Abortion argument lacks statistics

With all the material published about the ever-present abortion issue, I would expect a political science grad student like Bill English to be able to form a truthful and coherent argument regarding his thoughts on the matter. Unfortunately, he achieved neither.

In my Public Opinion class last semester, we learned about American trends in abortion opinion. Abortion has most certainly not, as English claims, “increasingly lost ground in its public perception.” Peoples’ views on abortion are extremely strongly held and are not subject to much fluctuation. Many studies confirm this fact. Just because very few people change sides does not mean that the issue is not salient. There is merely no room for negotiation. You tend to either believe in abortion (at least in certain cases) or you don’t.

English accuses those who undergo abortions of having “shallow and pathetic... circumstances,” an idea, he claims, that a “large and increasing” group of Americans has come to realize. These claims are just false.

First, many of those who undergo abortions do so only as a last resort, and as a result of rape, incest, or danger to the mother’s life. These are hardly shallow and pathetic, and I sure hope that any sane human being would agree. Second, these three cases are supported by a vast majority of Americans, in some studies as many as 75 to 80 percent of people support abortions under these extreme circumstances. As for the “increasing” group, the number of people who hold more anti-abortion opinions compared to before is not numerically significant.

English’s unconscionable comparison of abortion to slavery, which he calls “a legal norm as wicked as abortion,” is truly out of line. I do not think any retort I could offer would be able to capture my feelings, and those, I’d hope, of many on this campus, to any degree. I can only paraphrase one of the best lines of last century and say, “Mr. English, have you no sense of decency, sir?”

In summation, English offers no statistics to back up his ideas, and those that he attempts to offer are completely incorrect. His ability to offer such hogwash and then proclaim that he knows what is right (i.e. a reversal of Roe v. Wade, one of the “greatest scandals” of our time, at least according to him), disgusts me.

English offers no coherent support for his argument, and I only hope that nobody was simple-minded enough to be completely swayed by it.

Andrew Shadoff