Power

Susan B. Anthony List Opens Anti-Guttmacher Research Center to Push Polls That Support Their Agenda

Oh hey!  Looks like the anti-choice folks found a new way to come up with their own set of "facts"!

Image taken from the SBA List website.

First you have a mainstream media, then the right wing creates Fox News to promote their own set of facts. Then you have EMILY’s List, and the anti-choice political groups create Susan B. Anthony List to “combat” it. Now, they’ve created their own version of a “research arm” in order to support their an alternate reality — “facts” and polling, calling it the “counterweight” to the respected Guttmacher Institute.

Because if the facts don’t support your agenda, you have to find some place to create a new set of facts.

SBA List has unveiled the “Charlotte Lozier Institute,” an anti-choice version of Guttmacher Institute that will be “a crossroads for both new information and fresh analysis of policy questions that vex the modern world, centered on the value of human life and care for mothers, the children they carry, and the family,” according to President Chuck Donovan, who formerly worked for such bastions of anti-choice “facts” and “evidence” as the National Right to Life Council, Focus on the Family, and Heritage Foundation, before joining the Susan B. Anthony List.

Editing the site is Gene Tarne, who worked on the “Women Deserve Better,” campaign,
which brings together anti-choice groups ranging from Priests for Life and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to Silent No More and Feminists for Life.

The Lozier Institute is fairly light on policy at this point, and especially their own research. In fact, it’s without the slightest hint of irony that the Lozier Institute actually uses Guttmacher as a resource in their own research, such as in the piece on abortion in D.C.

Still, putting together a propaganda arm and calling it a “research institute” has its benefits. Their new poll on sex-selection abortion, an anti-choice manufactured “crisis” being created to try to get the general public to correct a non-existent problem by agreeing to curb the right to an abortion, has already gotten them coverage in The Hill.

According to the report, “77 percent of respondents would support a law banning abortion in cases where ‘the fact that the developing baby is a girl is the sole reason for seeking an abortion.'” And with that exact phrasing, it’s unsurprising that so many respondents support such a law. 

The real fact is that any instances of someone is considering an abortion with “the sole reason for seeking an abortion” being that the fetus is female would be almost impossible to find.  And even if such a person did exist, it would be nearly impossible for a provider to discern that this is the “sole reason” and not perform the procedure.

But maybe that’s why they need of their own set of facts.