cold hard facts
Today it occurred to me that people on their own personal warpath do not like to be told to supply facts. Facts aren’t sexy, and they rarely galvanize the way that bombast does. No one ever scintillated a crowd by crooning sweet, sweet numbers into their ears. The leader of the Free World certainly never did, and now we get to look forward to “alternative facts” in the White House in place of evidence based science.
So when I find myself in the position of defending my opinions, as I so often do considering how rarely I keep my mouth shut, I do so by providing statistics and sources and demanding the same from my opponents. How hard is it to substantiate a claim that you’ve just spewed from your face hole? Evidently, very.
Take for example a conversation I recently had with a lovely person on Twitter who disagreed with my disgust over Donald Trump reinstating the Global Gag Rule. For those of you who do not know, the Global Gag Rule (or the Mexico City policy), prohibits the United States from giving funding to international nongovernmental organizations that offer reproductive health and family planning assistance, if that assistance also includes abortions, even if the money from the United States is not used for specifically abortion-related services. For those of you like me who crave cold, hard numbers, the United States currently spends roughly $600 million per year on various reproductive health services, serving some 27 million women. And how much of that money is spent on abortions? Zilch. So, to break it down, Donald Trump just denied vital health care including birth control, mammograms, and cancer screenings to 27 million women so that he could look like a hero to the anti-abortion GOP.
My disgust was naturally met by outrage from pro-life users who celebrated any obstruction to abortion, even if it, by extension, puts the lives of women around the globe at risk by reducing their access to quality, life-saving healthcare. Here is the dialogue that inevitably followed:
Me: Women are going to die.
Them: But fewer female babies will die!
Me: Abortion will not magically disappear if you restrict access to it. Safe abortion will disappear, and, again, women will die.
Them: If you restrict abortion, there won’t be any more abortion!
Me: That’s not how that works. Restricting abortion will not stop women from having abortions. Instead it will compel them to seek abortions from unsafe practitioners and endanger their lives.
Them: But what about all of the gay babies?
Me: …What?
Them: The Xq28 gene test! Women will use it to abort their gay babies!
Me: Okay. I need to see some numbers on if that test has actually ever been used to abort a baby.
Them: You are advocating for the in-utero extermination of gay babies!
Me: Is that even a thing?
Them: You can’t handle the truth!
Me: Wait a minute. What? I’m not even sure where this is headed. Is it that I can’t accept the truth about gay babies?
Them: Carrying a baby to term is medically healthier than an abortion in all cases!
Me: Unless the case is that a woman doesn’t want to carry a baby to term, and then it’s completely irrelevant.
Them: ABORTION IS NOT SAFE!
Me: Actually, it is, and I have a plethora of solid, scientific information on my side to back me up. Would you like to submit your own for evidence against the fact?
At this point I can only assume they spontaneously combusted.
Over and over again during this mind-numbing exchange I asked for cold, hard facts to back up their hysteria. I even dug around and did a little research on my own just because I was curious about the gay babies thing. Turns out that there is a host of wonderful scientific data on the Xq28 gene as well as studies on genetic variation that may explain homosexuality at the genetic level, there is no existence of a successful “gay test” in utero that could weed out gay babies for slaughter. Even if there were, what I requested from these nut-jobs were numbers. I wanted to see the exact number of babies murdered in-utero for being gay and compare them to the number of women who have died due to lack of adequate abortion services. They could not provide me these numbers. I asked for statistics and documented sources for the number of women who have died during abortions that could have been prevented had the services been provided by licensed practitioners in safe, sterile, regulated environments. They gave me an article from the Daily News.
This is where we are now as a country, as a people. And while this sort of thing is amusing when it comes to debating such things as whether Joey should’ve ended up with Pacey or Dawson (Pacey), who is the best Batman (Bale), or whether Han or Greedo shot first (Han), arguments without facts and sources have absolutely no place in issues where human lives are at stake.
The truth is that abortion rates in the United States have been steadily declining in the United States since Roe v. Wade became the law of the land. Yes, you read that correctly: declining. Adversely, do you know what has increased in the same span of time? Access to birth control, particularly long-term methods such as the IUD.
In order to understand this statistic, let us look at a similar one: Birth control and teen pregnancy. The teen pregnancy rate in the United States has also declined steadily, and statistics have attributed two factors to this: 1) Better reproductive education in schools and 2) Greater access to birth control. So in other words, education, and the means in which to apply it.
The same goes for abortion. The more education women receive about their bodies, the more they know how to protect themselves. The more they have access to means with which to protect themselves, the more they will do so. The less unwanted pregnancies befall them, the less need they will have to rid themselves of said unwanted pregnancies.
And less abortion is a good thing for everyone. Even us pro-choice supporters can agree with that. After all, we are not pro-abortion. We simply support a woman’s right to make her own choice in this matter rather than the non-scientifically backed opinions of others make it for her.
When women’s lives are at stake, personal beliefs have no place in arguments of such importance. If you believe that abortion is baby murder, then great — keep on believing that. But stay out of the argument because you cannot support your position with science and sources. Pieces of legislation as important as the Global Gag Rule should not be decided with emotion, personal anecdotes, or religion, but with cold, hard, scientific facts.
Here they are: Money from the Global Gag Rule does not fund abortions. Instead, it funds fundamental women’s health services, without which lives are at risk. Donald Trump’s decision to reinstate it has made women all over the world less safe today.
Also, for the record, if you try to engage me in an argument and I ask for scientific data and sources and you give me the fucking Daily Mail I will end you. And don’t even get me started on Natural News.
