The Daily Egyptian recently circulated an advertising supplement provided by the Human Life Alliance of Minnesota, Inc. This insert has appeared in the DE before, and was included in several college papers across Illinois. While the DE obviously has financial interests in stuffing these inserts into the paper and circulating them to the SIUC student body, they also have a responsibility to recognize it for what it is:dissemination of inflammatory, biased and inaccurate propaganda.

As president of SIU’s Voices for Choice, a Registered Student Organization dedicated to keeping abortion safe, legal and accessible, I could not let the lies and misinformation spread in this insert stand uncorrected.

The first flaw in the insert I feel obliged to correct is on page two. The Alliance quotes the personal testimony of Carol Everett, a clinic worker in Texas. This administrator claims to have seen 1 in 500 abortions result in a killing or maiming between 1982 and 1983. In glaring contrast to what one administrator (and anti-choice activist) claims to have seen, the Allen Guttmacher Institute, a nationally respected organization dedicated to reproductive research, presents quite a different picture. Their documented research indicates that the risk of death from an abortion reduced fivefold in the period between 1973 and 1985 as access to abortion became legal and safe. In 1983 the AGI research indicated the risk of death as a result of an abortion was only .4 in every 100,000. In the first eight weeks of pregnancy, when most abortions take place, the risk is only one in 500,000. This means that complications and risk of death posed by carrying a child to term is actually higher than aborting. Human Life Alliance’s numbers are extraordinarily misleading in an attempt to equate personal, and biased, observations with accurate information to aid their political agenda.

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The second claim I take issue with is their reading of constitutional law on the subject. Their claim that the Supreme Court’s decisions allow abortion throughout all stages of a pregnancy is either the result of outright lying or a profound ignorance on the subject. Doe v. Bolton only protects a woman’s right to choose to terminate a pregnancy during the first two trimesters when the fetus cannot live outside the womb (Constitutional Law, Goldman 1991 164). Webster v. Reproductive Health Services allows states to ban abortion after viability. The court has acted to further restrict access and the amount of control states can exert over abortion in the 1980s.

The third point that needs to be clarified is Human Life Alliance’s characterizations of abortion clinics. All clinics must conform to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists regulations concerning impartial counseling and informed consent. Any Planned Parenthood clinic must also follow strict guidelines. Abortion clinics are not mils selling abortion. The one described in the insert, if the portrayal is accurate, is an exception to the rule and should be shut down. This is not how Planned Parenthood clinics are run. Planned Parenthood actually prevents more unwanted children each year through family planning than abortions provided, is non-profit, and simply isn’t lining the pockets of dirty physicians and administrators.

Information from groups like Human Life Alliance is misleading, and the groups are evidently well enough funded to pay thousands of dollars every year in advertising. While the Daily Egyptian evidently has the right to accept this money in exchange for the dissemination of such material, it is very important to understand what they say for the most part is not true. Voice for Choice and other groups across the country are working very hard to keep this minority view from destroying the right of women to make such a fundamental and private choice as whether or not to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, and we invite everyone to join the fight.

April Pruitt is a senior in political science and president of Voice for Choice at SIUC.