Thinking to Believe

Those who are opposed to state and federal defunding of Planned Parenthood argue that these dollars are not paying for abortions, but contraception and other female-related health services.  So why would pro-lifers want to defund this?  Do we just hate women?  Do we want to ensure that more women are “punished” for premarital sex by getting pregnant?  Of course not.  What we understand is that the grants Planned Parenthood receives for their non-abortion services indirectly funds their abortion business.  To see why, imagine for a moment that the government provided grants to churches to pay for all of their office supplies, marriage counselors, city permits, and building repairs.  Would the pro-Planned Parenthood-funding crowd agree with the government that this is not supporting religion?  Of course not!  They realize that the money a church saves by not having to pay for those government-funded items will be redirected to evangelistic efforts.  So while the government’s funds would not be directly funding Christian evangelism, they are indirectly funding it.  The same is true of federal funding of Planned Parenthood.  While these funds are not directly responsible for aborting babies, they are indirectly responsible because Planned Parenthood can use all of the money the government saved them and direct it to their abortion business. And when 41% of their revenue comes from government, that’s a lot of money to redirect to their abortion business.

I applaud Nick Cannon for having the guts to state the obvious: Planned Parenthood is responsible for “real genocide” in the black community, and is a form of “modern eugenics.”  Indeed, more black Americans die from abortion than from anything else.  The abortion rate for black women is three times higher than that of white women.  Black lives truly matter, and that includes in the womb.  And if the Black Lives Matter movement truly believed black lives matter, they would become pro-life because nothing has done more to desecrate the black population than abortion.

It’s commonly said that 90% of all unborn babies with Down Syndrome are aborted.  This statistic is offered by both conservatives and liberals alike.  Fortunately, it’s based on a misunderstanding of the data.  Studies have shown that approximately 90% of women who undergo an amniocentesis diagnostic test and are told that their baby has Down Syndrome end up aborting the baby (which is not surprising considering the fact that this is the second test for the disease, is invasive, and carries a risk of killing the baby.  It stands to reason that women willing to undergo the procedure do so because they want to be sure that their child has Down Syndrome before they kill him/her).  In other words, the people who undergo amniocentesis are more likely to abort a baby with Down Syndrome than those who do not, but only ~2% of pregnant women undergo amniocentesis.  When you consider all women pregnant with a baby suffering from Down Syndrome, the abortion rate is estimated to be somewhere between 1/3 to 1/2.  That is still way too much, but not nearly as bad as 90%.

Check out this video from Stand to Reason demonstrating why abortion is unjust discrimination against the unborn.

From Bloomberg News:

Abortion access in the U.S. has been vanishing at the fastest annual pace on record, propelled by Republican state lawmakers’ push to legislate the industry out of existence. Since 2011, at least 162 abortion providers have shut or stopped offering the procedure, while just 21 opened.
…

Typically defined by medical researchers as facilities that perform 400 or more abortions per year, the ranks peaked in the late 1980s at 705, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a New York-based reproductive-health research organization. By 2011, the most recent year for which Guttmacher has data, that number had fallen to 553.

Read the rest at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-24/abortion-clinics-are-closing-at-a-record-pace.

Whenever the subject of abortion and politics comes up, inevitably well-meaning but uninformed people will say pro-life politicians (particularly Republicans) aren’t really doing anything to prevent abortion – that it’s just a position they pay lip-service to in order to court the vote of conservative Christians; therefore, it doesn’t really matter who you vote for.  This simply isn’t true.  Just ask the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute.  In their latest press release they write:

Including the 57 abortion restrictions enacted in 2015, states have adopted 288 abortion restrictions just since the 2010 midterm elections swept abortion opponents into power in state capitals across the country. To put that number in context, states adopted nearly as many abortion restrictions during the last five years as during the entire previous 15 years. … The 288 new restrictions enacted since 2010 include a broad range of approaches, from banning some abortions to putting restrictions on the providers allowed to perform the procedures to limiting insurance coverage.

Clearly how one votes can make a difference for the unborn. While the current political situation does not allow for politicians to outlaw abortion entirely, they can and do pass legislation to reduce the number of abortions by providing more information to women and making it more difficult to obtain abortions. How you vote can and does translate into saving the lives of innocent children, and saving women a lifetime of guilt for having murdered their own babies.

UPDATE: The Guttmacher Institute released a report declaring that more than a quarter of all anti-abortion laws passed since Roe have been passed in the last five years (288 of 1,074).

See also: “Pro-life Republican politicians aren’t just paying lip-service to the pro-life cause“