Big Abortion’s Biggest Lie

The abortion industry is nervous about the reduction in its profits that may result from state laws prohibiting the termination of a pregnancy after a fetal heartbeat can be detected. This anxiety is exacerbated by the possibility that the Supreme Court may revisit Roe v. Wade. Big Abortion has responded to these threats by filing lawsuits, pressuring politicians in Democrat-controlled states to pass preemptive statutes permitting the “abortion” of babies born alive, forcing poltroons like Joe Biden to recant heretical positions, and launching a propaganda campaign to the effect that unlimited abortion liberated women from the depredations of “the patriarchy.”

Of all the lies promulgated by the abortion industry, the claim that abortion on demand has improved the lives of women in general is the most pernicious. It encourages women to make uninformed choices which can and do damage their physical and psychological health. Yet, despite the absence of evidence supporting the liberation myth, it has been inculcated in young women for nearly half a century by the education system, the media, and professional feminists. A typical example of the latter, Katha Pollitt, recently repeated the lie in a New Yorker essay titled, “How the Right to Legal Abortion Changed the Arc of All Women’s Lives”:

I wonder if women who have never needed to undergo the procedure, and perhaps believe that they never will, realize the many ways that the legal right to abortion has undergirded their lives.… Legal abortion means that the law recognizes a woman as a person. It says that she belongs to herself.… A woman could plan her life without having to consider that it could be derailed by a single sperm.

Predictably, Pollitt neglects to mention the easiest way to avoid being thus derailed. Pollitt knows perfectly well that the very real progress that women have made during the last 100 years has virtually nothing to do with abortion. The foundation of that progress — the right to vote — was secured by genuine feminists who vehemently opposed abortion. Yet she suggests that the gains women have achieved in legal, social, and employment rights is due to their ability to murder their own children in the womb: “Without more women obtaining law degrees, would men still be shaping all our legislation?” The obvious answer is, “Of course not.”

The progress that Pollitt attributes to abortion on demand was primarily the result of cultural changes that precededRoe v. Wade by decades, and those changes were accelerated by the advent of “the Pill” in 1960. This cultural evolution manifested itself in federal and state legislation. Laws like the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 all preceded the Supreme Court’s 1974 discovery of “penumbral rights” lurking in the Constitution. In other words, the claim that the progress women have made is due to abortion just doesn’t conform with the facts.