Over the weekend, a mini-brawl erupted on Twitter among myself and several pro-lifers and pro-aborts reacting to Kurt Eichenwald’s epic meltdown. As you can imagine, the brain cell casualty count was astronomic.
But the most blog-worthy insanity came from pro-abortion OB/GYN Leah Torres, who is perhaps best known for telling Dana Loesch that “abortions save women’s lives. Period. Every. Single. Time,” which scores of sane tweeters had a field day with. In response to me, Torres put forth a pair of her blog posts as general justifications for her abortion advocacy. In reality, they expose just how little pro-abortion “doctors” care about the truth of their claims, or the moral principles they violate.
The title of Torres’ first offering, “Universal Truths,” will be disproven even quicker than you’re expecting. You see, her first universal truth is that “everyone wants fewer abortions.” She supports it with a stock flowery paragraph about how women never want to be in the position of considering abortion in the first place, followed by the usual boilerplate about how we must support “comprehensive sexual health education and access to highly effective contraception” in order to lower abortion rates.
Of course, the facts don’t support Torres’ fantasy—see Steven Ertelt’s dissection of the CHOICE Project study she cites, Ed Morrissey’s reminder that CDC data suggests lack of contraception “access” is a non-issue in the vast majority of unwanted pregnancies, Ross Douthat’s overview of Guttmacher data showing that contraception-friendly blue states often have higher abortion rates, or Marc Barnes’ exploration of the global data.
But for those too busy to go number-diving, Torres was kind enough to debunk her own claim for us. In our exchange, I asked her a simple question: “if we all want fewer, then what restrictions do you favor?”
Her answer: “I favor no restrictions.”
So even though “everyone wants fewer abortions,” there are zero circumstances under which abortions should be harder to obtain. Zero conditions added to the procedure itself to make someone less likely to undergo it. Zero pieces of relevant information that should be added to what abortionists must give abortion seekers. Zero situations in which an abortion isn’t justifiable. Zero living unborn babies who deserve to be treated humanely even if their mothers don’t want them.
So it turns out that “universal truth” actually means something more along the lines of “bald-faced lie.” For future reference, Doc, if you want people to believe your talking points, you have to at least try to pretend that you believe them yourself.
The next “truth” is that “abortions will always be needed,” because there will always be fetal abnormalities and life-threatening pregnancies. But Torres apparently thinks flowery prose about Mother Nature is a substitute for logical argument, because nowhere does she explain why “abnormal” babies don’t have basic human rights (lots of people would have told Rep. Jamie Herrera Beutler she “needed” an abortion), acknowledge that life-of-the-mother cases are red herrings because no pro-lifer would deny women life-saving treatment in such cases, or show how any of this would justify abortions that don’t involve serious medical complications.
Torres pads this non-argument with the following, revealing observation:
When a pregnancy is desired, that pregnancy is a child riding their bike for the first time, getting on the bus for their first day of school, and going off to college the minute the “+” sign appears on the home pregnancy test.
Presumably, then, a non-desired baby is none of those things—indeed, since “no restrictions” on abortion are tolerable, it’s not even any of those things when he or she can think, feel, breathe, kick, cry, or survive outside of the womb.
Torres couldn’t care less that the unborn baby actually is a living human being; the entirety of his or her value is determined by whether someone else cares for him or her. Is there anyone outside the womb she would apply this standard to? Should we start dismantling our child neglect laws, since kids that nobody “desires” don’t deserve protection?
Frankly, it’s terrifying that any physician, sworn under the Hippocratic Oath to “tread with care in matters of life and death,” would take such an inane, callously-subjective view of human life’s value.
The last imaginary truth is that “when abortion care is legal and accessible, it is safe.” It consists of an obligatory assurance that of course Kermit Gosnell doesn’t represent “how abortion is or should be performed,” an invocation of “the horrific tragedies of maternal deaths before abortion became legal in this country in 1974,” and a link to a report on “what really happens to women when abortion is legal”…in Latin America.
The real truth is that Gosnell only got away with it as long as he did because the “respectable” pro-choicers in the National Abortion Federation and Tom Ridge administration willfully looked the other way, and that those pre-Roe deaths were exaggerated and had nothing to do with legality, which is far more relevant than comparing the United States to Guatemala.
With Torres’ working definition of “universal truth” turning out to be such a joke, one might start to ask unflattering questions about her integrity. Fortunately, she covered that too—her second offering, “Ethics vs. Morals,” posits the following moral standard:
If it is legal and deemed ethical by society and the experts in the medical field, no physician has the right to impose personal morals on the care of their patients.
In other words, the author of a piece titled “Universal Truths” is telling us there are no universal truths when it comes to morality. Doctors should utterly outsource their reasoning on right and wrong to whatever the law allows and to social consensus.
If that’s your standard, then of course you’re not going to care if the “treatment” your patient wants kills someone else. Of course you’re going to tell whatever lie you can get away with in the service of abortion.
And lest you think I haven’t given Frau Doktor Torres’ intentions the benefit of the doubt, let’s consider one last quote:
I do not pretend to understand why there is such force behind trying to control women’s reproductive organs and, in turn, their bodies and their lives but I have sworn to advocate for them.
That’s it. That’s about as incontestable a point of no return as possible. Banal “control women’s bodies” misdirection aside, people oppose abortion because IT KILLS LIVING HUMAN BEINGS, and every honest person on either side of the debate admits it. There is no leeway whatsoever for anyone who has known about this controversy for five minutes, and certainly not for a medical professional presuming to speak authoritatively on the subject, to plausibly pretend she doesn’t even know the other side’s motivation.
Now, the story here isn’t that Leah Torres is a heartless pathological liar. Twitter’s crawling with those. The story is that we live in a society where medical and academic institutions don’t weed out the heartless pathological liars, where heartless pathological liars can obtain credentials and positions where they exert substantial influence over unsuspecting patients, and where professional media organizations turn to heartless pathological liars for expert analysis.
Be afraid, folks.
