State cuts number of abortions in half

According to WorldNetDaily, the State involved is Mississippi. How did they do it? WND talks about "restrictions." But have a look at what they are, according to the article:

• In Mississippi, any health-care provider may, for no better reason than the dictates of his conscience, refuse any abortion-related service or referral.
• Minors must obtain the consent of both their parents before obtaining an abortion.
• Abortion providers must inform their prospective patients that having abortions increases the risk of cancer of the breast. (You may doubt this, but just think about it for a moment: Throw your hormones out of whack often enough, and you'll get breast cancer. It's that simple.)

Those aren't restrictions at all. A restriction would be a direct prohibition of the practice under certain circumstances. The conscience statute is an affirmation of a cardinal freedom: the right to decide for yourself what goods or services you will provide or recommend to other people. The parental-consent law is simply an application to abortion of a regulation that now applies to any other form of medical treatment. And the breast-cancer warning is a targeted truth-in-advertising statute. I am ashamed that judiciaries won't apply regular truth-in-advertising law to the abortion-and-breast-cancer link, but if they won't do it, then legislatures must issue explicit orders.

The number of abortions done in Mississippi has dropped by more than half in the last twelve years, to a level one-third the nationwide abortion rate (although the WND article doesn't give the denominator of that rate). Did the above measures bring that about? I just can't say, for many reasons, chief among which:

1. The article doesn't say when each of these measures was enacted.
2. I don't know what else has been going on in Mississippi that might bear on the question of why women are having fewer abortions. Maybe the same activists who have been changing the law have also been changing hearts.

I do have one major criticism of the activist Roy McMillan, whose affiliation the WND article doesn't give. WND cites the Associated Press as quoting him thus:

Thankfully, we've arrived at a time I always wanted -- when the women have to come through us.

Roy, if you said that, then let me straighten you out. This isn't about you, or me, or any movement, or about any human beings acting as gatekeepers. This is about changing hearts and minds. All the conscience clauses you can imagine would avail nothing if the doctors didn't have a conscience. All that the legislature has done is allow doctors to act as their conscience dictates; the doctors themselves have then decided not to recommend abortion to their patients, nor tell them where they can get an abortion. Likewise, the women involved have made their own decisions, following a presentation of the facts and just possibly getting their own consciences pricked. Talking about "having the women come through you" is counterproductive and, considering the stakes, irresponsible.

That aside, we can all be thankful of this clear sign that abortion is becoming less of a winning issue on the left, now that the truth is becoming known.

UPDATE: Here is the original AP article, as printed in The Clarion-Ledger. This article uses the same distortions I detected earlier--and I would really like to encourage WorldNetDaily not to carry forward the AP's habitual distortion of the facts when they cite AP articles in staff-written pieces. The article does, however, describe other factors responsible for the decline of abortions in Mississippi: you have women going to other States to get their abortions, or you have women using contraception so that they avoid the whole pregnancy question in the first place. The article also mentions something they call "community pressure," which they don't define.

But then the AP article makes an interesting point: pro-life activists in Mississippi have been pointing out "the checkered legal backgrounds of some abortion providers." This could mean that some of these abortionists have bent the law, or that they have a history of malpractice judgments against them. I can well imagine that either scenario has some basis in fact, and even that this one strategy, more than any other, has been effective in shutting down every abortion clinic but one. Now what the article doesn't explain is why no other abortion clinics have sprung up to replace those that have shut down. That could possibly be the result of doctors refusing "emergency referrals" (I can't imagine any emergent indication for an abortion--none whatsoever) or of minors suddenly needing to get parental consent. Or maybe it's because we now have crisis pregnancy centers equipped with the one piece of equipment that has done more than any other single thing to change hearts and minds: an obstetrical sonograph or "ultrasound machine." When you actually see this life that you have been thinking to terminate, going through with it suddenly gets an order of magnitude harder.