http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=42462
How lying marketers sold
Roe v. Wade to America
By David Kupelian
"Women must have control over their own bodies."
"Safe and legal abortion is every woman's right."
"Who decides? You decide!"
"Abortion is a personal decision between a woman and her doctor."
"Who will make this most personal decision of a woman's life? Will women
decide, or will the politicians and bureaucrats in Washington?"
"Freedom of choice – a basic American right."
In one of the most successful marketing campaigns in modern political history,
the "abortion rights movement" – with all of its emotionally compelling
catch-phrases and powerful political slogans – has succeeded in turning what
once was a heinous crime into a fiercely defended constitutional right.
During the tumultuous 1960s, after centuries of legal prohibition and moral
condemnation of abortion, a handful of dedicated activists launched an
unprecedented marketing campaign. Their aim was twofold: first, to capture the
news media and thus public opinion, and then, to change the nation's abortion
laws.
Their success was rapid and total – resulting in abortion being legalized in
all 50 states, for virtually any reason, and throughout all nine months of
pregnancy. Since the Supreme Court's controversial Roe v. Wade decision in
1973, American doctors have performed well over 40 million abortions.
Although polls consistently show a clear majority of Americans disapprove of
unfettered abortion-on-demand, the movement's well-crafted, almost magical
slogans – appealing to Americans' deeply rooted inclination toward tolerance,
privacy and individual rights – have provided the abortion camp a powerful
rhetorical arsenal with which to fight off efforts to reverse Roe, which struck
down all state laws outlawing abortion.
In marketing wars, the party that frames the terms of the debate almost always
wins. And the early abortion marketers brilliantly succeeded in doing exactly
that – diverting attention away from the core issues of exactly what abortion
does to both the unborn child and the mother, and focusing the debate instead
on a newly created issue: "choice." No longer was the morality of killing the
unborn at issue, but rather, "who decides."
The original abortion-rights slogans from the early '70s – they remain
virtual articles of faith and rallying cries of the "pro-choice" movement to
this day – were "Freedom of choice" and "Women must have control over their
own bodies."
"I remember laughing when we made those slogans up," recalls Bernard Nathanson,
M.D., co-founder of pro-abortion vanguard group NARAL, reminiscing about the
early days of the abortion-rights movement in the late '60s and early '70s. "We
were looking for some sexy, catchy slogans to capture public opinion. They were
very cynical slogans then, just as all of these slogans today are very, very
cynical."
Besides having served as chairman of the executive committee of NARAL –
originally, the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, and later
renamed the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League – as well
as its medical committee, Nathanson was one of the principal architects and
strategists of the abortion movement in the United States. He tells an
astonishing story.
Changing the law on abortion
"In 1968 I met Lawrence Lader," says Nathanson. "Lader had just finished a book
called 'Abortion,' and in it had made the audacious demand that abortion should
be legalized throughout the country. I had just finished a residency in
obstetrics and gynecology and was impressed with the number of women who were
coming into our clinics, wards and hospitals suffering from illegal, infected,
botched abortions.
"Lader and I were perfect for each other. We sat down and plotted out the
organization now known as NARAL. With Betty Friedan, we set up this
organization and began working on the strategy."
"We persuaded the media that the cause of permissive abortion was a liberal,
enlightened, sophisticated one," recalls the movement's co-founder. "Knowing
that if a true poll were taken, we would be soundly defeated, we simply
fabricated the results of fictional polls. We announced to the media that we
had taken polls and that 60 percent of Americans were in favor of permissive
abortion. This is the tactic of the self-fulfilling lie. Few people care to be
in the minority. We aroused enough sympathy to sell our program of permissive
abortion by fabricating the number of illegal abortions done annually in the
U.S. The actual figure was approaching 100,000, but the figure we gave to the
media repeatedly was 1 million.
"Repeating the big lie often enough convinces the public. The number of women
dying from illegal abortions was around 200-250 annually. The figure we
constantly fed to the media was 10,000. These false figures took root in the
consciousness of Americans, convincing many that we needed to crack the
abortion law.
"Another myth we fed to the public through the media was that legalizing
abortion would only mean that the abortions taking place illegally would then
be done legally. In fact, of course, abortion is now being used as a primary
method of birth control in the U.S. and the annual number of abortions has
increased by 1,500 percent since legalization."
NARAL's brilliantly deceitful marketing campaign, bolstered by fraudulent
"research," was uncannily successful. In New York, the law outlawing abortion
had been on the books for 140 years. "In two years of work, we at NARAL struck
that law down," says Nathanson. "We lobbied the legislature, we captured the
media, we spent money on public relations ... Our first year's budget was
$7,500. Of that, $5,000 was allotted to a public relations firm to persuade the
media of the correctness of our position. That was in 1969."
New York immediately became the abortion capital for the eastern half of the
United States.
"We were inundated with applicants for abortion," says Nathanson. "To that end,
I set up a clinic, the Center for Reproductive And Sexual Health (C.R.A.S.H.),
which operated in the east side of Manhattan. It had 10 operating rooms, 35
doctors, 85 nurses. It operated seven days a week, from 8 a.m. to midnight. We
did 120 abortions every day in that clinic. At the end of the two years that I
was the director, we had done 60,000 abortions. I myself, with my own hands,
have done 5,000 abortions. I have supervised another 10,000 that residents have
done under my direction. So I have 75,000 abortions in my life. Those are
pretty good credentials to speak on the subject of abortion."
'A window into the womb'
After two years, Nathanson resigned from C.R.A.S.H. and became chief of the
obstetrical service at St. Luke's Hospital in New York City, a major teaching
center for Columbia University Medical School. At that time, in 1973, a raft of
new technologies and apparatuses had just become available, all designed to
afford physicians a "window into the womb."
Nathanson recalls the dazzling array of cutting-edge technologies back then:
Real-time ultrasound: an instrument which beams high frequency sound into the
mother's abdomen. The echoes that come back are collected by a computer and
assembled into a moving picture;
Electronic fetal heart monitoring: We clamp an apparatus on the mother's
abdomen, and then continuously record the fetal heart rate, instant by instant;
Fetoscopy: an optical instrument put directly into the womb. We could watch
that baby, actually eyeball it.
Cordocentesis: taking a needle, sticking it into the pregnant mother's uterus
and, under ultrasound, locating the umbilical arteries and actually putting a
needle into the cord, taking the baby's blood, diagnosing its illnesses, and
treating it by giving it medicine. Today, surgery is actually performed on the
unborn!
"Anyway," says Nathanson, "as a result of all of this technology – looking at
this baby, examining it, investigating it, watching its metabolic functions,
watching it urinate, swallow, move and sleep, watching it dream, which you
could see by its rapid eye movements via ultrasound, treating it, operating on
it – I finally came to the conviction that this was my patient. This was a
person! I was a physician, pledged to save my patients' lives, not to destroy
them. So I changed my mind on the subject of abortion."
"There was nothing religious about it," he hastens to add. "This was purely a
change of mind as a result of this fantastic technology, and the new insights
and perceptions I had into the nature of the unborn child."
Nathanson expressed some doubts about abortion then, in an editorial in the New
England Journal of Medicine. "I was immediately summoned to a kangaroo court
and was discharged from the pro-abortion movement, something I do not lose
sleep over."
In 1985, intrigued by the question of what really happens during an abortion in
the first three months of a pregnancy, Nathanson decided to put an ultrasound
machine on the abdomen of a woman undergoing an abortion and to videotape what
happens.
"We got a film that was astonishing, shocking, frightening," he says.
It was made into a film called "The Silent Scream." It was shattering, and the
pro-abortion people panicked. Because at this point, we had moved the abortion
debate away from moralizing, sermonizing, sloganeering and pamphleteering into
a high-tech argument. For the first time, the pro-life movement now had all of
the technology and all of the smarts, and the pro-abortion people were on the
defensive.
Nathanson's film provoked a massive campaign of defamation on the part of the
pro-abortion movement, including charges that he had doctored the film. He
hadn't. "I was accused of everything from pederasty to nepotism. But the
American public saw the film."
In 1987, Nathanson released another, even stronger film called "Eclipse of
Reason," introduced by Charlton Heston. "'The Silent Scream' dealt with a child
who was aborted at 12 weeks," said Nathanson. "But there are 400 abortions
every day in this country that are done after the third month of pregnancy.
Contrary to popular misconception, Roe v. Wade makes abortion permissible up to
and including the ninth month of pregnancy. I wanted to dramatize what happens
in one of these late abortions, after the third month.
They took a fetuscope, which is a long optical instrument with a lens at one
end and a strong light at the other. They inserted the fetuscope into the womb
of a woman at 19-1/2 weeks, and a camera was clamped on the eyepiece and then
the abortionist went to work.
This procedure was known as a D&E (dilation and evacuation). It involves
dilating the cervix, rupturing the bag of waters, taking a large crushing
instrument and introducing it way high up into the uterus, grabbing a piece of
the baby, pulling it off the baby, and just repeating this procedure until the
baby has been pulled apart piece by piece.
Then the pieces are assembled on a table, put together like a jigsaw puzzle, so
the abortionist can be sure that the entire baby has been removed. We
photographed all this through the fetuscope. This is a shattering film.
Thus did Bernard Nathanson, once a founder and top strategist of the
pro-abortion movement, come to be staunchly committed to the cause of ending
legalized abortion in America.
Nathanson is by no means the only abortionist to switch sides in the abortion
war. Indeed, in recent years hundreds of abortion providers have left their
profession. On its website, NARAL bemoans "the dwindling number of doctors
willing or trained to perform abortions."
If we really want to understand how abortion has been so successfully marketed,
there's no better source than those who have worked in the abortion industry.
They, like no one else, really know first-hand what it's like to sell and
perform abortions for a living.
Take a deep breath, and prepare to be deeply affected by what you read next.
Deceptive counseling
Carol Everett of Dallas, Texas, got involved in the abortion industry in 1973,
the year of Roe v. Wade, after having an abortion herself. She set up referral
clinics in Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma, then worked in two clinics in which
800 abortions were performed monthly, and eventually ran five abortion clinics.
She describes how women coming to her clinics were counseled:
Those kids, when they find out that they are pregnant, may not want an
abortion; they may want information. But when they call that number, which is
paid for by abortion money, what kind of information do you think they're going
to get? Remember, they sell abortions – they don't sell keeping the baby, or
giving the baby up for adoption, or delivering that baby. They only sell
abortions.
The counselor asks, "How far along are you? What's the first day of your last
normal period?"
They've got their wheel there and they figure it out. The counselor is paid to
be this girl's friend and authority figure. She is supposed to seduce her into
a friendship of sorts – to sell her the abortion.
Surprisingly, professional public relations firms are commonly brought in to
train clinic personnel to sell women on the abortion option.
Nita Whitten worked as chief secretary at another Dallas abortion clinic, that
of Dr. Curtis Boyd. Whitten concurs with Everett about the often-obsessive
profit motive of abortion clinics:
I was trained by a professional marketing director in how to sell abortions
over the telephone," she said. "He took every one of our receptionists, nurses,
and anyone else who would deal with people over the phone through an extensive
training period. The object was, when the girl called, to hook the sale so she
wouldn't get an abortion somewhere else, or adopt out her baby, or change her
mind.
With disarming candor, Whitten adds: "We were doing it for the money."
Kathy Sparks, who worked in a Granite City, Ill., abortion clinic, describes
the manipulative counseling practices used at her clinic:
One particular worker was very good. She could sit down with these girls during
counseling and cry with them at the drop of a pin. She would immediately draw
them out, asking them all kinds of good questions, to find out what their
pressure point was – what was driving them to want the abortion.
Whatever that pressure point was, she would magnify it. If the girl was afraid
her parents would kill her, and didn't know how to tell them, the counselor
would proceed by saying, "Well, that's why abortion is here, we want to help
you; this is the answer to your problems."
If it was money, she would tell the girl how much baby items cost: "You know it
costs $3,000 to have a baby now," or "You know, baby shoes are $28. Sleepers
are $15. But you know, that's what's so wonderful about abortion. We can take
care of this problem and you don't have to worry about it until you are
financially prepared to have a child."
The salesmanship at her abortion clinic was so effective, says Sparks, that 99
out of every 100 women would go ahead and have an abortion.
Abortion clinics, and particularly Planned Parenthood, the world's largest
abortion provider, insist publicly that they offer all alternatives – keeping
the baby, adoption, abortion – without coercion or preference.
"The women were never given any type of alternatives to abortions," says Debra
Henry, who worked as an assistant and counselor for six months at an OB/GYN
office in Levonia, Mich. "They were never told about adoption agencies, that
there were people out there willing to help them, to give them homes to live
in, to provide them with care, and even financial support."
Everett relates what happens after the initial counseling of her clinic's
clients: After the basic questions, the girls were told briefly about what was
to happen to them after the procedure. All they were told about the procedure
itself was that they would experience slight cramping, similar to menstrual
cramps. They were not told about the development of the baby, or about the pain
that the baby would be experiencing, or about the physical or emotional effects
the abortion would have on them.
The two questions they always ask are: No. 1, "Does it hurt?" And the answer
would always be, "Oh, no. Your uterus is a muscle. It's a cramp to open it, a
cramp to close it – just a slight cramping sensation." And the girl thinks,
"That's no problem. I can stand that. I've been through it before." Then the
client asks question No. 2: "Is it a baby?"
"No," would come the answer, "it's a product of conception," or "it's a blood
clot," or "it's a piece of tissue." They don't even call it a fetus, because
that almost humanizes it too much, but it's never a baby."
There are two standard reactions in the recovery room, says Everett:
The first is: "I've killed my baby." It amazed me that this was the first time
the patients called it a baby, and the first time they called it murder. But
the second reaction is: "I am hungry. You kept me in here for four hours and
you told me I'd only be here for two. Let me out of here." That woman is doing
what I did when I had my abortion. She's running from her abortion, not dealing
with it.
Why doctors do abortions
Many doctors who perform abortions cite the same contributory factors to their
getting started – the media, women's-rights groups and their medical training
itself. In addition, doing abortions makes for a very lucrative practice.
Joseph Randall, M.D., of Atlanta, Ga., frankly admits that he was attracted to
the large income potential that abortions offered. Over the 10 years that he
did abortions, Randall estimates that he performed 32,000 of them.
"The media were very active early on," recalls Randall. "They were probably one
of the major influences on us, telling us that abortion was not only legal, but
that it was to serve women. It was to give women a choice, more or less give
them a freedom to grow and to take their rightful place in society where they
had been kind of pushed down prior to that. We also believed the lie that there
were tens of thousands of women being maimed and killed from illegal abortions
prior to legalization of abortion law."
In 1972, the year prior to Roe v. Wade, 28 deaths were reported from illegal
abortions in the U.S.
"As part of our medical training," added Randall, "abortions became a necessary
procedure, according to the chief of my department. This was in 1971, before
the law had changed in the country, but it had changed in New York a few years
before. We needed to serve women, we needed to know all the procedures that we
had to do for women, and we had to know how to do them well. Otherwise, we
weren't considered effectively trained. Our chief said that if we didn't do the
abortions, we might as well get out of obstetrics and gynecology because we
just wouldn't be complete physicians."
"Why do doctors do abortions?" asks Anthony Levantino, M.D., an OBGYN who
provided abortions for his patients in his Albany, N.Y., office for eight
years. "Why did I do abortions? If you are pro-choice, or, as a lot of people
like to say, 'morally neutral' on the subject, and you happen to be a
gynecologist, then it's up to you to take the instruments in hand and actively
perform abortions. It's part of your training. I've heard it many times from
other obstetricians: Well, I'm not really pro-abortion, I'm pro-woman.'
"The women's groups in this country have done a very good job of selling that
bill of goods to the population, that somehow destroying a life is being
pro-women. I can tell you a lot of obstetricians believe it. I used to.
"Along the way," says Levantino, "you find out that you can make a lot of money
doing abortions. I worked 9 to 5. I was never bothered at night. I never had to
go out on weekends. And I made more money than my obstetrician brethren. And I
didn't have to face the liability. That's a big factor, a huge perk. I almost
never, ever had to worry about her lawyer bothering me.
"In my practice, we were averaging between $250 and $500 per abortion – and
it was cash. It's the one time as a doctor you can say, 'Either pay me up front
or I'm not going to take care of you.' Abortion is totally elective. Either you
have the money or you don't. And they get it."
Cash payment is common in the abortion industry, says Everett.
"I've seen doctors walk out after three hours' work and split $4,500 dollars
between them on a Saturday morning – more if you go longer into the day," she
said. "Of the four clinics I've worked in, none of them ever showed that they
collected the doctors' money; they collect it separately, and do not show it on
any of the records in those clinics. That way, the doctors are independent
contractors and the clinic doesn't have to be concerned with their malpractice
insurance, and doesn't have to report their income to the IRS."
"Every single transaction that we did," adds Whitten, "was cash money. We
wouldn't take a check, or even a credit card. If you didn't have the money,
forget it. It wasn't unusual at all for me to take $10,000 to $15,000 a day to
the bank – in cash."
Beverly McMillan, M.D., founded the first abortion clinic in Mississippi and
did a large volume of business. She makes the provocative observation that not
only do many abortion clinics require payment in cash, but also do not report
that income to the government.
"A lot of these folks do not declare all their income," she says flatly. "When
you're dealing in cash, unless you're honest you can just not have a record for
that patient, not make an entry on your ledger. I know some people who were
paid under the counter. They would get half of their salary in cash, and they
never had to pay taxes on that. Why the IRS doesn't go after these guys, I
don't understand."
The heart of the matter
Ultrasound, the great awakener of Bernard Nathanson, is routinely employed
today to check on the progress of developing babies. In an ironic and shadowy
parallel, ultrasound is also used to aid in abortions.
Dr. Randall:
The nurses have to look at the ultrasound picture to gauge how far along the
baby is for an abortion, because the larger the pregnancy, the more you get
paid. It was very important for us to do that. But the turnover definitely got
greater when we started using ultrasound. We lost two nurses – they couldn't
take looking at it. Some of the other staff left also.
What about the women having the abortions? Do they see the ultrasound?
"They are never allowed to look at the ultrasound because we knew that if they
so much as heard the heartbeat, they wouldn't want to have the abortion," said
Randall.
A peculiar problem in the abortion clinic is fetal disposal.
"We basically put them down the garbage disposal if they were small enough,"
says Whitten. "We hardly ever sent anything to the laboratory for pathology
unless there was something weird going on and the doctor wanted to make sure he
wouldn't get sued."
Kathy Sparks recalls: "Oftentimes, second trimester abortions were performed
and these babies we would not put in the little jar with the label to send off
to the pathology lab. We would put them down a flush toilet – that's where we
would put these babies."
'There are no words to describe it'
Every year in the United States, over a million abortions are performed –
including tens of thousands of late-term abortions (after the 12th week). Many
of these late abortions are carried out by means of amniotic infusion (the
injection of a foreign substance into the amniotic sac) of saline,
prostaglandin, urea, or another agent designed to kill the unborn baby.
"Saline abortions have to be done in the hospital because of complications that
can arise," says OB/GYN staffer Debra Henry. "Not that they can't arise during
other times, but more so now. The saline, a salt solution, is injected into the
woman's sac and the baby swallows it. The baby starts dying a slow, violent
death. The mother feels everything, and many times it is at this point when she
realizes that she really has a live baby inside of her, because the baby starts
fighting violently for his or her life. He's just fighting inside because he's
burning.
"One night a lady delivered and I was called to come and see her because she
was uncontrollable," says David Brewer, M.D., of Glen Ellyn, Ill. As a military
physician in Ft. Rucher, Ala., Brewer performed abortions for 10 years. "I went
in the room, and she was going to pieces; she was having a nervous breakdown,
screaming and thrashing. The nurses were upset because they couldn't get any
work done, and all the other patients were upset because this lady was
screaming. I walked in, and here was her little saline abortion baby kicking.
It had been born alive, and was kicking and moving for a little while before it
finally died of those terrible burns, because the salt solution gets into the
lungs and burns the lungs, too."
"I'll tell you one thing about D&E," says Levantino. "You never have to worry
about a baby's being born alive. I won't describe D&E other than to say that,
as a doctor, you are sitting there tearing, and I mean tearing – you need a
lot of strength to do it – arms and legs off of babies and putting them in a
stack on top of a table."
Commenting on late-term D&E abortions, Everett recalls:
My job was to tell the doctor where the parts were, the head being of special
significance because it is the most difficult to remove. The head must be
deflated, usually by using the suction machine to remove the brain, then
crushing the head with large forceps.
The question of how doctors could tear apart a virtually full-grown baby is
painful, perplexing, mystifying.
"Psychologically," says Everett, "the doctors always sized the baby at '24
weeks.' However, we did an abortion on one baby I feel was almost full-term.
The baby's muscle structure was so strong that it would not come apart. The
baby died when the doctor pulled the head off the body."
Kathy Sparks describes a second-trimester abortion:
The baby's bones were far too developed to rip them up with this curette, and
so he would have to try to pull the baby out with forceps, in about three or
four major pieces. Then he scraped and suctioned and scraped and suctioned, and
then this little baby boy was lying on the tray. His little face was perfectly
formed, little eyes closed and little ears – everything was perfect about
this little boy.
"There are no words to describe how bad it really is," says Everett. "I've seen
sonograms of the baby pulling away from the instruments as they are introduced
into the vagina. And I've seen D&E's through 32 weeks done without the mother's
being put to sleep. And yes, they hurt and they are very painful to the baby,
and yes, they are very, very painful to the woman. I've seen six people hold a
woman on the table while they did her abortion."
'My heart got calloused'
Physicians are manipulated into going against their own consciences and
performing abortions, says Brewer, all in the name of helping women. He
describes witnessing a suction abortion for the first time, during his medical
training:
I can remember ... the resident doctor sitting down, putting the tube in, and
removing the contents. I saw the bloody material coming down the plastic tube,
and it went into a big jar. My job afterwards was to go and undo the jar, and
to see what was inside.
I didn't have any views on abortion; I was in a training program, and this was
a brand new experience. I was going to get to see a new procedure and learn. I
opened the jar and took the little piece of stockingette stocking and opened
that little bag. The resident doctor said, "Now put it on that blue towel and
check it out. We want to make sure that we got it all." I thought, "That'll be
exciting – hands-on experience looking at tissue." I opened the sock up and
put it on the towel, and there were parts of a person in there.
I had taken anatomy, I was a medical student. I knew what I was looking at.
There was a little scapula and an arm, I saw some ribs and a chest, and a
little tiny head. I saw a piece of a leg, and a tiny hand and an arm and, you
know, it was like somebody put a hot poker into me. I had a conscience, and it
hurt. Well, I checked it out and there were two arms and two legs and one head
and so forth, and I turned and said, "I guess you got it all." That was a very
hard experience for me to go through emotionally.
Here I was with no real convictions, caught in the middle. And so I did what a
lot of us do throughout our life. We don't do anything. I didn't talk with
anybody about it, I didn't talk with my folks about it, I didn't think about
it. I did nothing. And do you know what happened? I got to see another
abortion. That one hurt too. But again I didn't do anything, and so I kept
seeing abortions. Do you know what? It hurt a little bit less every time I saw
one.
Then I got to sit down and do an abortion. Well, the first one that I did was
kind of hard. It hurt me again like a hot poker. But after a while, it got to
where it didn't hurt. My heart got calloused. I was like a lot of people are
today – afraid to stand up. I was afraid to speak up. Or some of us, maybe we
aren't afraid, but we just don't have our own convictions settled yet.
One particular abortion changed Brewer's life. "I remember an experience as a
resident on a hysterotomy (a late-term abortion delivered by caesarean
section). I remember seeing the baby move underneath the sa
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| User: "WH" |
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| Title: Re: How lying Liberals made Abortion legal |
23 Jan 2005 12:46:42 PM |
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TonyZ2001 wrote:
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=42462
How lying marketers sold
Roe v. Wade to America
By David Kupelian
"Women must have control over their own bodies."
Japp!
"Safe and legal abortion is every woman's right."
Japp!
"Who decides? You decide!"
She decides!
"Abortion is a personal decision between a woman and her doctor."
The doctor carries it out, the woman decides whether she wants him to
or not!
"Who will make this most personal decision of a woman's life? Will
women
decide, or will the politicians and bureaucrats in Washington?"
The women!
"Freedom of choice - a basic American right."
Umm...we all have freedom of choice! But yes the woman is and rightly
so, free to decide whether she wants an abortion or not!
Don't see anything wrong so far...but the rest of it was scaremongering
and freaky Christian insincerity!
Shove it up your arse WnutD!
WH
Rubbish and scaremongering snipped<<<<<<<<<<
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