* Claim of a Health Exception Victory: the pro-life industry is claiming a victory in that the Gonzales v. Carhart ruling does not include a health-exception. This claim is false because the Justices themselves address the matter in the ruling, and explain different ways for the abortionist to kill the baby in any particular health circumstance, so that they require no health exception because they are not prohibiting aborting such a baby, but explaining how to kill it.
* Holiday Abortionist Home Visit: Denver Christians can meet at the Winchell's Donuts at Monaco and Evans at 8 a.m. Monday morning for an hour of fellowship and deterring medical students [search for "at home"] from becoming abortionists!
* More false claims from Focus on the Family: In CitizenLink, Focus on the Family's rebuttal of our condemnation of the recent partial-birth abortion ruling includes this statement, that perhaps "Colorado Right to Life... would prefer that viable babies would continue to be killed without anesthetics." This report, filled with examples like this, seems to indicate that the people in the Public Policy and editorial departments at Focus on the Family have not read the partial-birth abortion ban Act, have not read the Gonzales v. Carhart ruling, and have not even read our open letter to Dr. Dobson. We are dead serious in this plea for Dr. Dobson to realize the wrong he has done, and so far management of Focus on the Family has not even addressed our concerns. We pray that changes, and will make every effort for them to reconsider this life and death matter.
* The Washington Times Called Us: to ask if we would run our full-page open letter in their conservative D.C. newspaper, and their management has already given approval regading the content of the ad being acceptable to run in the paper. We need to raise $7,000 to run this ad, and have so far raised $1,500, so if you would like to help, please call 800-8Enyart or you can help underwrite this ad by clicking here!
* A Christian Foundation Is Helping! A Christian Foundation with years of valuable experience in designing and executing internet advertising campaigns has volunteered to run our Open Letter internet advertising campaign and so far, our ads have appeared in the search pages of 1.1 million viewers, and during the first week, thousands will click over to read the letter at ColoradoRightToLife.org/openletter.
Michael J. New, Ph.D. writes reports published by the Heritage Foundation that claim a positive pro-life result from laws that regulate child-killing. I need to apologize to Michael and correct the record regarding an accusation I made against his work. And also, I will here explain why so many pro-life activist groups, including Bob Enyart Live and Denver Bible Church, reject Dr. New's optimistic conclusions.
Apology and Correction: I wrote the following to Michael New on May 17, 2007, and he replied on May 21st.
"Michael, I am writing to apologize for the gross error I made in a public presentation regarding your research. I am now going to make an effort to widely disseminate that admission, and a correction, including by announcing it on my radio show on the 50k-watt AM 670 KLTT, and by posting a permanent correction on our website, KGOV.com. Also, we have held up reproduction of the professionally-produced DVD of that event for the error to be removed, so that it will not appear in the copies being made. I realize my misinformation certainly can hurt you, and for that I apologize. Finally, I invite you to appear on my radio show if you have any desire to do so (if not, I don't blame you). I am very willing to have you correct me on the air, and we can point out the terrible error I made mistaking your 1.5 abortions per 1000 women, for ex., as meaning a 1.5% drop in the number of abortions. I did read your entire report (which only makes me more guilty), but obviously too quickly. I still believe, however, that your overall conclusion is in error regarding the lives saved by abortion regulations. Perhaps we could discuss that on, or off, the air. To state the obvious, I am not trained in statistics, but I am eager to better understand your research.
Michael replied in a very gracious letter, "Dear Mr. Enyart, Thank you for your apology. I first learned of Colorado Right to Life's recent conference through my friend Jill Stanek. I heard my research was subjected to some criticism..." I am grateful for Dr. New's kindness. Also I ask him to read the following criticism of his research, including his latest study, Analyzing the Effect of State Legislation on the Incidence of Abortion Among Minors. I don't really deserve a second shot at this, since I made such a sloppy error by misreading his charts, but the following observations were not made in a few minutes, but over fifteen years of pro-life activism.
Disputing Pro-Life Claims for Regulations: Hundreds of pro-life laws, which are child-killing regulations, undermine personhood and the God-given right to life. As such, we reject them as immoral, and as counterproductive to the goal of eventual legal protection for the unborn. Further as attested by Professor Charles Rice of the Notre Dame Law School, stalwart of the pro-life movement, these laws can keep abortion legal for years or decades after Roe v. Wade is eventually overturned (see the Forty Years DVD). The pro-life industry has a vested interest in claiming these laws save lives, thus there we cannot document any attempts to quantify the potential short and long-term negative consequences of these laws. Child-killing regulations prune the abortion weed, and strengthen its root. They make abortion look more reasonable and even humane to millions of women, and voters, and to countless politicians and judges, and even to those many Christians who are apathetic about abortion.
Granted, it would be difficult to quantify the number of children who will be killed after Roe v. Wade is merely overturned, as pro-life laws become the nails that hold open the abortion clinic doors. Dr. Rice has stated:
"If the court says the states can regulate abortion, then to protect the right to life, you'd have to get rid of the 'pro-life' abortion laws."
For example:
Indiana Code Title 16, Section 34, Chapter 2. Requirements for Performance of Abortion... 1. (a) Abortion shall in all instances be a criminal act, except... if ...the woman submitting to the abortion has filed her consent..."
Dr. Michael New's research ignores enormous potential negative effects of child-killing regulations as listed above and is therefore fundamentally flawed and gives the pro-life industry a false sense of confidence. This undue confidence could further a pro-life strategy which may result in millions of children killed over years or decades by the permissive authority of the pro-life industry's child-killing regulations.
Now consider the current effect of child-killing regulations, some of which have been considered by Dr. New, but most of which have not. Dr. New recognizes the difficulty in quantifying what is really happening regarding the influence of child-killing regulations because of complex over-lapping influences, and also, because of inadequacies in the abortion statistics themselves. These numbers originate with the abortionists themselves, and abortionists are liars; and pro-abortion forces often seek to under-report, as in during the 1990s to make the Clinton administration appear better than Republicans at reducing abortion. Further, abortionists will under-report, or even completely refuse to report even when mandated by law, as in Planned Parenthood's systematic refusal to comply with mandatory reporting laws regarding suspicion of child molestation. Thus in states where political attention and pressure is brought upon the abortion industry for, say, abortions on girls under age 16, abortion chains can simply underreport to make the concern appear overblown and to deflect attention.
Some factors affect the number of annual abortions, and others that lower the ratio of abortions as a percent of pregnancies. Back in 1989, during a Saturday protest at Denver's Planned Parenthood clinic, we prayed and asked God to help us make the commitment to have Christian sidewalk counselors at the mill five days a week, during killing hours, to offer help and hope and the Gospel, to the women scheduled to kill their children. Since then, there has been a five-day presence at that killing center, and for about ten years that we have been counting, over 100 children are confirmed as saved from death by these efforts, and there are probably far more than a hundred more not confirmed, but saved annually. Being at the clinic gives these activists a better understanding of the dynamics of the abortion reality. When the Heritage Foundation reports that child-killing regulations significantly reduce the incidence of abortion, the pro-life industry accepts that without question, because they want to believe it, and also, there has been a large reduction in the raw numbers of children being killed annually. Here's are the major factors:
Homosexuality: Compared to fifteen years ago, pregnancy itself is way down, and one reason is that out of all annual sexual encounters, today many millions more than in the past are lesbian encounters, all of which is immoral, but which has also reduced pregnancies, which in turn reduces abortion numbers.
Stigma: The stigma for unwed pregnancy has greatly faded, which can reduce the abortion ratio, that is, women who get pregnant who may have aborted fifteen years ago to avoid the social stigma, have far less stigma to be concerned about, and this stigma dropped sooner in more liberal states, and more recently in Bible-belt states, and that effect is one of many ignored by the latest Heritage Foundation report.
Economic Growth: Dr. New does consider the effect of economic growth at some level, and this can reduce the perceived need to abort, and thus can lowers the abortion ratio.
CPCS, Ultrasound, Sidewalk Counseling: Crisis pregnancy centers have become extremely more effective over the past fifteen years, as has ultrasound technology (3D & 4D), as has sidewalk counseling (often working as a referral service to thousands of CPCs), all of which has reduced the abortion ratio, and which is ignored by the Heritage report even though the influence of these significant factors can vary state-by-state in ways that could undermine Dr. News efforts at covariant analysis.
Pregnancies Down: The pregnancy rate has been plummeting among some age groups, and especially among teens. According to the Centers for Disease Control, there has been an explosion of birth control use, and especially so among young women. Today, moms give their own daughters the pill, and condom use has skyrocketed among teens since the late 1980s, and so among teenagers for example, the subject of Dr. New's February 2007 report, the pregnancy rate has plummeted over 30%, and that greatly reduces the number of abortions. So, when the pro-life industry sees abortion numbers plummet, and the Heritage Foundation tells them what they want to hear, "it's because of your child-killing regulations," no one seriously challenges the results (except for the Colorado Right To Life coalition from their Open Letter to Dr. James Dobson.)
Chemical Abortions: Pro-life studies that claim success with child-killing regulations often ignore chemical abortions, like RU-486 which has grown in use through the 1990s and especially over the last few years.
Abortion Lowers Abortion: Abortion itself makes women infertile, and so as the fertility of young women drops, the number of abortions drop, not because of our regulations, but because women who waited 24 hours, or who signed informed consent forms, now are injured and perhaps can never again conceive a child.
So, many pro-life activists no the fallacies of unchallenged studies that tell the pro-life industry what it wants to hear, that regulating child killing is effective.
Partial-birth Abortion: PBA bans have no authority to prevent even a single abortion, and while Dr. New indicates that the raw data is insufficient to give much confidence, he still optimistically reports that PBA bans have saved children from being killed, and completely ignores the potential negative consequences of the bans themselves (that is, how more children may die as a result of PBA).
Relying on Abortionists: Abortionists lie. And they are the primary source for the data. The Heritage Foundation reports employ abortion statistics which are themselves notoriously unreliable, with states reporting numbers of abortions than can double or halve themselves in a year's time. Vermont enacted no child-killing regulations and yet reports a 44% drop through the 1990s. If National Right To Life had passed child-killing regulations in Vermont, the pro-life industry, enabled by the Heritage Foundation, would hype their fundraising, claiming great credit for that drop, when in reality other factors produce whatever reduction actually occurred (the numbers themselves being unreliable).
Relying on Clinton: Democrats in places of influence, health department regulators, abortion clinic administrators, etc., preferred lower numbers of reported abortions during the Clinton years (roughly during the time of Dr. New's study) to deny claims that Republicans reduce abortion more than Democrats. The Heritage Foundation, normally astute politically, somehow completely missed this major political factor that lowered abortion reporting. The Colorado Department of Health reported abortion statistics for 2000 (see their Induced Terminations of Pregnancy, apparently not online, but the CRTL office has a photocopy of some pages). In their report, the Colorado Dept. of Health indicated that the Clinton administration cut off funding used for collecting abortion statistics, "funding for states to sustain reporting systems was eliminated in 1995, and Colorado has had very limited resources available to maintain or improve the reporting system for induced terminations of pregnancy." Thus "these numbers significantly underestimate" actual abortions, and use these statistics with: "great caution."
Look to Colorado: Colorado enacted no child-killing regulations during the years of the Heritage Foundation report, yet saw one of the largest drops in reported abortions according to the State Health Department, from 12,679 in 1990 to 4,215 in 2000 (adding, "reporting... not... consistent over time"). This two-thirds drop in abortions reported by the state (none of which, remember, is reliable), is greater than the average drop nationwide in abortion among teenagers of 50% that Dr. New concludes occurred in significant part due to child-killing regulations. Yet in Colorado we had no such regulations during the years of his study! So how about Colorado's drop? If we had enacted informed consent, waiting periods, and parental involvement in killing their grandchildren, what? Would our abortion rate have dropped to about zero? The way that the pro-life industry is going, they may end up passing a law prohibiting abortion reporting, and then when zero abortions are finally reported, the Heritage Foundation can declare victory in the war against the unborn!
Deflecting Attention: When state legislators pass laws prying into the incidence of teen abortions, the abortion chains in those states can simply underreport to deflect attention. Planned Parenthood does not obey mandatory reporting laws for child molestation; and it easily misreports abortion numbers because this service is mostly a cash business; and many young women don't want their parents to find out what they have done; and many adult customers don't want a paper trail of their shame; and according to their own websites, Planned Parenthood abortion mills don't even accept checks for this service. And since an abortionist commits murder, it's not surprising that whenever convenient, he also lies.
Sidewalk counselors may not have degrees in statistics, but killing kids is more about right and wrong than numbers. And while statistics can easily mislead, right and wrong are simple enough for a child to understand. When you compromise on Do not murder, the results easily backfire, and abortion can become more entrenched. But don't expect the pro-life industry to seriously examine its claims of success, nor any harmful consequences of its strategy, like promoting moral relativism and legal positivism, and like further eroding the child's personhood in the mind of the public and among governing officials. All Christians, and all pro-life ministries, should read and sign Colorado Right To Life's Forty Year Pledge, to never compromise on God's enduring command, Do not murder!
Today's Resource: Get the Colorado Right To Life DVD, Forty Years in the Wilderness! This is the most powerful DVD that Bob Enyart Live has been involved with, and it includes Bob's entire Focus on the Strategy II, the sequel to our popular analysis of Christian political strategy. You will LOVE this DVD, or your money back!