Pro-Abortion Data for Arkansas Should be Taken With a Grain of Salt
Recently, two pro-abortion groups released data estimating the number of abortions performed on women from states like Arkansas — but families should take their findings with a grain of salt.
The Guttmacher Institute — a former research arm of Planned Parenthood — and the Society of Family Planning have both published reports in recent months that seem to indicate more women from Arkansas and other pro-life states are crossing state lines for abortion or ordering abortion pills online.
Guttmacher estimates that last year 900 women from Arkansas traveled to Kansas for abortions and 1,680 traveled to abortion facilities in Illinois.
The problem is Guttmacher Institute estimates the number of abortions by looking at data from abortionists around the country and combining that data with “a statistical modeling approach” to estimate the total number of abortions. In the past, Guttmacher has had a reputation of overestimating abortions in some cases.
The Society of Family Planning’s “#WeCount” report released last week estimates that last year, 3,070 women in Arkansas ordered abortion pills from states with “shield laws.”
The report says it relied on data from abortion facilities each month and that “The Society [of Family Planning] provided compensation to participating facilities for each monthly submission.”
But the report also says that 17% of its abortion data was “imputed” — that is, estimated — using information from news articles, individual contacts, and other sources. The actual data tables show the report “imputed” as much as 35%-45% of the abortion data for some states.
The Society of Family Planning also admits it cannot verify how many women actually took the abortion pill after ordering it. At best, the report can only estimate how many abortion pills were ordered.
The truth is, we know that groups like Planned Parenthood are spending millions of dollars to promote abortion to women from pro-life states like Arkansas. And we know that pro-abortion states are protecting abortionists who ship abortion drugs across the country. These are serious problems we need to address.
But we also know that public opinion polling shows Arkansans oppose abortion, and there is evidence that children are alive right now because Arkansas has prohibited abortion.
Given all the gaps in the data, the abortion estimates being published by pro-abortion groups simply don’t seem reliable.
Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.
Free Only to Agree: The Limits of Freedom
Many western countries are putting the right of conscience and speech to the test.
In March, Chris Elston, known as “Billboard Chris,” was detained in Australia for protesting the harm done to children in service of radical gender ideology. He was detained again in Belgium in June, this time along with Lois McLatchie Miller, a senior legal communications officer for Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) International. The two were simply standing in a public space, offering to talk to anyone interested about the realities of transgender treatment, wearing billboards that stated, “Children cannot consent to puberty blockers” and “Children are never born in the wrong body.” Though they called the cops to ask for protection from harassment, they were told to remove the signs or face arrest. After being detained and strip searched, they were released without charge.
Thought and speech has not always been treated this way. Because the West was deeply influenced by Christian consensus, citizens enjoyed the liberty, to various degrees, to challenge dominant paradigms and ideologies. That liberty is, based on what we’ve seen in Belgium and Britain and other nations, on shaky ground, from both state and institutional pressures. In some places, praying to yourself is considered unruly protest.
Just recently, Lila Rose of LiveAction shared the story of Naomi Best, a therapy student at Santa Clara University, an ostensibly Roman Catholic school in California. As part of the coursework, the university insisted that therapy students view extreme pornography and share their own sexual history. When she asked for the same exemption regularly given to Muslim students, they refused. When she described what happened in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Best was kicked out of the program. As she pointed out,
If we don’t have a set of therapists with diverse worldviews, and with tolerance for people with diverse worldviews, we will alienate people who need psychological care, and we will cause more harm than good.
Totalitarian states such as East Germany and Soviet Russia guaranteed citizens the freedom of worship but would levy fierce and often violent penalties for spreading religion outside church walls. In those countries, freedom of conscience was only the freedom to believe in one’s heart and head and maybe, one’s house of worship. Worldview diversity was never something allowed to enter the public square.
The First Amendment guaranteed more. In just 45 words, it protects conscience rights that are public. Thus, nonsensical campus chants that “speech is violence” or “silence is violence” are, in law, separated from actual violence. The founders wanted a country in which citizens could think and worship as they believed but could also assemble together and take those beliefs out into the world. Both Belgium and Britain, which is currently debating whether saying things that offend Islam should be illegal, could use something like that, written down into law, about now.
Of course, all freedoms have limits. In the United States, that limit is not one’s own head or heart but real harm done to another. Certainly, that must be constantly clarified and adjudicated, but it’s a far better arrangement than a limit based on how someone else might feel.
The First Amendment is a bulwark against speech police and one of the Founding Fathers’ greatest legacies. It’s a structured freedom that is part of the inheritance of the Christian view of humanity, recognized as both sacred and sinful. It’s a legacy that will not last if people are not willing to express their deeply held beliefs and defend the right to do so.
Copyright 2025 by the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Reprinted from BreakPoint.org with permission.