Thread by @catholiccom, 3 common myths about Roe v. Wade debunked (thread):1. "Roe v. Wade [...]

3 common myths about Roe v. Wade debunked (thread):

1. "Roe v. Wade only allows abortions during the first 3 months of pregnancy."

Roe v. Wade divided pregnancy into 3 12-week trimesters and ruled that in the first 2 trimesters states couldn't outlaw abortion, but... (1/13)

...they could regulate the procedure in the 2nd to ensure the safety of the mother. Roe allowed but did not require states to ban abortion in the 3rd trimester. Only a handful of countries have federal laws that permit elective abortion into the 3rd trimester of pregnancy... (2/)

...and Roe makes sure that the U.S. is one of them.

Furthermore, if states did ban abortion in the third trimester, they had to allow an exception for abortions deemed necessary to protect a woman’s health. And Roe’s companion case, Doe v. Bolton, ruled that “health”... (3/)

...included any factor that was “physical, emotional, psychological, familial, [or related to] the woman’s age.” As a result, even though the decision nominally allows states to ban 3rd-trimester abortions, the Court’s definition of “health” made it practically impossible. (4/)

2. "A majority of Americans support Roe v. Wade and don’t want it overturned."

This one is a half-truth; a 2013 NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll (all citations at bottom), like similar polls, found that 70% of Americans did not want Roe v. Wade overturned. However... (5/)

...41% in that same poll did not know enough about the decision to say if they disapproved of it. Shockingly, a 2012 Pew Research poll found that 56% of adults under the age of 30 did not know Roe v. Wade was about abortion. (6/)

It’s only true that “Americans don’t want Roe v Wade overturned” because most people are hesitant to hear that anything currently legal will become illegal. But once those same people learn that Roe v Wade allows abortions through all 9 months of pregnancy for any reason... (7/)

...a majority of Americans disagree with what it has wrought. A 2017 Gallup Poll shows that only about 25 percent of Americans agree with the precedent set by Roe that allows abortion to be “legal under any circumstance.” (8/)

3. "Roe v. Wade has kept hundreds of thousands of women from dying in unsafe back-alley abortions."

According to the Centers for Disease Control, only 39 women in the U.S. died from illegal abortion deaths in 1972, and 24 women died from legal abortions in that year. (9/)

In 1960 (13 years before RvW), former Planned Parenthood President Mary Calderone said: "Abortion is no longer a dangerous procedure. This applies not just to therapeutic abortions as performed in hospitals but also to so-called illegal abortions as done by physicians. (10/)

"In 1957 there were only 260 deaths in the whole country attributed to abortions of any kind....Second, and even more important, the conference estimated that 90 percent of all illegal abortions are presently being done by physicians." (11/)

Any death from abortion is tragic, whether it’s a woman or her child, regardless of whether the procedure was legal. But the answer to these tragedies is not to make it legal to kill certain people. (12/)

There is no reason to think that a developed country cannot protect the health of both unborn and born human beings by outlawing medical procedures that are designed to kill either. (13/13)

Citations:
2013 NBC/WSJ poll: https://wapo.st/396Ulmp
2012 Pew Research poll: https://pewrsr.ch/3qLLHA6
2017 Gallup poll: https://bit.ly/2LPbf0m
CDC: https://bit.ly/365SuMR
Mary Calderone: https://bit.ly/2MjaMDa

For more pro-life apologetics resources, visit http://catholic.com or check out these books by
@Trent_Horn:
Persuasive Pro-Life: https://bit.ly/3aaHteH
20 Answers: Abortion: https://bit.ly/2LNEDEg

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