“Pro-life advocates in New York State have a big challenge before them in the new legislative session as pro-abortion Democrats are expected to leverage newly acquired power to advance legislation posing significant assaults on life. “
Alexandra DeSanctis of National Review offers some facts to counter the historical inaccuracies of recent New York Times opinions.
Just days after Christmas, the New York Times editorial board released a lengthy feature on threats against abortion rights, asserting that the pro-life movement has invented the concept of “fetal personhood” in order to erode female autonomy.
The series delves into extremely rare applications of state legislation protecting the unborn — bills that criminalize drug abuse by pregnant mothers, for example — to illustrate the left-wing claim that American women are living in a “Handmaid’s Tale” created by opponents of abortion.
But this attempted bombshell exposé is in fact a compilation of half-baked pro-choice myths, historical inaccuracies, and philosophical elisions mashed together to create a bludgeon against the pro-life movement, toward which the Times evidently harbors significant animosity.
An overwhelming majority of pro-life people agree with the Times, for instance, that laws penalizing women for having suffered a miscarriage or a stillbirth are unacceptable. And yet the entire series rests on a straw man: Abortion opponents rejoice when pregnant women are thrown in jail, because they care more about punishing the errant than about protecting human life.
Far from being a thoughtful reflection on the competing legal rights of mother and fetus, the Times series offers little more than blatant fearmongering, with the help of exceptionally uncommon horror stories that it uses to demonize the pro-life perspective. Here are the three most inaccurate claims from the feature:
Read the full article at the National Review.
In an Opinion piece published in the New York Post, John Podhoretz begins as follows…
Gov. Andrew Cuomo took to the stage at his third inauguration to express his horror at President Trump, which is pretty funny when you think about it: The politician Trump most resembles is . . . Andrew Cuomo.
Cuomo attacked Trump on New Year’s Day for sowing discord. “America’s only threat is from within,” he said. “It is the growing division amongst us.” But wasn’t it Cuomo who, in 2015, said that pro-life and pro-gun conservatives were “extreme” and “have no place in the state of New York”?
He is their governor too.
Thirty-two percent of New Yorkers identify as pro-life. A majority of upstate voters in 2015 opposed new gun-control restrictions. Do these people “have no place in the state of New York”? And just who in this case was responsible for widening the divisions between us but this state’s governor? Doesn’t this make it sound like Trump was taking lessons in how to divide us from . . . Cuomo?
You can read the full piece at the New York Post.
Syracuse.com published the following editorial by Michele Sterlace-Accorsi, executive director of Feminists Choosing Life of New York.
Women’s rights continue to be front and center in our body politic. As they should. Abortion rights, however, continue to dominate, especially here in New York. Rather than focus our energy on matters most feminists agree upon, such as equal pay for equal worth, considering women in New York continue to be paid nearly 13 percent less than men for the same workplace performance, according to the New York Women’s Foundation, pro-choice feminists are pushing hard to expand abortion in New York.
Despite the fact that New York law already permits abortion for any reason during the first 24 weeks of pregnancy and the fact that an overturned Roe vs. Wade would not affect this “right,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo and others are pushing hard to enact the Reproductive Health Act (RHA). Apparently, it is also irrelevant that, according to the Guttmacher Institute, New York already has an abortion rate (29.6 per 1,000 women) that is twice the national average (14.6 per 1,000). Abortion advocates claim the passage of the RHA will be a first priority when the New York state Legislature convenes Jan. 9.
To be clear, the RHA legalizes abortion “on demand” during the third trimester of pregnancy. The RHA’s legislative intent ushers in a broad health exception for late-term abortion, which courts have interpretedto allow women to abort fully viable fetuses for essentially any reason, including economic or familial health. The RHA, by repealing a section of Public Health Law, also would allow for viable infants born alive during an abortion to die without treatment.
In addition, the RHA potentially endangers women’s lives by permitting the performance of surgical late term abortions in facilities other than hospitals, and by individuals other than duly licensed physicians. According to studies, including “Risk Factors for Legal Induced Abortion-Related Mortality in the United States,” published by Obstetrics & Gynecology, the “risk of death … for women obtaining legally induced abortions … increase[s] exponentially by 38 percent for each additional week of gestation.”
The RHA also potentially re-victimizes victims of sex trafficking and domestic violence by completing gutting abortion from New York’s penal laws. Relevant abortion related provisions in New York’s criminal statutes allow women to hold abusers accountable for the death of wanted unborn children and for coerced abortions. If the RHA act is enacted, women can no longer hold violent partners criminally accountable for killing wanted unborn children. While pregnant, my now ex- husband tried to push me down the stairs. If he had, and my unborn child had died because of my fall, I would not have been able to prosecute him for the death of my Noah, if the RHA had been the law.I’m not the only one. Studies, including “Acknowledging a Persistent Truth: Domestic Violence in Pregnancy,” published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, show that domestic violence escalates in pregnancy, with significant consequences for women and their unborn children, including death.
Further, studies also show that victims of domestic violence and sex trafficking undergo coerced, but otherwise “safe and legal,” abortions. These studies, include, respectively, “Associations Between Intimate Partner Violence and Termination of Pregnancy: A Systemic Review and Meta-Analysis,” published in PLOS Medicine, and “The Health Consequences of Sex Trafficking, Their Implications for Identifying Victims in Healthcare Facilities,” published in Beazley Institute for Health Law & Policy.
Rather than fight for ways to disempower women, jeopardize women’s health and destroy viable humans in utero, as well as children born alive, all feminists and legislators should be focusing on real women’s issues — none of which are contained in the Reproductive Health Act. Otherwise, New York surely will become a dark place in which to live.
The New York Times editorial board released a major series of opinion pieces to promote abortion.
The Times delivered this cleverly designed and severely one-sided puff-piece focusing on New York State to its international audience. Each piece makes an argument out of an exception, leveraging partially-told stories to emotionally hook their readers. Discerning readers will see through the smoke screen, but a few quotes are worth immediate comment.
A society that embraces a legal concept of fetal personhood would necessarily compromise existing ideals of individual freedom.
New York Times
Somehow, the Times argues that recognizing that people are people everywhere at any stage of development would reduce freedom. Every time a society has determined that some people are “more human” than others, bad things happen.
In addition to bringing New York’s abortion law up to today’s federal standard, the Reproductive Health Act would permit nurse practitioners, physicians assistants and midwives to provide nonsurgical abortion care, reducing wait times.
New York Times
While common sense measures like requiring abortionists to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital have been enacted in many states around the country, the
Times and the pro-abortion legislators behind the Reproductive Health Act (RHA) are pushing for lower standards of care in women’s reproductive health. Allowing non-physicians to perform abortions (the RHA doesn’t specify “nonsurgical”) may reduce waiting times…but lowers quality of care.
Gov. Cuomo will fight to pass the Reproductive Health Act and the Comprehensive Contraceptive Coverage Act within the first 30 days of the new session.
