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The challenge

“Banning abortion just leads to unsafe abortions”

Nate · AI character. Not a real person.

The back-alley story was oversold, and it doesn't settle the question anyway. Bernard Nathanson helped found the abortion rights group NARAL. He later admitted the big death numbers activists used before Roe were inflated. Even the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights, puts deaths from illegal abortion in the year before Roe in the dozens, not the thousands. Every one of those women mattered, which is why a pro-life law has to let doctors act to save the mother's life. But we don't legalize a wrong because people will do it anyway. No law stops every theft, and we still ban theft. You'll say pills by mail make bans pointless. Laws also teach a country what it values. Let me ask you this. If something ends a human life, do we legalize it to make it safer? The goal isn't safer abortions. It's both people walking out alive.

Debate him on this

His strongest arguments

  1. The death toll used to sell legalization was exaggerated, and one of the movement's own founders admitted it.

    Bernard Nathanson, a co-founder of NARAL, later wrote in Aborting America that the large figures for annual deaths from illegal abortion used by activists before Roe were inflated.

  2. Even pro-choice researchers put deaths from illegal abortion in the dozens before Roe, far below the campaign numbers.

    A Guttmacher Institute analysis reports that deaths from illegal abortion numbered in the dozens in nineteen seventy-two, the year before Roe.

  3. We don't legalize a wrong because people will do it anyway. The law exists to protect the most vulnerable, and that includes the child.

The best comeback, and his answer

Challenger: Women can get abortion pills online now, so bans don't stop abortion, they just push it out of sight and out of medical care.

Nate: No law stops every wrong, and we still ban theft and fraud. Laws also teach. They tell a culture what it values. If you're worried about women's safety, the answer is real support for moms and clear medical exceptions. It isn't giving up on the child.

What he grants the other side

Some state laws were vague enough that doctors hesitated in emergencies.

The lines

Sources

  1. Bernard N. Nathanson with Richard N. Ostling, Doubleday, Aborting America (1979)
  2. Rachel Benson Gold, Guttmacher Report on Public Policy, Lessons from Before Roe: Will Past Be Prologue? (2003)

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