BOOK SHELF How abortion negates equality and choice

Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing, by Ryan T. Anderson and Alexandra DeSanctis (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2022). Hardcover/paperback 256 pages.

Only a few months before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion invented in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, Dr Ryan T. Anderson and Alexandra DeSanctis published Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing. In this exhaustive work, they show us the wider impacts of abortion, which corrupts society, politics, the law, science and medicine itself.

It begins with the familiar case of an abortionist, Dr Anthony Levatino, experiencing his Damascus moment while performing an abortion, shortly after the death of his five-year-old daughter who had been hit by a car.

The irrefutable reality of human life in the womb and the tragedy of abortion, which has killed over 65 million babies in the U.S. alone, demand the reform of the legal, structural and cultural frameworks which support it. These allow those in power to deem certain lives expendable, allowing people to eliminate "populations that we don't want to have too many of", in the words of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. As Mother Teresa of Calcutta put it in her 1994 brief to the court, "Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being's entitlement by virtue of his humanity."

Early chapters address the harm of abortion to the unborn child and the myth that it empowers women with choices which enhance their equality in their careers and lifestyle. The writers assert the personhood and worth of the child in the womb, and insist on the consequent right to protection. As for the advantages to women, they point to the lack of support for pregnant women from men who view it as the woman's problem alone. The physical harm to women, described in the scandalous Kermit Gosnell case, demonstrates how fake is the rosy picture of safe and legal "clinics". These authors' arguments are developed at length and portray the hypocrisy of the so-called pro-choice case.

It is in the chapter detailing the actual harm done to equality and choice that this work punches a huge hole in the fictions built to dignify legal abortion. Statistics of abortion among non-whites, the poor, disabled and those deemed mentally unfit show that the dreams of the early 20th-century eugenics movement — then focused also on sterilising the immigrant masses — are being fulfilled today.

Wittingly or not, Planned Parenthood — the largest single provider of abortions in the U.S. — perpetuates racially discriminatory beliefs. Black women are five times more likely than whites, and Hispanic women twice as likely, to abort their babies. This is why Planned Parenthood centres are heavily concentrated in areas of low-income households, while it claims to provide services to minority women who need affordable health care. Meanwhile, white women have the lowest rate at 6.6% abortions per 1,000 whites, alongside 23.8% for blacks.

Another form of discrimination occurs on the basis of sex and disability, where abortion is chosen on account of unwanted characteristics of the unborn child. Although there is insufficient data on gender-selective abortion in the U.S., progressive elites are silent on the global destruction of millions of girl babies, due to the feminist dogma of female autonomy, and are opposed to requiring patients to give a reason for their choice.

Early diagnosis of Down syndrome has made abortion almost a matter of course in the Western world, and the authors are passionate on this issue. No child is "perfect" and children with disabilities are no less valuable and lovable than those without them. They write: "The truly human response to suffering is compassion — not to eliminate suffering by eliminating the one who suffers."

In any event, the "suffering" is overstated, and the case study of "Jon" and his fulfilling life in a supportive family, with his routines and interests, demonstrates this. Anderson and DeSanctis insist that the term "pro-choice" is a misnomer, and it is the absence of alternatives, such as those offered by Manhattan's Sisters of Life, which forces women into abortion, too often compelled by "partners" and one-way counselling to see it as their only choice.

One chapter begins with two reflections on how abortion has corrupted the practice of medicine. One is an account of the wonderful advances in maternal care, such as ultrasound screening, which have contributed so much to the health of mothers and babies. The other concerns the Hippocratic Oath, once the gold standard of doctor care, but now too often stripped of its millennia-old prohibition of abortion.

The authors trace the decline of the medical profession through the story of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and how its ethic shifted from the life-of-the-mother consideration to a complete revision of the meanings of "healthcare" and "therapeutic". Moreover, ACOG became a lobby for the expansion of abortion "rights". It even provided support for the Clinton administration's opposition to legislation before Congress in 1996 banning partial-birth abortion.

We learn that the original impetus for ACOG's change was chiefly to protect its members who carried out abortions, rather than any abstract concern for women's rights, and that this was the basis of its argument to trust the physician on good medical practice, which helped secure the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. Finally, in 1992, the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling on Planned Parenthood v. Casey removed the issue from one of doctors' judgement to one of female freedom and autonomy.

All along, the argument was supported with false statistics of thousands of women supposedly dying in "back-alley" abortions. In 1973 an obstetrics textbook claimed that 5,000 pregnant women died each year from clandestine abortions, when the national total of maternal deaths in the U.S. was fewer than 150! Pro-abortion advocates believed that these shameless fabrications were totally justified by the "morality" of their cause, as another reformed abortionist, Dr Bernard Nathanson later admitted.

Abortion has surely perverted medicine from its aim to heal and never harm!

The remaining chapters of Tearing Us Apart are devoted to the harm that abortion does to the rule of law, politics and the democratic process. The slippery concept of the Living Constitution, or judicial pragmatism, which maintains that a centuries-old document can be radically re-interpreted in light of current needs, thrived in the era of Roe v. Wade.

It is noteworthy that even eminent jurists who were no friends of the pro-life movement have branded the decision as bad law. Obama administration official, Edward Lazarus — former law clerk to Supreme Court judge and author of the ruling, Harry Blackmun — has branded it "indefensible" as constitutional interpretation and judicial method. Even the late Justice Ginsburg described this imagined discovery of a "right to privacy" in the Bill of Rights as "heavy-handed judicial intervention".

The issue of foetal viability has featured prominently in recent "heartbeat" laws in states such as Texas. Back in the 1970s, it was raised in the debate on Roe v. Wade, but was left unresolved. In 1992, Planned Parenthood v. Casey went further, however, ruling that states may not prohibit abortions before the point when a foetus could survive outside the womb in any way that amounts to a "substantial obstacle". This led to a general understanding that the law upheld abortion on demand. Authors Anderson and DeSanctis rightly call these decision perversions of the rule of law, which have stood for decades solely to permit elective abortions.

When we turn to politics and the democratic process, we meet a procession of Democratic Party politicians who progressed from professions of mildly pro-life views to ardent support for permissive abortion laws. Even Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign slogan of "safe, legal, and rare" had become anathema by the time of the 2019 Democratic Party primaries, as it suggested that abortion is a bad thing.

Pro-life politicians have been marginalised by Democratic Party power-brokers, and many professing Catholics, such as Joe Biden and the late Ted Kennedy, have recanted their former opposition to abortion. Some have preferred to champion women's autonomy and declared their own unwillingness to impose their faith on others.

In a famous speech at University of Notre Dame in 1984, New York Governor Mario Cuomo claimed to be able to oppose abortion in his personal life while not opposing it politically, a line that Biden has taken ever since and used to pitch for left-wing feminist support during the 2019 primaries.

He has also reversed his support for the Hyde Amendment, which has denied federal Medicaid for abortions, and its repeal has become an issue, with the Democratic Party currently committed to full funding. This remains a decision for individual states; but the authors explain how Planned Parenthood has been able to milk federal funds by inflating the extent of concurrent services which it claims to have provided to its clients.

Public opinion is confused, with 38 per cent of Americans polled unaware that Roe v. Wade is connected with abortion, while a majority want it to stay in place; yet respondents split on 49 per cent as to whether abortion should be legal. Nevertheless, contemporary culture has long since normalised abortion and now even celebrates abortion-on-demand as a human right, even while many Americans are unaware of the history about it.

The mainstream media, the social media and even the government-school system exercise strict censorship of pro-life views and information. Journalists and TV anchor-persons apply different standards of interrogation when hosting representatives of opposed sides in the debate.

Tearing Us Apart provides several case studies of this phenomenon, such as how the U.S. media has unfailingly downplayed the horrors of partial-birth and born-alive abortions. Concerning the film industry, we learn that Planned Parenthood has advised on more than 150 movies and shows, and that at the 2017 Oscars prominent actresses sported this organisation's pins!

The authors warn that even after the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, pro-lifers will still face an uphill struggle to convince their neighbours that unborn children deserve protection under the law.

Now that this bad law has been overturned, and abortion law is once again solely a matter for the states, what do we have to show for it? Heroic Supreme Court justices, such as Brett Kavanagh and Amy Coney Barrett, have been hounded and threatened, while law-makers in progressive states have shored up permissive abortion regimes. However, a raft of heartbeat laws and other pro-life measures have been passed through legislatures in states such as Texas.

Unlike here in Australia, the abortion issue is a more equal battle in the U.S., although still an uphill one for the pro-life movement. We can only marvel at the size of the U.S. life marches, the prominent role of Christian churches, and the proliferation of groups prepared to support women with unplanned pregnancies.

Tearing Us Apart is an important addition to the resources of the pro-life movement, as it shines a light on so many more aspects of the abortion issue, other than those concerning merely the ethical, medical and social aspects. It has much to offer the Australian reader and covers so many aspects in impressive depth, with an abundance of reasoned argument and evidence. It comes with a wealth of end-notes and a useful index. Endeavour Forum commends it to our readers.

John Morrissey is a retired secondary school teacher who has taught in government, independent and Catholic schools. He lives in the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn with his blue heeler, Missie.

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