Love or truth? This Sunday, my pastor asked the congregation to vote by a show of hands whether God’s love or God’s truth was more important. I think I half-heartedly raised my hand for love, but I couldn’t help also murmuring, “They’re the same.” (The pastor confessed it was a trick question). Love and truth might be the two most important forces in the world. Love gets most of the attention, but truth is important on a visceral level as well. Everyone likes to be right, regardless of moral or religious belief. Yet, the phrase “being right” only exists because truth does. I’m disgusted and heartsick at the thought of someone making a poor choice based on lies they’ve been told. And I know I’m not the only one: It came to my attention this week that the pro-choice and pro-life camps make similar claims about each other. Each clinic/center is different and I can’t read all that’s been written about them. But each “side” claims that the other resorts to trickery and misinformation to manipulate women. Both say staff at the opposing locations will say anything, even lies, to get the pregnant women to choose what the staff want. I was naive and I was surprised. I would have thought that pro-choicers viewed pro-lifers as wrong or misinformed or stupid, but not that they would think they were lying. Of course, there can be both and there can be overlap. Is it lying to go around eagerly sharing false information you think is true? A common definition of lying is “knowingly telling a falsehood.” But lying can also be defined, “the telling of false statements.” Both pro-choice and pro-life seem to agree: it is bad to lie to a pregnant woman, and those who do should be shut down. Here are some of the claims that both are making:

– An article at feministing.com describes crisis pregnancy centers as, “anti-choice “clinics” that feed pregnant people misinformation to trick them out of having abortions.” – Students for Life writes that Planned Parenthood offers “deceptive counseling and biased information. …Planned Parenthood offers ‘options counseling’ to help decide a course of action. However, dozens of former employees have blown the whistle on the unscrupulous nature of Planned Parenthood’s ‘options counseling,’ acknowledging that it was commonly used to steer women towards abortion (which they profit from) instead of adoption or parenting (which they don’t get paid for).” – NARAL Pro-Choice North Carolina claims, “CPCs… often lie to women about abortion and birth control. They’ll do anything to scare a woman away from choosing legal abortion. CPCs… use deceptive tactics to mislead women about pregnancy-related information. Many try to manipulate and frighten women… Some false claims many CPCs make include: Abortion causes breast cancer. Abortion is psychologically damaging. Abortion can lead to sterility, future pre-term births, and even death. Condoms are not effective against STDs, HIV/AIDS, and pregnancy.”

Liveaction.org says, “Footage from an Appleton, WI, Planned Parenthood shows clinic staff, including the abortionist, lying to two of our undercover investigators about fetal development and encouraging the one who is pregnant to obtain an abortion because ‘women die having babies.’ In the undercover video, when the two women ask a Planned Parenthood counselor if the pregnant woman’s 10-week-old preborn child has a heartbeat, the counselor emphasizes the term ‘heart tones’ and answers, ‘Heartbeat is when the fetus is active in the uterus–can survive–which is about seventeen or eighteen weeks.’ On the contrary, embryologists agree that the heartbeat begins around three weeks from fertilization.” (Why is Planned Parenthood called out by name in these examples? While many pregnancy centers spring up individually in communities, Planned Parenthood is a national organization and America’s largest abortion provider.)

Both abortion clinics and pregnancy centers claim they are providing accurate information for the woman’s benefit. Thus both seem to agree: a woman deserves truth, not lies or myths or emotionally-based conjectures by staff. The NARAL Pro-Choice North Carolina website explicitly states, “You deserve the truth: comprehensive, unbiased, factual, and medically accurate information. ” Accurate, current information about fetal development can be so important because individuals have different “lines in the sand” with regard to this issue. Some are unwilling to name any point in a pregnancy (or even after birth – check YouTube) at which abortion should be illegal, but others say things like, “once there’s a heartbeat,” or “once the baby can survive outside the womb.” These are shifting targets as medical science continues to advance. We must detect a heartbeat to know whether it’s there, so our measurement is as contingent on our equipment as on the presence of something to detect. In this day and age, fetuses have received heart surgery in utero, which is one way to handle a birth defect if that is of concern. “Once the fetus can feel pain,” is another common line, and someone with this concern deserves an informed staff’s truthfulness. Some of us like to think we’re data- and logic-driven. “Show me the numbers!” But haven’t you ever read a study that you felt sure must be false? It’s so easy to manipulate numbers– adding one person to your team so that you are now two could be considered a 50% staff increase or a 100% increase, or growing to 200% of what you were, even though it would be far less misleading to just say you hired a person. Whatever information you seek to support your point, you will find it on the internet. Just today, on the first page of search results, I found both a study that called abortion safer than childbirth, and another claiming to have better methodology that says abortion actually correlates to far higher death rates (while acknowledging correlation is not causation). We don’t all have a background in scientific research to know if the methods used were reputable. I don’t think studies necessarily convince us we’re wrong. I would hope we consider who commissioned the study at the very least. I wouldn’t trust information about whole grains or gluten-free diets from Barilla (my former favorite pasta brand). I do not trust that study from a few years ago commissioned by oil companies that says climate change isn’t a thing. In that particular case, I didn’t even need to read it to know it wasn’t going to convince me. I wouldn’t expect anyone who can profit off me to give an unbiased comparison of other products (or services), much less alternative solutions to just purchasing more products/services. The source of our information matters, and I sometimes wonder if we don’t just pre-select sources to trust instead of thoughtfully considering each matter on our own. We can end up yelling back and forth quoting opposing studies and differing data.

Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof. –John Kenneth Galbraith

But I can’t help believing that our minds can really change. We don’t come out of the womb (excuse the expression) with fully-formed opinions. Our experiences and conversations shape our understanding and beliefs. Sometimes I’m confident anyone open-minded would come to the same conclusions I have, if given the same information. Yet I know that cannot be the case, because we all receive information at different times in life and under different circumstances, and we all have prejudice and biases that prevent us from receiving it objectively. (To be clear, I’m not claiming objectivity, either). Still, though I admit many topics about which I know little or nothing, discoveries in my areas of interest have given me a much happier and healthier life, so (as you may have noticed) I go around telling everyone about them. When statistics get me down and confused, I can find comfort in hopeful stories. Sometimes stories get a bad rap, but not all stories are fiction. True stories, both sad and happy, can cut through the propaganda. And true stories of love? Those are the best ones of all.