Who Would Jesus Deceive?

I live in a state where Jesse Helms won five straight Senate elections, so I try not to make sweeping generalizations about any other state. But after enough stories about Texas, I'm beginning to wonder whether they're blending lead paint in the baby formula down there.

Texas approved one of the nation's most sweeping abortion "counseling" laws Wednesday, requiring doctors, among other things, to warn women that abortion might lead to breast cancer -- a correlation that does not exist, according to the American Cancer Society and federal researchers.

Critics say the law is a thinly veiled attempt to intimidate, frighten and shame women who are seeking an abortion. Proponents say they are merely trying to give women as much information as possible, and they argue that research into the alleged link between abortion and breast cancer remains inconclusive.

"They don't care what science says," said Claudia D. Stravato, chief executive officer of Planned Parenthood of Amarillo and the Texas Panhandle. "It's like talking to the Flat Earth Society."

The bill's author, state Rep. Frank Corte Jr., a San Antonio-area Republican, said he called the bill the "Women's Right to Know Act."

Well, as long as we're being helpful and providing as much information as possible, let's go ahead and give these patients some details about the still remote but markedly less theoretical possible outcomes of taking the pregnancy to term.

A government study conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and released in 1999, found that the maternal mortality rate is still problematic. The national rate is 7.7 per every 100,000 women: the death of one woman for every 12,987 who give birth. That's more than twice the goal set by the federal government under its Healthy People 2000 initiative (3.3 deaths per 100,000 women). And big disparities also exist; among African-American women in New York, for example, the study found that 28.7 of these women die for every 100,000 pregnancies.

And those numbers simply reflect maternal mortality - the number of women who died in pregnancy or 42 days after giving birth. That's not counting the number of women who survived the various serious complications that can occur during and after pregnancy. Dr. Jeffrey C. King, head of the Maternal Mortality Task Force of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, reported that for every maternal death there were an estimated 3,100 hospitalizations for pregnancy-related complications.

And I'm guessing they probably don't do any slideshows on delivery-related fistulas either. Or even post-partum depression, though I'm sure post-abortion depression comes up several times. But Texas is just trying to give women as much information as possible when they must, by law, warn them of a link to breast cancer that has been debunked.

There is a moral argument that can be made against abortion that is perfectly internally consistent; I think it is based upon faulty assumptions, but it is at least sincere. If you must be completely intellectually dishonest to promote your beliefs in a free society, then perhaps the time has come to sit down and evaluate whether your belief system deserves your adherence.