Critics Suggest Guttmacher's Pro-Abortion Report Ignores Negative Evidence
by Bill Fancher and Jody Brown
May 4, 2006
(AgapePress) - - Pro-lifers are condemning a pro-abortion report being released today by the Alan Guttmacher Institute. They say the report, titled "Abortion in Women's Lives," attempts to deny the mounting evidence that abortion harms women both physically and psychologically. According to its website, the Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI) began as a "semiautonomous division" of Planned Parenthood Federation of America -- and today remains a "special affiliate" to the taxpayer-supported abortion-provider. The Institute's namesake actually served as president of PPFA for more than a decade in the 1960s and 1970s. AGI's mission? To advance "sexual and reproductive health" -- buzzwords typically used by organizations that promote abortion.
Consequently it should come as no surprise that the Institute would release a pro-abortion report. Concerned Women for America (CWA) is not surprised, saying a Guttmacher report on abortion should be taken as seriously as a "tobacco industry report on nicotine."
"True to form, Guttmacher asserts that abortion is safe," says CWA president Wendy Wright, "then claims abortion providers have the solution for reducing what it says is harmless." Wright then offers this thought: "If abortion is harmless like Guttmacher claims, why should there be fewer of them?"
Wright's organization has chronicled the physical and emotional risks of abortion. "Clearly, abortion carries numerous medical risks -- even death, as we have seen with the abortion pill RU 486," says the CWA president. "The physical and emotional trauma a woman endures during and after an abortion can be excruciating." And taking an innocent human life simply because a pregnancy is unwanted or unplanned leaves scars, she says -- "some physical, some psychological, and some spiritual."
Wright's take on the new Guttmacher report lines up with that of Troy Newman of Operation Rescue. Newman says the report attempts to put a "nice face" on the evil of abortion, without any evidence. As he puts it: "Guttmacher loads their reports with quotes and evidence from themselves -- and it's full of junk science and junk reporting."
He points out that AGI ignores more than two dozen studies that have linked abortion to breast cancer. "They say that [abortion] may even prevent some forms of cancer, although they don't have any studies or proof to underscore that," he says.
"If it wasn't such a serious subject that millions of women have been injured through abortion, both psychologically and physically, this report would be absolutely laughable," Newman adds. "They whitewash abortion to the point where they want to say abortion's actually good for you."
The report says there is virtually no risk in first-trimester abortions and that there are no long-term mental effects of abortion. Newman suggests the Institute is releasing the report as a last-ditch effort to salvage what he says is a dying pro-abortion industry.
