Texas NOW Blog

Major kudos to Jordan Smith over at the Austin Chronicle for this great story on Texas state funds going to crisis pregnancy centers. I do love to see our hard-working pro-choice friends over at NARAL Pro-Choice Texas get quoted on this issue, because they've done a huge amount of work on it. And I was very glad to see Smith reference Rep. Henry Waxman's report on crisis pregnancy centers and how they spend your money to lie to women about the effects of abortion.

Lying? Surely not, you say. No, really. They're flat-out lying. The following four assertions are the most common:

• Abortion causes breast cancer. Crap. Planned Parenthood puts the smack down on this one. Don't trust them? The National Cancer Institute backs 'em up. Considering all the cultural attention paid to breast cancer, and the fact that breast cancer accounts for 1/3 of all cancer diagnoses in women and killed about 40,000 women last year, it's cruel to fudge the facts on this terrible disease to a woman who's already upset and vulnerable because of an unplanned pregnancy.

• Abortion is extremely dangerous for women. Nope. According to the most current stats on the DSHS website, there were 76,019 abortions performed on Texas residents in 2003 without a single maternal death. Zero. Nada. In 2004, Texas women had 72,440 abortions with one death. In 2002, there were 76,277 abortions and one maternal death. So in the last three years, the death rate for abortion has been 2 in 224,736 - less than .0001%, and less than 1 per every 100,000 procedures. In fact, in the 1,444,809 abortions performed in Texas between 1986 and 2003, only nine deaths resulted. So having an abortion is slightly less safe than having your appendix out - which is to say, extraordinarily so.

• Abortion makes you infertile. Nope. Big honkin' lie. The National Institutes of Health list a bunch of causes of infertility, but abortion is not among them. It's tough to find statistics on the incidence of infertility, but NIH estimates 10-20% of couples trying to conceive won't get pregnant at the end of one year. They also say that 15-20% of those couples will successfully conceive a child without seeking treatment - in other words, sometimes you just have to try for a while. So that knocks the rate of persistent infertility down to a max of about 16%. It is true that there are some rare complications of abortion that can affect fertility. But use some common sense here. One, look how rare the complications are - all of them are under 1%, most well under. Two, think about it just for a minute. About 40% of women will have an abortion at some point in their lives. If abortion reliably caused infertility, wouldn't we expect to see a lot more than a 10 or 15% rate of persistent infertility?

• Abortion makes you crazy. For years. Again, Planned Parenthood debunks this decisively. They cite authorities ranging from the American Psychological Association to former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop stating that abortion has minimal lasting mental health effects. Of course women are going to have some feelings about it. But there is no good scientific evidence to support the notion of a 'post-abortion syndrome.' The study most often cited by anti-choicers has a serious sampling flaw: it only included women who had high-stress abortion experiences. That's like going to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and concluding that there is a massive epidemic of alcohol abuse. In that room, of course there is! But it's irresponsible to apply that conclusion to the general public.

The state of Texas is paying crisis pregnancy centers $5 million over two years to tell women this garbage. You know where the money came from? It's a set-aside in the family planning budget. You know. The money that should be going to fund the services that would keep women from facing unintended pregnancies in the first place!

Does all this make you mad? It infuriates me. Remember in November, people. It is a reprehensible use of state funds to pay contracting agencies to lie to citizens. Ask your candidates what their take is on this. Ask your rep if he or she voted for Senator Williams' budget rider, called Alternatives to Abortion, which started all this mess. And let 'em know you won't stand for it again.