TAPPED, “Republicans Lobby for Abortion – In Israel.”
In this posting, Sarah Posner reports on the trip of three United States’ Republican Congressmen – Frank Wolf (VA), Chris Smith (NJ), and Joseph Pitts (PA) – to Israel, where the trio is lobbying for a ban on abortion in the Holy Land. Posner, at best, seems to disapprove of this move.
Yet Posner objects not only to the actual trip but also to Ynet News’ reporting on it. She notes, “Israeli press coverage of the visit did not mention Smith's 2004 comparison of abortion to the Holocaust.” This might have been a valid point… if it were true. A quick trip to the link she supplies proves her claim feeble and nit-picky. Speaking at the 31st annual March for Life, Smith had stated, “Americans want the abortion holocaust to end.”
Past the connotation of the word, there is no other evidence that would support Posner’s claim that Smith was likening the slaughter of around 50 million innocent lives to the Nazi Holocaust, which claimed the lives of 12 million. Though perhaps such a comparison would be generously kind to the likes of Planned Parenthood.
For those of her readers who enjoy bonus deception, Posner adds in her concluding remarks, “But just like here [in the United States], this [that abortion is murder] is a minority view; according to a recent poll, only 30% of Israelis believe that abortion is murder.” Well, I checked the site she suggested and boom, there it was: 30%. My doubts were quenched… that is, of course, until with a lingering suspicion I checked US statistics to see if Americans agreed with the Israelis about the morality of abortion. Guess what I found. In the year 2000, 57% of those surveyed by the LA Times agreed that abortion is murder. For those one you, who, like Sarah Posner at numerologically disinclined, that’s almost twice 30% and any percentage over 50% is called a majority.
1 comment:
I do not think that Americans should be trying to force our policies on other countries, but that is just an opinion.
However, I would also like to comment about stats on abortion. Wording of the question is extremely important. According to Gary Wasserman in his 2006 book Politics in Action, in a Los Angeles Times poll in 2000, 60% of Americans considered abortion murder, similar to the stat in this post. “Yet, in the same poll, over 70 percent agreed with the statement ‘No matter how I feel about abortion, I believe that it is a decision that has to be made by a women and her doctor.’” Both sides of the issue have stats to support their views.
Wasserman argues that most Americans fall in the middle, and that their opinion has remained steady since Roe v. Wade in 1973. In 1975 21% thought abortion should be legal, 54% legal in certain circumstances, and 22% illegal. In 2003 those numbers were 24%, 57%, and 18%, respectively. Americans feel about the same.
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