“Disinformation” and “misinformation” have been buzz words for the past several years.  Social media, where every opinionator has global access without the need of a fact-checker or benefit of an editor, spawns this.  Apart from innocent ignoramuses, social media is also fertile ground for propaganda trolls advancing foreign governments’ agendas: military forces recognize that, today, warfare is conducted not just on land, sea, air, or space, but in cyberspace—where narratives can be defined before the first shot is fired.

For that reason, governments have been interested in addressing disinformation.  But government involvement also runs the risk of government censorship and policies of the previous administration suggested an easy conflation between “disinformation” and “policies we don’t agree with.”  The flip side of such confusion is that “policies we agree with” become “facts,” even “science,” no matter how disinformative they are.

Take pregnancy.

In the wake of Dobbs’ reversal of Roe v. Wade, it has become an article of faith among pro-abortionists that getting pregnant today is an inherent risk – potentially a fatal one – absent access to abortion-on-demand through birth.  It’s the outcome of the pro-abortion drumbeat to redefine abortion as “healthcare,” a position born of the legal legerdemain in Roe and especially its companion case, Doe v. Bolton.  For while Roe paid lip service to fetal “potential life” and even invented a trimester system as a feigned Constitutional requirement, that whole edifice was negated by Doe’s definition of “health,” which basically meant anything a woman wanted it to mean for which she could get a doctor to sign up.  That’s why those who would “codify” Roe pooh-pooh pro-life claims that the decision imposed abortion-on-demand through birth; reading Roe without Doe let’s you get away with that claim.  But the federal courts never read them separately.

Pro-abortionists spread disinformation that women in pro-life states are especially vulnerable because physicians are chilled from undertaking even legitimate medical care unless a woman is in the process of dying.  Pregnant women supposedly cannot be treated for ectopic pregnancy, for example, in pro-life states.

All that is bunk, but it doesn’t prevent its spread.  From 2022-24, i.e., under Democratic control, the U.S. Senate regularly held hearings to offer platforms to such disinformation, e.g., the Judiciary Committee under retiring Catholic Senator Dick Durbin (whom Chicago Cardinal Cupich tried to feat with a “lifetime achievement award”) held various hearings alleging the medical and legal dangers of Dobbs.  One should not be surprised, then, when surveys show that women of childbearing age indicate a plurality who think pregnancy “irresponsible” absent abortion guarantees.

To this end, Andrea Widburg recently penned an illuminating op-ed tracing some of the origins of this disinformation.  She cites a feminist website that, pre-Dobbs, engaged in its own revisionist biology.  According to Womensvoicesmedia, the purpose of the womb is not to receive and sustain a pregnancy.  It really is a protection device to keep women from remaining pregnant (they’d probably say “becoming” pregnant if they subscribe to ACOG’s revisionist definition of pregnancy as starting with implantation).  But fetuses are “frighteningly good” at overcoming “fortress” uterus’ defenses.  The result is that “[e]ven with modern medical care, at least 800 people die EVERY DAY from pregnancy- and childbirth-related causes. Among developed countries, the United States has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world….”

Back in the late 1960s, “thousands” of maternal deaths from “back-alley abortions” was picked up and bandied about as a fact in the media as a justification for abortion legalization, even though one of the creators of that “fact” – Dr. Bernard Nathanson – admitted it was utter fabrication.  The same “facts” and “hard cases make bad laws” arguments have seen a post-Dobbs renaissance, abetted by politicians whose ideological commitments to abortion-on-demand tailor the “facts” to the agenda.

There’s one other element today that wasn’t around in the 1960s: pandemic experience.  America has not yet fully come to grips with the impact of the COVID shutdown.  One of them that I see frequently are those still masking themselves five years after COVID.  I understand the elderly and the frail, but the most prominent cohort I see is often 20- and 30-something females, by their attire professionals.

To the best of my knowledge, there’s been no study of particular susceptibility among that demographic—which is also a population in its prime childbearing years.  Persons raised by helicopter parents afraid of scraped knees, not yearning to breath free lest a virus infect them, will likely be susceptible to the claim that 800+ people are dying daily from yielding to the millennia-old ‘risk’ of becoming a mother.

It’s time we faced this disinformation head on.