When Rebecca and I wrote this piece about how the World Health Organization conjured up the 70,000 women dying from abortion, Joyce Arthur responded with this. I didn’t link to it yesterday because I thought it was very weak and borderline slanderous–an ad hominem attack in face of strong evidence.
Today, Rebecca and I respond with this letter to the editor in the Post:
Re: There’s No Dispute, Joyce Arthur, counterpoint, July 8.
Joyce Arthur, a devoted abortion advocate, takes us to task for questioning the methodology used to conjure up 70,000 deaths annually as the result of unsafe abortions. She should have taken up the issue of sound research with the authors of the studies she cites, for it is they who pepper their work with caveats, qualifiers and disclaimers. We merely quote their work.
Citing surveys of schoolchildren about whether they know someone who’s had post-abortion complications, as Ms. Arthur did in her piece, is baffling. We feel sure that a sizeable number of Canadian schoolchildren might claim to know a friend of a cousin whose stomach exploded after combining Coke and Pop Rocks. Shall we launch a worldwide campaign against junk food on the strength of those numbers? Schoolyard gossip and rumours do not constitute sound evidence.
More seriously, there is indeed an elephant in the room. It’s the number of women in the developing world who die from complications of pregnancy and childbirth. We know with certainty this number is much higher than abortion-related deaths. As we saw at the G8/G20 meetings, abortion was not the controversial topic activists thought it might be. The G8 leaders understood help for mothers in the developing world shouldn’t focus on abortion. Why can’t Joyce Arthur?
by 
Your response made me laugh so hard I spilled more than a drop of coffee on my baby’s head. Thankfully, the coffee was lukewarm and I have one tough little daughter.
It just so happens that my son came home the other day telling me that a friend of his friend had been in the hospital for DAYS EVEN WEEKS because he drank pop after eating a bunch of popcorn kernels which made the popcorn explode in his belly. My son is 5 and very gullible. I’m pretty sure his little friend is less so. Either way, my kids swears up and down that this is true, and I’m sure will continue to pass this story on to other gullible children all summer.
Another point on using “Schoolgirls” as source of relevant information: if they are experts on the ramifications of unsafe abortion, why are they at the same time being pointed to as the holders of all unsafe sex misinformation?
Joyce Arthur’s article was hilarious, and she even thanked someone for helping her write it, lol. If one girl in a school admitted to friends that she got hurt, and 75 students knew her, then Joyce Arthur would no doubt conclude that 75 girls got injured. And by the way, did you ever see that Mythbusters episode about Mentos and soda pop? Very interesting!