LCG: Abortion Proponents Lied to Public

The July-August issue of LCG’s Tomorrow’s World has an article titled “The Deception of Abortion” by Gerald Weston that states:

    Abortion proponents who fight to preserve the Roe v. Wade decision rarely acknowledge that the Jane Roe of the lawsuit—Norma McCorvey—is today a fierce opponent of abortion, even to the point of filing a class action suit in 2003 to have Roe v. Wade overturned. In this suit, “Among her 5,437 pages of evidence were affidavits from more than 1,000 women who testified that having an abortion had devastating emotional, physical, and psychological effects on them. Today McCorvey is passionately and publicly committed to undoing the damage she did in her earlier years and ending legalized abortion in America” The Marketing of Evil, Kupelian, p. 210).
     Also rarely mentioned is the fact that McCorvey did not seek out an abortion at the start of the legal process that led to Roe v. Wade. In the course of arranging an adoption for her unborn child, her attorney put her in touch with two attorneys who wanted to find a “test case” to establish abortion rights. McCorvey was not some young crusader for reproductive rights; she was a frightened young woman who believed what her lawyers told her. Thankfully, because the legal process took so long, the child she was carrying was born—not aborted—and was put up for adoption. But her lawsuit led to the deaths of millions of other children—a fact she now regrets.
     And McCorvey is far from the only one with regrets. And regrets are not just found among those who have had abortions—some who have performed abortions have also reconsidered their role. In 1969, the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws was founded by physician Bernard Nathanson and abortion advocate Lawrence Lader, with help from noted feminist Betty Friedan. NARAL set out to convince the American public that abortion should be legalized, but how could such an audacious task be accomplished? How did Nathanson and his co-conspirators sell an unsuspecting American public on abortion? Was it with truth? Was it with science? Was it with medical expertise? What about the morality of it? In Nathanson’s own words:

“We persuaded the media that the cause of permissive abortion was a liberal, enlightened, sophisticated one.… We announced to the media that we had taken polls and that 60 percent of Americans were in favor of permissive abortion. This is the tactic of the self-fulfilling lie. Few people care to be in the minority. We aroused enough sympathy to sell our program of permissive abortion by fabricating the number of illegal abortions done annually in the U.S. The actual figure was approaching 100,000, but the figure we gave to the media repeatedly was 1 million.
“Repeating the big lie often enough convinces the public. The number of women dying from illegal abortions was around 200-250 annually. The figure we constantly fed to the media was 10,000. These false figures took root in the consciousness of Americans, convincing many that we needed to crack the abortion law” The Marketing of Evil, Kupelian, p. 191).

There were other confessed lies, but you get the point…

      Today Nathanson is doing everything he can to reverse the horrendous tragedy he helped to start…
     Bernard Nathanson, Norma McCorvey and thousands of others, whether the manipulators or the manipulated, are part of a greater deception. The Bible speaks of a time in which we have all “walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience” (Ephesians 2:2). Revelation 12:9 tells us that this spirit, this prince of the power of the air, is so powerful that he has deceived the whole world.
     Thankfully, not everyone has been deceived about the abortion issue. Several years after the Supreme Court ruling, a 15-year-old rape victim found herself in a situation like Norma McCorvey’s. But there was an important difference; the law now gave her the right to abort her child. Yet this brave young person chose to give birth to a baby daughter and turn her over for adoption to a couple who could care for her better than she could. The girl she brought into this world grew up in a loving family, went to university, became a social worker, married and had children. Today, millions of young people know of Pam Stenzel, an inspirational speaker and powerful advocate for abstinence, who teaches young people the price of having sex before marriage. When it comes to her own birth, in Pam’s own words, “I did not deserve to die because of the sin of my father.”

An article in an earlier Tomorrow’s World had the following insert:

Children of Carthage

     Today’s nations should learn a grim lesson from the way children were treated in ancient Carthage, and from the fate that befell the city. In 300BC, Carthage was the center of a rich trading empire, and was a rival of Rome. Its citizens were wealthy, cultured and educated, yet remarkably callous about taking human life. Unwanted orphans and widows were killed “to reduce the amount of poverty and suffering in the city” ( When Nations Die, Black, p. 164). Carthaginians burned thousands of their own children to appease their patron goddess, Tanet. Ancient writers report that frequent public sacrifices “took place in front of a bronze statue of the god, with arms outstretched over a blazing fire; the child slid down over the arms and fell” into the flames ( The Phoenicians and the West, Aubet, p. 211). The necropolis at Carthage contains more than 20,000 urns with charred remains of infants and children. This gruesome practice finally ended when the Romans besieged and destroyed Carthage in 146BC.
     Historian Jim Nelson Black wondered how the murder of unborn children in modern societies is any different from the murder of children in ancient Carthage? He asked: “Isn’t the rite of abortion our culture’s sacrifice to the gods of materialism and greed? The Phoenicians killed many thousands of children… But in the entire history of Carthage or of Rome, they never killed 30 million in the name of “a woman’s right to control her own body” (Black, p. 166).
     The media lavished much attention on the famous Roman Catholic nun, Mother Teresa, but only infrequently reported her stinging rebukes of contemporary society. Mother Teresa likened abortion to “a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?… Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of peace and love is abortion” ( ibid., pp. 214–215).
     Carthage continued its barbaric practice of murdering children until the day it was destroyed. Will our society today, which permits far greater evil, do the same?

—Douglas S. Winnail

Killing For Convenience
Reasons Given for Abortion:
Having a baby will change my life	76%
Cannot afford a baby now	68%
Want to avoid single parenthood	51%
Unready for responsibility	31%
Don’t want others to know of pregnancy	31%
Not mature enough to have a child	30%
Fetus has a health problem	7%
Woman was victim of rape or incest	1%
(Family Planning Perspectives, July/August 1988, pp. 169–170)