Feminist Leader Admits They Lied About Women Dying From Illegal Abortions

International   |   Micaiah Bilger   |   Sep 14, 2022   |   10:04AM   |   Mexico City, Mexico

Another abortion activist recently was caught admitting the pro-abortion movement exaggerates the number of women dying from illegal abortions to manipulate the public into supporting abortion on demand.

In a recently uncovered video, Mexican pro-abortion leader Marta Lamas told a university panel how they vastly “inflated the figures” of maternal abortion deaths, the Spanish Catholic news outlet ACI Prensa reports.

Lamas teaches at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and helped to found the pro-abortion organization Group for Information on Elective Reproduction (GIRE). Her group has been influential in lobbying Mexico City and eight other Mexican states to legalize the killing of unborn babies in abortions.

In the video, uncovered by the pro-life organization Steps for Life, Lamas admitted that abortion activists misinformed the public about the number of women dying from illegal abortions, according to the report.

“At that time, I remember, we women said ‘100,000 women die from clandestine abortions.’ It turns out that 100,000 people died in the whole country, men and women from all diseases. We inflated the figures,” she said in the video.

“It was a very complicated process, where we learned many things,” Lamas continued, prompting laughter from the audience. She said GIRE’s “radical objective” is for “abortion to be decriminalized” throughout Mexico.

The GIRE leader made the comment during an Oct. 25, 2016 panel discussion “Conversation on the Feminist Movement” at the Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico City, the report states.

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Pilar Rebollo, director of Steps for Life in Mexico, told ACI Presna that it’s disturbing to watch abortion activists laugh about lying to the public.

“Their method of lying, inflating, exaggerating isn’t new,” Rebollo said. “… But we mustn’t let up and we cannot be asleep in the face of this [because] they’re lying to the woman that she can’t be a mother and that she doesn’t know how to be a mother, that maternity is a diagnosis.”

Abortion activists have lied to the public for decades about the number of women dying from illegal, back alley abortions.

In the United States prior to Roe v. Wade in 1973, abortion activists claimed thousands of women were dying from dangerous back alley abortions. However, Dr. Bernard Nathanson, an abortionist and founder of NARAL who later became pro-life, admitted that those numbers were “totally false.”

In 2021, research by an Oxford University doctor found that figures from the World Health Organization and other leading medical organizations about women dying from illegal abortions in Malawi were “demonstrably… misrepresented or even fabricated.”

The research prompted a major British news outlet to issue a correction to one of its articles. The Telegraph wrote, “… a closer examination of the joint report, which is publicly available, shows that this estimate of 12,000 women dying from backstreet abortions annually is unsupported by the data contained in the report.” It pointed to health data showing that there are about 2,100 total maternal deaths in Malawi each year “and only a small proportion of these are attributable to unsafe abortion.”

Although rare, women sometimes do die along with their unborn babies in abortions. Several recent studies have found that legalizing abortion does not reduce maternal mortality rates, and abortions may, in fact, be more dangerous for mothers than childbirth.

Hundreds of women died after supposedly “safe, legal” abortions in the U.S. In total, the CDC has documented about 450 women’s deaths to abortion since the late 1970s; however, the agency notes that the number is almost certainly an under-count because eight states do not report their numbers to the CDC.

LifeNews also has documented cases where women died along with their babies after legal abortions. These include Tonya Reaves, Cree Erwin, Lakisha Wilson, Diana Lopez, Holly Patterson and others.