RedState is running an Erick Erickson post that claims the Obama Administration has ordered a cover-up of abortion data. Erickson claims he has “confirmed” with the press office of the Center for Disease Control that “the Obama administration is deliberately playing ‘hide the ball’ on nationwide abortion statistics.”
For apparently the first time in 40 years, the CDC’s annual “Abortion Surveillance Report†was not published, and there are “no plans†for the data to be produced at this time.
According to the CDC website, they’re still working on the report. And the CDC has denied the allegation, saying a report will come out later this month.
I found no evidence that this alleged “deep-sixing” came from anywhere else but Erick Erickson’s imagination. Of course, it will now be added to the elaborate mythology (e.g., abortion causes breast cancer) the pro-criminalization mob has constructed around abortion. No amount of evidence, or lack thereof, will ever persuade them the allegation isn’t true. Just watch; even after the report comes out, they’ll find some reason to claim it isn’t the “real” report.
For several years, anti-abortion activists have been making all kinds of claims about the goings-on in abortion clinics. You’ll remember the late Dr. George Tiller was hauled into court several times on bogus charges. No amount of dismissals and “not guilty” verdicts ever convinced the Fetus People that Tiller was not breaking the law, however. Their reaction to the outrageous and illegal practices of Dr. Kermit Gosnell is the completely unsupported conclusion that Gosnell’s practices are somehow typical of how all abortion clinics are run.
In fact, the Gosnell case is typical of something else that’s a problem — every now and then some colossally incompetent physician will make the news for doing something stupid, leading to a lot of discussion about how in the world this fool was allowed to practice for so long. No one seems to have a solution to that one.
For example, last year a Baltimore cardiologist was found to have placed more than 500 stents in a patient who didn’t need even one. Turns out he’d been making a good living doing unnecessary procedures on mostly healthy people. I don’t see anyone making hysterical claims that every cardiovascular surgeon in the U.S. is doing the same thing, however.
Anti-abortion operatives have been trying to catch abortion clinics doing something illegal for years. So, the recent attempt by an associate of James O’Keefe to entrap Planned Parenthood clinics by posing as a child sex trafficker is just a long line of such attempts. After multiple tries at multiple clinics in six states the posers found one lamebrain employee who fell into the trap, and who was later fired. The resulting highly edited video was triumphantly released to the public as proof that Planned Parenthood enables child sex trafficking.
But the attempts to entrap clinic workers caused Planned Parenthood to alert federal authorities about a possible sex trafficking ring, which to a reasonable person would be solid evidence that Planned Parenthood does not condone sex trafficking. Naturally, the “reasonable person” criterion leaves out Live Action, the group that sponsored the video.
