Foxes Find Chicken-Coop Security Measures Excessive

A year-long investigation conducted by foxes has determined that poultry farmers devote excessive attention to security measures for chicken coops. Details on this important study will be available later. For now, consider a similarly stunning scientific report posted on October 12 on the website of the New York Times.

“A yearlong investigation by NARAL Pro-Choice New York found that crisis pregnancy centers … feed women information that has been medically refuted (including an old standby, rejected by the National Cancer Institute, that abortions cause higher rates of breast cancer).” The abortion lobby says that its competitors engage in misleading advertising. What a surprise! And—what a coincidence!—the crisis pregnancy centers tell the Times that Planned Parenthood engages in false advertising. But the Times story slaps down the pro-lifers’ claim (although it is demonstrably accurate) and lets the abortionists’ claim stand unquestioned.

By the way, did the National Cancer Institute say that abortion does not cause higher rates of breast cancer? No; the report said that the connection has not been demonstrated. Go ahead: research the question for yourself. Browse through the readily available literature, and see if you’re convinced that the connection is “medically refuted.”

The abortion lobby in New York is demanding regulations that would require crisis pregnancy centers to advertise the fact that they do not give abortion counseling, and thus do not provide pregnant women with every legal option available to them. But the same argument can be turned on the abortion clinics:

Unsurprisingly, Chris Slattery, the president of E.M.C. FrontLine Pregnancy Centers, considers the New York bill excessive. “They don’t do pro-life counseling,” Mr. Slattery said, referring to Planned Parenthood. “Why don’t we have on Planned Parenthood’s door ‘No pro-life counseling, only pro abortion counseling’—O.K.? Let’s just have a level playing field.”

Planned Parenthood responds to that argument by saying that its counselors are ready to help pregnant women arrange adoptions. Yet again, the Times relays that argument without question. But according to their own statistics, Planned Parenthood clinics arranged more than 324,000 abortions in 2008 (the last year for which full figures are available), and a mere 2,405 adoptions. By the way, that number of abortions performed by Planned Parenthood was up 6 percent from the previous year, while the number of adoptions was down by more than 50 percent.

The Times story on crisis pregnancy centers is just one more example of the help provided to the abortion industry by the mainstream media. Without that in-kind help the industry would have massive image problems, because fulltime abortion advocates—unlike their friends in journalism—seem incapable of presenting their case to the public effectively.

This year, for example, NARAL Pro- Choice Virginia produced a new video ad, entitled “This is what I learned at a Virginia Crisis Pregnancy Center.” In its own way the ad is outrageous. Yet pro-lifers might want to welcome it.

In the video, a series of young women appear before the camera and make a claim that, they say, was made by a counselor at a crisis pregnancy center. The ad concludes with NARAL’s counter-claim that all these claims were false. But the claims allegedly made by the crisis pregnancy center are not all false. Abortion does increase a woman’s risk of subsequent miscarriages and of contracting breast cancer. Abortion does entail the risk of serious complications. Sexual promiscuity does raise the risk of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. Condoms don’t eliminate those risks. Abstinence is the most effective method of birth control.

It’s true that some of the claims made on the video are exaggerated. (We have only NARAL’s word for it that the crisis pregnancy center made the claims in those inaccurate ways.) Still, a sensible young woman, hearing that an abortion carries all these risks, would want to know more. If she did her homework, she would learn that all of the claims have some validity.

Think about it: If you were marketing Sudz Beer, would you want to broadcast an ad ridiculing a rival’s claim that every bottle of Sudz contains three teaspoons of arsenic? How about if tests have shown “just” one teaspoon of arsenic in each bottle? So the net effect of the NARAL video is to place questions in the viewer’s mind: questions about the risks of abortion and of sexual promiscuity. The very questions that the crisis pregnancy centers are raising.

NARAL complains that the crisis pregnancy centers are confusing women. But this video illustrates the profound confusion in the minds of the NARAL folks, who think that they’re plugging their own cause by introducing the claims of their critics.