Since Roe v. Wade in 1973, more than 40 million abortions have been performed.
Bernard Nathanson, MD, co-founder of NARAL, has performed or supervised 75,000 abortions. He explains the beginnings of NARAL....
The original abortion-rights slogans from the early '70s---they remain virtual articles of faith and rallying cries of the "pro-choice" movement to this day---were "Freedom of choice" and "Women must have control over their own bodies."
"I remember laughing when we made those slogans up....We were looking for some sexy, catchy slogans to capture public opinion. They were very cynical slogan then, just as all of these slogans today are very, very cynical.
"We persuaded the media that the cause of permissive abortion was a liberal, enlightened, sophisticated one....Knowing that if a true poll were taken, we would be soundly defeated, we simply fabricated the results of fictional polls. We announced to the media that we had taken polls and that 60 percent of Americans were in favor of permissive abortion. This is the tactic of the self-fulfilling lie. Few people care to be in the minority. We aroused enough sympathy to sell our program of permissive abortion by fabricating the number of illegal abortions done annually in the U.S. The actual figure was approaching 100,000, but the figure we gave to the media repeatedly was 1 million.
"Repeating the big lie often enough convinces the public. The number of women dying from illegal abortions was around 200-250 annually. The figure we constantly fed to the media was 10,000. These false figures took root in the consciousness of Americans, convincing many that we needed to crack the abortion law.
"Another myth we fed to the public through the media was that legalizing abortion would only mean that the abortions taking place illegally would then be done legally. In fact, of course, abortion is now being used as a primary method of birth control in the U.S. and the annual number of abortions has increased by 1,500 percent since legalization."
In New York the law outlawing abortion had been on the books for 140 years. "In two years of work, we at NARAL struck that law down."