Hello friends, welcome to the Case for Life podcast. Do pro-life laws kill women? We’re gonna look at that in this episode of the Case for Life podcast. If you have not already liked us on social media, please do so. And also, can I mention again, if you’ve not received a copy yet or purchased a copy yet, I should say, of the Case for Life second edition, can I encourage you to do so? You can do so at scottklusendorf.com. where you can also register for our pro-life training course if you haven’t already done so. Both the book and the course are there. I hope you’ll take advantage of them. All right. Vice President Kamala Harris has been all over the place decrying the fact that laws restricting abortion, as she believes, kill women. And she cited a couple of cases in particular that we’re going to look at today. She has cited the case of Amber Thurman, a Georgia young woman, who took mail order abortion drugs and ended up having complications and ended up eventually dying from allegedly not getting the medical care that she needed because of pro-life laws. That’s the argument. So all over the press who bought this wholesale is the lie that pro-life laws are killing women. This is nonsense. In fact, anybody that spends 2 seconds looking this up on the Internet can figure out what the real problem is. The problem in the death of Amber Thurman was not that pro-life laws protected the unborn. and somehow stopped her from getting medical care. The problem was she was able to obtain these abortion drugs across state borders, have them mailed to her, and take them with no physician supervision, no oversight from a doctor. The real issue here is abortion drugs being widely available to women with no supervision. individual or direct medical supervision. And that means women who shouldn’t be taking these pills because of pre-existent conditions aren’t being warned to stay clear of them. They’re able to get these drugs like candy. That’s the issue, not the pro-life view protecting the unborn. But let’s go a little deeper here. Here’s what’s really going on. What’s being rehashed here is the old coat hanger back alley abortion argument. And it goes like this. If we restrict abortion through law, women will still get abortions illegally and they will die from them or be harmed by them, if nothing else. This is not a persuasive way to argue. Now, as a pro-lifer, of course, I mourn any woman who dies from an abortion, legal or illegal. That’s a given. All pro-lifers mourn the deaths of women. But notice the objection assumes the unborn aren’t human. Because if you don’t begin with the assumption the unborn are not human, what you’re essentially arguing is this— because some people will die or be harmed attempting to intentionally kill others, we ought to make it safe for those who want to kill others to do it without any risk of harm. That’s a ridiculous, absurd argument, but that is precisely what pro-abortionists are arguing, that because some people will be harmed attempting to kill others, we ought to make it safe and legal for them to do it. I mean, imagine some rogue country deciding to legalize bank robbery so that it’s safer for felons. That’s how ridiculous this argument is. It only works if you engage in question begging. Namely, you assume the unborn aren’t human. But that’s precisely the question at issue in the abortion debate. Are the unborn one of us? If so, we ought not kill them to make it safer for those who want to do the killing. But secondly, I think we need to point out that historically, pro-abortionists now, as they have done in the past, overstate and distort statistics to make it look like millions or thousands of women in a particular area are dying from abortion restrictions. And this is simply not true. Prior to Roe v. Wade, yes, some women died from illegal abortions. That’s true. But did they die on the order of 5 to ten thousand a year, as we’re typically told by those who support the practice? And the answer is no, they did not. And I’m going to give you 4 pro-abortion sources that point to the fact that it’s a lie that women died from illegal abortion on the order of 5 to ten thousand a year. It’s simply not true. Pro-abortion source number one. Dr. Christopher Tietz, who was Planned Parenthood’s chief statistician in the 19 sixties and early seventies, at the time before Roe, when women were allegedly dying from all these illegal abortions, told the New York Times the following. that the claim of 5 to ten thousand deaths a year was, quote, unmitigated nonsense, unquote. OK, that’s not a pro-life guy. That’s Planned Parenthood’s own stat dude saying that. OK, so don’t say that’s just pro-life propaganda. That’s one of your guys, if you support abortion, who said that. second pro-abortion source, Dr. Mary Calderon, Planned Parenthood’s chief medical person in the sixties and seventies. Her medical director career helped her oversee what Planned Parenthood was doing. She was involved in several groups that support abortion. And here’s what Planned Parenthood’s own medical director said about illegal abortion in a nineteen sixty American Journal of Public Health article. She said 2 things that are worth noting. Number one, Dr. Calderon said that the death rate from illegal abortion was so low it wasn’t even worth commenting on. And she gave reasons why it was low. Number one, with the widespread introduction of penicillin, women were not dying from post-op infections the way that people used to die or get ill from post-surgery because of infection. Penicillin had removed the infection risk. Secondly, she pointed out that almost all illegal abortion, she estimated, 90 percent of all illegal abortions were not done by Rodrigo in a coat hanger with a coat hanger in the back alley of America. Rather, they were done safely by physicians in good standing in the law. So these physicians were simply skirting the law and they were performing these illegal abortions. It was not some dude with no medical experience with a coat hanger in the back alley somewhere. third pro-abortion source, actually to continue with Mary Calderon, she also made it very clear that although some women were harmed, it was the small number that were self-inducing their abortions. And that was a very small number, she argued, but it was not happening on large scale the way that pro-abortionists want us to believe that it’s happening. third pro-abortion source, Dr. Daniel Callahan. He wrote the book, Abortion Law, Morality and Choice. Dr. Callahan, a bioethicist at the Hastings Institute, argued that that even though he supports abortion, the claim of 5 to ten thousand deaths a year was mathematically improbable, if not nearly impossible to sustain. And here’s why. He made the observation that when you look at demographic data, women of reproductive age in the U.S., that there are about thirty five thousand deaths a year, at most forty thousand deaths a year from women of reproductive age from all causes here in the U.S. And he said it’s ridiculous, if not insanely silly, to argue that so high a number as 5 to ten thousand of those deaths come from one source, illegal abortion. He says that stretches credibility to the breaking point. 4th source, again, another pro-abortion source, Dr. Bernard Nathanson, who wrote the book Aborting America. Now, right away, some critics might be saying, wait a minute, he became a pro-life advocate. Yeah, he did. Later in life, he did become a pro-life advocate. But Dr. Nathanson said something very interesting, While he was still performing abortions, he conceded first that he had presided over sixty thousand deaths. But he also very candidly admitted that he and Dr. Lawrence later, as the 2 co-founders of NARAL, the National Abortion Rights Action League, had intentionally made up the lie of 5 to ten thousand deaths a year and sold it wholesale to the media who bought it without any kind of critical review that’s how we came up with this number of 5 to ten thousand deaths a year not based on actual statistics but based on a made-up number from the 2 co-founders of naral now again i want to make it clear pro-lifers We always mourn the death of any woman that dies from an illegal abortion or a legal one for that matter. don’t fall for the claim that 5 to ten thousand deaths a year came from illegal abortion. That’s not statistically sustainable as an argument. And most importantly, recognize that the back alley argument assumes the unborn are not human. And the argument goes nowhere without that assumption. So make sure you keep the main thing the main thing. The issue here is, are the unborn one of us? And if so, should they be killed to make it safer for those that want to do the killing? I think we know the answer to that. That’s the issue we always want to focus on. Thanks for joining us today. I look forward to seeing you the next time.