Pro-Woman / Pro-Life Sound Bites

The following is an example of how a candidate for public office can address the abortion issue from a pro-woman/pro-life perspective in a way which provides “sound bites” for the press which are difficult to distort.

Speech Inserts:

Abortion is a divisive issue. But certainly we can all agree to this: no woman should feel forced to undergo an unwanted abortion. Women should be protected from coercion by husbands, boyfriends, parents, or abortion counselors. And every woman who wants to keep her child should have access to the public and private agencies offering her and her child care and compassion. This is pro-life. This is pro-woman. This is pro-choice. And that is the type of candidacy that I am offering you.

My opponent opposes legislation which would protect women from being lied to by greedy abortion clinics. I believe that if a woman is going to have an abortion, she deserves to know the risks!

My opponent opposes legislation which would hold abortion providers financially liable for the physical and psychological aftereffects of abortion. I believe that if abortionists are going to do abortions, they had better be able to guarantee that they are doing safe abortions, or they had better be willing to pay for the consequences of dangerous abortions.

I am pro-life; I am also pro-woman. I am seeking to protect women from being coerced into unwanted and dangerous abortions. I want to guarantee the rights of women to know all the risks about abortion and about realistic alternatives – including thousands of volunteer resources which are available to help a women give birth to an unplanned child, and care for that child long after it has been born.

My opponent says he is pro-choice, but he refuses to do anything to protect the 55 percent of abortion patients who say they are being pressured into UNWANTED abortions. He says he is pro-choice, but he refuses to guarantee a woman’s right to know about the risks of abortion; her right to know about the biology of her unborn child. He says he is pro-woman, but he has abandoned women to the unscrupulous exploitation of fast-buck abortion clinics.

I am both pro-woman and pro-life. I want to protect both the unborn child and the child’s mother. The courts have given women a right to seek a safe abortion. So if a woman does have an abortion, I will do all I can to regulate clinics to ensure that it is absolutely the safest abortion possible, that she has a guaranteed right to receive compensation for any physical or psychological complications which occur, and that she is fully informed of every risk and alternative.

Questions and Answers

Media: What is your position on abortion?

Candidate: I believe we absolutely must protect women from dangerous and unwanted abortions which are injuring hundreds of thousands of women every year.

We don’t hear about it in the press, but our country is faced with a terrible plague of unwanted abortions — cases where mothers would rather carry their pregnancies to term but instead submit to unwanted abortions to satisfy the demands of others.

I oppose allowing abortion to be used as an escape route for unloving and irresponsible boyfriends. I oppose allowing parents to force a daughter into an unwanted abortion without regard for her own desires to keep her child. I oppose making women suffer the pain and aftereffects of abortion alone just so others won’t be inconvenienced.

A study of over 250 women who claim that they have suffered from post-abortion trauma found that nearly 60% of these women felt forced to submit to an abortion because of pressure from other people. Eighty-three percent say they would have kept their babies if they had received support to do so from their boyfriends, families, or other important people in their lives.

Is it “pro-choice” to allow women to be forced into unwanted abortions? No. That’s abandonment. That’s abandonment of women in need to the manipulation and greed of our unregulated abortion industry.

Media: Would you support legislation which would limit a woman’s right to have an abortion?

Candidate: I support regulations which would protect women from being pressured into unwanted abortions. I support laws holding abortion clinics liable if they fail to protect women from being coerced into unwanted abortions. If abortion is to be a decision made between a woman and her doctor, then we should hold the doctor responsible for ensuring that the mother’s desire to have an abortion is truly her own, and not a decision being forced on her by her husband, boyfriend, or her parents.

If my opponent is truly “pro-choice,” and not pro-abortion, I am sure he will work with me in seeking legislation to protect these women from unwanted abortions.

Media: Aren’t your proposals actually intended to make it more difficult for women to get abortions?

Candidate: Not at all. My proposals would simply codify the high professional standards which the Supreme Court itself has already described in Roe and the other abortion cases. It is the obligation of the physician to ensure that a woman’s choice to abort is fully free and fully informed of risks and alternatives. Abortion providers have legal responsibilities to their patients and these responsibilities must be met to safeguard the rights of women.

Media: How would you propose to heal the divisions in our country over the abortion issue?

Candidate: As I have said, there is plenty of common ground for people who are both truly pro-choice and truly pro-life. First, we need to protect women from feeling forced into unwanted abortions.

Second, I think all people of goodwill can agree that we need to do more to understand when and why some abortions are dangerous. In 1989, Surgeon General Koop reported that there had not yet been enough adequate research on the aftereffects of abortion. Dr. Koop recommended a $100 million dollar research project to study the effects of this most common of all surgeries in America today.

What was the response from Congress? Nothing. They ignored the Surgeon General’s appeal for more research. Why? Because pro-abortion lobbyists have argued against post-abortion research because they are afraid that proof of abortion’s risks will increase clinics’ liability for the damages women suffer.

If abortion is truly safe, why are pro-abortionists so hostile to funding a major study to prove once and for all whether or not abortion is truly as safe as they claim?

If my opponent is truly concerned about the health needs of women, then surely he will help me in pushing for research to measure the health risks of abortion so that women can make more fully informed choices Surely this is an area on which all reasonable people can agree. The only reason to oppose more post-abortion research is if one is more concerned about the health of the abortion industry than one is about the health of women. Does the safety of women come first, or the freedom of an unregulated abortion industry? The women come first, of course. I challenge my opponent to support this necessary research to protect women’s health.

Media: I don’t understand what you mean by “unwanted” abortions. If a woman chooses to have an abortion, that’s the choice she wants.

Candidate: I can’t tell you how many times I have heard women’s stories of how they were threatened, badgered, pressured, and even literally dragged to abortion clinics by abusive husbands, angry parents, or selfish boyfriends. These women would rather have had their babies, but the pressures they faced from other people or circumstances made them feel they had no choice and no one at the clinics offered to help them to overcome these pressures.

Another example is found in China’s national one child policy, where couples are brutally forced to undergo unwanted abortions. This points to another important difference between my opponent and myself. My opponent supports government funding to agencies which engage in forced abortions on unwilling women for reasons of suppressing population growth in less developed countries. Is this what it means to be pro-choice?

Of course not. Yet he is closing his eyes to minority women in developing countries who are being forced into unwanted abortions. He’s even willing to pay for it.

This makes me wonder. Where will he stand on women’s rights here in the U.S., if someday he suddenly decides there are too many people in our own country? Will he support reproductive freedom and the right of women to bear as many children as they choose, whether it is 3, 8, or 15 children? Or will he support forced abortions on American women to satisfy the demands of the radical population control lobbyists.

Will he be “pro-choice” then, or will he simply be pro-abortion? This is what I would like to know. This is what I believe all voters have a right to know.

What does his “pro-choice” stand mean? Does it mean defending the welfare of women when they are threatened by unwanted and dangerous abortions? Or does it just mean defending the profit margins of our unregulated abortion industry?

If he and his colleagues in the legislature are truly pro-choice, then let us cooperate and start protecting women from coercion and deceit so their choices are fully free and fully informed.

Originally published in The Post-Abortion Review 2(3) Fall 1994.

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