Andrea Friedman, Director of Reproductive Health Programs
The recent comment by Representative Todd Akin (R-MO), that women don’t get pregnant from “legitimate” rape because “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down” provoked an unusual outcry, but the strategy he is using is not unique. The use of bad science is part of a long-term effort to limit – or eliminate – women’s access to abortion and it has been effective in legislatures and encouraged by the courts.
The roadmap for passing legislation based on questionable science that will then be upheld in court is clear. Find someone with a scientific background to make an “Akin argument” – proclaim a scientific fact that justifies the conclusion that abortion is bad for women’s health. Repeat the “Akin argument” over and over as fact. Write it into legislation and then tout the proposal as being good for women’s health. When challenged in court by the real science, point to the initial scientific conclusion you made up, demonstrating medical uncertainty. Then note that the state’s interest is helping women. You’ve just secured a law that harms women in the name of helping them.
The legislative efforts are on-going. For example, a bill in Kansas earlier this year included a requirement that the physician tell a woman seeking an abortion that it will bring “risk of breast cancer and risks to the woman’s reproductive health.” The National Cancer Institute and others have solidly rebutted this proposition. Yet if this bill passes, Kansas will become the sixth state requiring doctors to inaccurately assert that there is a link between abortion and breast cancer. Similarly, five states require women to be told about an invented connection between abortion and future fertility.
The courts’ stamp of approval continues as well. Just this past July, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a South Dakota law that requires abortion providers to inform a woman seeking an abortion that she may be at risk of an “[i]ncreased risk of suicide ideation and suicide.” This ruling came despite overwhelming medical evidence to the contrary.
The 8th Circuit was not acting alone, it was relying on precedent from the Supreme Court. In 2007, the majority on the Court put its stamp of approval on using bad science to restrict access to abortion in Gonzales v. Carhart. In upholding a ban on a particular abortion procedure without a health exception, the majority gives deference in regards to medical decisions — not to science nor to a woman and her doctor, but to legislatures. The majority purports to be helping women with this decision, stating, “[w]hether to have an abortion requires a difficult and painful moral decision. While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained.”
An article in the New England Journal of Medicine says it best. In Gonzales, “[f]or the first time, the Court permits congressional judgment to replace medical judgment.”
Promoting abortion restrictions by arguing that they are being imposed for the woman’s own health and well-being, when in fact the opposite is the case, is one of the most cynical and unfortunately very effective strategies that opponents of abortion rights choose to deploy. In a recent piece, American’s United for Life President Chairmaine Yoest states, “it’s very important to establish… this foundational argument that there really are harms for women…It rounds out the pro-life position by putting a marker down to say, here’s why being pro-life is a pro-woman position.”
These distortions of medical facts should be rejected and should never become the basis for laws. We cannot let “Akin arguments” be used to undermine women’s health care. Neither courts nor politicians should impose their judgment, but instead should let women and their doctors make their own personal medical decisions, informed by evidence-based science.
This blog post was published in conjunction with Repro Health Watch, an exciting new edition of the Women’s Health Policy Report, which compiles and distributes media coverage of proposed and enacted state laws, ballot initiatives and litigation affecting women’s access to comprehensive reproductive health care.
When congressional opinions are becoming law and the Supreme Court seems to uphold these arcane lies regarding the reproductive process in women, our government no longer represent women,therefore we are disinfranchised.
Thank you for your advocacy on behalf of women everywhere. One thing you did not note in the blog was the longstanding policy (understated though it was in the media) of the GW Bush Administration’s effort to put into practice the very junk science arguments that are now being advanced in the States and Federal courts, namely, that having an abortion increases the likelihood of contracting cancer. I suppose this is a chicken and egg question in terms of which influenced which — the Feds and state/local municipalities or vice-versa…however, it is an importan tone as the election season ramps up and both the Presidency and Senate hang in the balance.
Well said!
While I may not like abortion and I honestly don’t think anyone of either gender particularity likes it or that every woman wants to have to have the procedure. But, it is nevertheless, the choice to be made by the woman based on her own thinking. But as you noted, when we allow junk science to be twisted many times over as to exhibit some future negative causal effect to a woman’s health, as particulars coming from abortion procedures, then pro-lifer morals get totally lost on lies that completely gut the meaning of what being “moral” is.
I am all for free speech and to everyone having their opinions. It is perfectly fine for those who are staunchly pro-life, to state their case as to why they think abortion is wrong. But don’t take real science down on a path of lies to farther an agenda that has no bearing on that of the actual physical health of a woman; doing that just simply makes their pro-life stance a complete lie.
We should expect more and more of this.
Right now in Kentucky, the legislators are trying to force the ACT college testing people to accept their students who do not know about evolution as a result of their creationism teachings. Biology cannot exist as a science without evolution. So, their answer is to attack the gatekeepers and change the rules to make the world safe for creationism.
They seem desperate to insulate all children from known and accepted science. In Missouri where I live, the primary elections included a constitutional amendment allowing for “school prayer”. Now, students can opt out of science if their parents are “offended” by the science teachings, and my children will have to hear about “intelligent design” in a setting that’s supposed to be serious. I wonder how long this one will last once the classroom fights begin and our test scores fall through the floor…. sigh.
Attention Conservatives: The science behind your smartphones and computers and military equipment and spy satellites and drones and smart bombs works on THE SAME PRINCIPLES and uses the SAME SCIENTIFIC METHODS AND SYSTEMS that underpin evolution and is just as correct. Same for climate science. You don’t get to decide which science branches you agree with. You either prove it wrong with peer-reviewed research, or you shut up.
I don’t understand how these opinions are becoming laws. Isn’t being impartial part of being an effective judge? And isn’t Rational Thought an actual class lawyers take?
Although not part of this discussion isn’t anyone else worried about the fact that the left is only offended that there are “no exceptions” to proposed abortion rules/laws? If these laws pass with ONLY the exception of rape and incest we’ll then go back to the days where the burden of proof is on the victim and we then revert back to vilifying the victims. Because, of course, she asked for it.
Please don’t call them pro-lifers, call them anti-choicers. If they were pro-life the pregnant women would have as much value as the “innocent fetus”.
I am surprised that the Reagan Administration’s investigation on the effects of abortion on women, purportedly to determine what the “Federal role” should be, is not a part of this discussion. PResident Reagan enlisted the help of then-Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, whose personal views were against abortion, to head a Federal Oversight Investigation on abortion, hearing from various groups, medical and psychological experts, and the research of the time. The conclusion he reached was that the most common feeling experienced by women was relief, that the medical risks of a legal first-trimester abortion were less than getting an injection of penicillin, and that psychological harm was caused by policies such as mandatory waiting periods. Dr. Koop testified before congress about this investigation (which he and the President decided not to ever publish) and the testimony transcripts reveal his frustration with the antiabortion movement, who had his sympathies but whose studies were so flawed or conclusions so distorted that both sides sometimes were quoting the same studies to support their assertions. He implored the antiabortion organizations for good studies to back up what he “felt” must be true, but finally had to admit wasn’t. Dr. Koop had to tell President Reagan that the science did not support the administration’s policies . . . . and they buried the study. Why are we not talking about this today? This seems to me to be the beginning of the end of using science to inform policy, rather than the other way around.
Dr. Cheryl, can you post a link to Dr. Koop’s testimony? It would be very good information to have. Thank you for raising it here.
With regard to the South Dakota law that requires doctors to inform a woman seeking an abortion that she may be at risk of an increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide after having an abortion, to be fair they should also require the doctors to inform the woman that not having an abortion may put her at an increased risk of suicidal and homicidal ideation for at least 18 years.