told the undercover reporter about the physical and psychological risks of abortion, including breast cancer and infertility. She also explained that unborn babies can feel intense pain.
The Huffington Post described the counselor’s statements as “lies” and relied entirely on pro-abortion talking points in an attempt to debunk them.
For example, the pro-abortion news outlet wrote:
[The counselor said,]“The reality is a baby in the womb will feel pain considerably more than we would, or a toddler, or a full-term, due to the sensitivity of the developing nervous system.”
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A 2005 study of fetal pain published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that “evidence regarding the capacity for fetal pain is limited but indicates that fetal perception of pain is unlikely before the third trimester.”
Reproductive Choices in Ireland has, according to The Times, been linked to the Good Counsel Network, a Catholic anti-abortion group. This kind of center is similar to Crisis Pregnancy Centers, or CPCs, in the United States.
CPCs are often advertised by anti-abortion groups as medical facilities with counseling services for new mothers or women with unexpected pregnancies, when in actuality they are paid for and run by religious anti-abortion groups.
It also attacks the counselor’s information about the abortion-breast cancer link, claiming that the American Cancer Society does not recognize the link. It also quoted an Irish doctor who called the counselor’s statements “outrageous.”
The abortion industry wants women to believe the unrealistic idea that abortion is risk-free. They constantly deny and suppress research that goes against this narrative, and they get help from liberal news outlets like the Huffington Post that parrot pro-abortion talking points without question or research.
The truth is there is growing evidence that support the pregnancy counselor’s statements.
Though abortion advocates deny the science of fetal pain, researchers have fully established fetal pain at 20 weeks or earlier. Dr. Steven Zielinski, an internal medicine physician from Oregon, is one of the leading researchers into it. He first published reports in the 1980s to validate research showing evidence for unborn pain.
He testified before U.S. Congress that an unborn child could feel pain at “eight-and-a-half weeks and possibly earlier” and that a baby before birth “under the right circumstances, is capable of crying.”
Maureen Condic, Ph.D. an Associate Professor of Neurobiology and Anatomy at the University of Utah and a Ph.D. graduate from University of California, Berkeley, also confirmed to Congress that unborn babies feel pain as early as 8 weeks.
“The neural circuitry responsible for the most primitive response to pain, the spinal reflex, is in place by 8 weeks of development,” she explained. “This is the earliest point at which the fetus experiences pain in any capacity.”
And the 2005 study that the Huffington Post mentioned in its attempt to debunk the evidence has been called into question. The two authors of the study were exposed as abortion activists who failed to disclose their conflicts of interest. Of course, the pro-abortion news outlet did not mention that.
The increased risk of breast cancer following an abortion also is well established in medical research across the world. In an article at LifeNews in March, researcher Joel Brind reported a shocking new study that found a 58-percent to 108-percent increased risk of breast cancer for women who have abortions. In 2012, LifeNews reported on 12 more studies that pointed to an increased risk.
Other studies have found increased risks of infertility and preterm birth for subsequent children after at least one abortion. Still more studies have linked abortion to increased risks of depression, post-traumatic stress and drug abuse.
Pregnancy resource centers like the one being attacked in Dublin provide women with honest information that abortion activists try to hide. They are the ones offering women the information and support that they deserve to make an informed choice for themselves and their unborn babies.
