Abortion rights are inherently pro-life, a CNN writer said last weekend. In her piece, "Why supporting abortion is pro-life," Danielle Campoamor claims that anyone who is advocating for abortion restrictions is "endorsing the unnecessary deaths of women across a country."
It is inherently violent to call for the demolition of Roe v. Wade, and wish to return to a time when abortion was listed as the official cause of death for almost 2,700 women in the United States. By 1965, according to the Guttmacher Institute, 17% of all deaths attributed to pregnancy and childbirth were the result of illegal abortions, and those were the deaths officials reported; the actual number of lives lost is undeniably much higher. (CNN)
The National Review's Alexandra DeSanctis called the CNN writer out by name this week in a counter op-ed. "No, Danielle Campoamor, Abortion Is Not Pro-life." In her rebuttal, DeSanctis notes that Campoamor's pro-abortion piece is heavy on emotion but light on argument. All those numbers Campoamor includes to make her piece appear analytical and well researched don't have much weight behind them, according to DeSanctis.
"The slightest effort to pursue her hyperlinked citations reveals that her portrait of the anti-abortion hellscape looming on the horizon is not nearly as likely as her catastrophic tone suggests — nor does she prove that it ever really existed in the U.S. at all," she writes.
It is irresponsible for her "to cite unsubstantiated data and portray reports as having conclusively proven her point when that isn’t the case."
DeSanctis shares her own number - 55 million - the number of children aborted in the U.S. since Roe v. Wade.
Worse than her easily debunked statistics, Campoamor misses the main, moral issue of abortion, DeSanctis points out.
It befits a Planned Parenthood awardee, after all, to pen an entire essay declaring abortion pro-life without so much as noting that the fetus killed in an abortion is, in fact, alive. Astonishingly, Campoamor never once acknowledges — let alone grapples with the ethical complications of — the scientific reality of fetal life. To completely ignore that abortion necessarily extinguishes that life is an insult to the reader’s intelligence.