Moa, Abortion, & the Contrarian Spirit: An Exercise in Thinking

I’ve been studying the history of Marxism a good deal of late. I’ve audited several courses, read dozens of monographs (a fancy word for books meant to alert you to the fact that I am even smarter than you previously imagined). I’ve read histories, testimonials, biographies and the like.

This lead recently to an attempted discussion with a relative whose mental acuity is definitely superior to my own, and I am no dummy. My wife and I took unofficial “Mensa tests” and she passed the test and I fell just shy. We both got nearly 100% on the questions, but she finished over 30 minutes before I did. This fellow was her relative not mine.

As soon as I began to lay down some discussion points and throw out some projected numbers of those untimely killed by Marxists in various regimes, he began to baulk and recite from memory chapter and verse from some book that he considered definitive and that was that… end of discussion. “The Marxist regimes of the 20^th century had ONLY killed 50-60 million among the lot of them” (emphasis his). He stated this as if it were nothing but a trifle, nothing to get worked up about in the face of my generalized claims to “Well over 100 million… possibly approaching 200 million.” He even rolled his eyes at me. No comment that I made during our whole time together, however innocuous it seemed to me in light conversational banter, went without an attack, claiming that any given comment at hand was faulty in some way and that he just had to put me to rights. There is a grand difference between IQ and wisdom. A fast processor fed garbage data spits out garbage answers faster and is less often corrected for the arrogant confidence in the speed of the processor.

In a similar discussion with this youth’s father, a few years earlier, I had made Statement “A.” He made rebuttal “B.” I countered with fact “C.” He decried fact “C” because of impression “D.” This went on for some time unpacking the whole of world history, economics, and lawn maintenance theory until finally in his ultimate football spiking declaration of victory over my points “Y & Z” he definitively declared “A” to be absolute fact. We stared at each other blankly for a second or two taking in this unexpected turn of events… he actually giggled at being caught in the game… I stopped speaking altogether about anything for years.

I engage in conversation to learn and connect with people. Everyone has something they can teach me and I am eager to learn. I am not, however, a baby bird letting mamma bird vomit whatever straight into my mouth. I listen. I weigh. I calculate and recalculate what I’m hearing in relationship to everything else I’ve studied. Sometimes I leave options open. Sometimes I reject new input. Sometimes I’m forced to reconsider previous intellectual and emotional commitments. When I listen, I strive to be as generous with the speaker as I can. First and foremost, even over other psychological “necessities,” like the need to be THE MAN in every exchange, I am hoping for understanding . Watkins calls this a hermeneutic of love.

Others, however, and I’ve met plenty of them in academic circles and plenty more in every other circle, are contrarian. Every encounter is a contest of egos. New information is disbelieved immediately and used as an excuse for insult and rude dismissal. These don’t converse, they listen waiting for a chance to speak, and that speech is usually caustic rejection of whatever is being said. These demand instant proof, accept no evidence as proof, and ridicule the speaker in subtle and, sometimes, not so subtle ways. Every discussion is an opportunity to best another person and a dozen different logical fallacies are employed to that end… while accusing the opponent of constant logical fallacies. Their personal favorites are ad hominem attack against you and your sources, and making appeals to superior authority for their sources. Their anecdotal evidence is superior to your researched conclusions. They claim their own supreme position as standardized and yours as unwarranted deviation.

So let me engage the issue using Mao and abortion as illustrations of the limits of raw data.

In the history of our previously noted Marxism discussion, this young man had a memorized fact from a “reliable source.” He needed nothing else. It was a weapon against anyone anywhere who contradicted this comfortable fact.

As I’ve continued to weed through the many sources that on the surface contradict one another (One claims a mere 17 million dead under Mao, others 20, 30, 50 or even 70 million) I found myself amused and less than amused by a number of trends that facilitate these numbers.

Trend one: Believe official reports from those who have a long history of lying about everything, who value ideology above truth… and people, who have every ideological reason to lie and conceal the real world outcomes of their poisonous ideas. My youthful relative, brilliant mind and all, rested here. There is no way of knowing, now, where he would have rested if I’d started with his own position. His contrarian spirit would not likely have accepted what he insisted upon under that circumstance.

Trend two: Carefully consider the way that these numbers were gathered, the motives behind them, and the procedural fictions used to get them and then speculate as best one can on actual numbers.

Neither are perfectly accurate, but trend two gives a better sense of where things sit.

Working with Yang Jisheng and Frank Dikötter let’s project it this way.[1]

1. It’s the 1950s in rural regions of China where record keeping is not ideal. A complicated tale ensues of Mao confiscating food, interfering with farming practices, forcing communal kitchens, destroying homes and forcing communal living, using confiscated food to buy weapons and machinery from abroad, leaving food to rot in massive storage facilities while shooting anyone who tried to eat any of it, enslaving men to work dangerous land projects to conquer nature and forcing the rest to operate steel manufacturing facilities built hurriedly in most villages, stealing all the metal he could from individuals to falsify global impressions of steel output, forcing women and children to do all the farming and forcing them to do it badly at the end of a whip, naked, and under constant threat of murder by work bosses who raped them and brutalized them without penalty. If you got sick, they stopped feeding you. Some pushed the sick into graves and buried them alive.
2. Those places where records are supposedly kept more accurately showed upwards of 20-30% dead in some places, and 50-100% in others. Eye witness accounts and local records claim various paths of death like intentional starvation, murder, cannibalism, illness linked to starvation, being worked to death at the end of whips, and suicide.
3. Mao refused to accept records that had death rates higher than birth rates, leaving those below him falsifying accounts. If you told the truth, you were punished. If you lied, you were praised. If your lie was exposed broadly, you were accused of deceiving Chairman Mao and took the blame for everything to protect his vision.
4. Babies were frequently ignored in counts until older, and it was not uncommon to leave those under 12 off death counts altogether.
5. Deaths from starvation were often blamed on other things and reclassified.
6. In a nation of 660 million, even a 10% starvation rate would leave the numbers at 66 million. The rates of starvation were lower in cities, and much higher than 10% in most of the farming communities. And some local leaders quietly ignore Mao’s commands and saved all their people from starvation.
7. The deaths claimed by official sources are often put forward for famine victims from 1958-1962 and seldom include the ongoing deaths from beatings, forced labor camps, accidents caused by communist dereliction of safety and concern for workers’ health. They also ignore ongoing deaths from starvation and malnutrition for years afterward. It does not count the deaths at the hands of Mao’s Red Guard and does not count the deaths of the Red Guard when Mao tired of them. Finally, these numbers do not count the 2-3 million killed in Mao’s war for power, which included in addition to soldier deaths, deaths from barricaded communities that Mao starved out, and the early purges where Mao sought a minimum of one execution for every 1000 people, and got many more.
8. The numbers are so twisted that some have had to draw a line between more certain populations in earlier censuses and later censuses, reasoning back from observable and consistent trends so as to measure the disruption of that time period. This method leaves one counting losses to population rather than specific deaths from starvation, but it gives a much more accurate understanding of the devastation Mao caused through his Marxist ideology. So here we see loss of life AND loss of fertility. So some of these include uncounted baby deaths, as well as miscarriages, and the “unconceived” who would have been conceived if not for Mao’s villainy. This comes out at just over 70 million people who should be present in say 1962 who are not present.
9. One of the ways to keep even these numbers down is by whitewashing many deaths as natural deaths. If you trace the normal death rates before these events and remove those dead from Mao’s debt the numbers get much lower. This too is a kind of “lie.” If I walk into a cancer ward full of children and adults under hospice care, circling the drain, and put a bullet in every head, I cannot rightfully label those as natural deaths in spite of the fact that they would have shown up in such a count anyway had I not shot them. Mao is responsible for many of those who are taken off his record by using statistics to discount them.
10. When the presented numbers are calculated through a haze of lies and layers of false record keeping, one may rest assured that the conservative numbers scarcely tell the tale.

Let us compare this with abortion. In a recent speech, Michael Knowles declared abortions in American to number 800 thousand per year. Well, that’s a number for sure. According to USA Facts,[2] and CDC reports, abortions were hovering between 600,000 and 700,000 from 2012-2021, ticking up to one million 37 thousand by 2023. This is, according to Guttmacher, a fall from 1.5-1.6 million in the 80s and 90s.[3]

Then we get this humdinger at the bottom of the report:

California, Maryland, and New Hampshire have not reported abortion data since at least 2012, while New Jersey did not report data for 2021.While abortion is legal in California, Maryland, and New Hampshire, these states do not track abortion data, and while the states don’t prevent hospitals, surgery centers, and health insurers from collecting such data, they don’t have mandatory reporting requirements. New Jersey, which did report abortion data between 2012 and 2020 had not submitted 2021 data by the time of the CDC report. [4]

CDC

The lack of comprehensive data collection has led to piecemeal understanding of abortion trends and practices and left a hole in the nationwide picture of abortion statistics.

I remember as we moved into “Millennials-coming-of-age” reports that news agencies and pastors alike began declaring that Millennials were more conservative about abortion, that increased awareness of the humanity of the unborn was having a positive impact, because reported numbers suddenly dropped by hundreds of thousands. Interestingly enough, this drop occurred right around the time that California, New Hampshire, New Jersey, then Maryland, stopped reporting abortion data. Not only that, but some who do report have limited their reporting to hospitals and care facilities that have ambulatory services and do not collect data from other types of abortion providers.[5]

What we’ve learned about places like Gosnell’s clinic in Philadelphia which has now been labeled a “non-compliant” abortion clinic,[6] should raise eyebrows over the numbers being bandied about even beyond the non-reporting of four states and reduced reporting because of limitations on who ranks as a reporting agency.

Then we have the oft referenced back-alley abortion “clinics” bemoaned in the 1987 hit film Dirty Dancing, and making the Left cry every day that women trying to murder their children might be forced to do it less safely. In her own day, Margret Sanger fretted just the same that 2 million abortions a year were taking place in America without proper safety regulations… the population was only 116 million at the time, compared to our present 345 million, not including illegal aliens living among us, who supposedly were 11-25 million strong during Obama’s day and have exploded under the Biden-Harris administration. I do not know where Sanger got her numbers, but given that this was taking place in a statistically more sexually conservative nation with a radically lower population, one wonders whether she knew something most don’t about illegal abortion resources or whether she was just being manipulative.[7]

Now, lets talk about “Morning after” pills, which are available without a prescription from a doctor. According to the propaganda aggressively promoted by pro-abortion activists and Pharmaceutical companies with a vested interest in their sale, “Morning after pills” do not cause abortions. I had to wade through nearly a hundred such claims (some quite angry and insulting) before finding this little ditty.

According to the Financial Times, 15 million prescriptions for “Morning-after” pills were sold in 2023,[9] but it is impossible to know how many proved abortive. It is unlikely that ALL 15 million were abortive, or even taken. The abortive effects concern the timing of ovulation with the sex act, supposedly postponing approaching ovulation, but failing to prevent fertilization if ovulating on the day of sex or on the day before sex.

History has told us that those with a high stake in outcomes, a lot of financial power and/or a prevailing ideological bent will kill steal and destroy to protect those interests. The whole history of the pharmaceutical industry is rife with belied promises of “safe.” Nothing could be more advantageous for those who both want to sell product and care nothing about the life of the unborn than to lie about the actual effects short and long-term for any such product they sell. Science is for sale so long as scientists are for sale… and scientists are always for sale.

When you look up death rates in America for 2022, we are told that Heart disease (700K) and cancer (600K) were the number one and two causes of death. We know, however, that radically conservative numbers for abortion equal these two combined. In the 80s, known abortion deaths were three times heart disease deaths. Yet no one says, Murder is the number one cause of death in America. Why? Because we just decided that some people don’t count and shouldn’t appear on our lists—And THIS is the real history of death under Marxist regimes.

So, how many abortions are there a year in America? Globally? How many people died from Mao’s Marxist daydreams? How many people were killed by all Marxist Regimes combined in the 20^th century? We may posit a minimal number that is absolute bottom. Trends suggest, however, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn claims in his work The Gulag Archipelago concerning reported deaths in Stalin’s tyranny,[10] two, three, or even four times higher than those in power, and those defending them are willing to acknowledge. While the whole scope of it is known by God alone, we should hang our heads in shame to latch onto a minimalist picture drawn for us by those with a dog in the fight. And we should weep over our own corrupt hearts when our egos and ideologies are the foremost things to be defended when discussing these matters.

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[1] Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013); Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962, (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

[2] USAFacts, https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-abortions-occur-in-the-us/#:~:text=Home%20%2F%20Health%20%2F%20Articles%20%2F%20How,a%2010.5%25%20drop%20since%202012. (11/4/2024)

[3] Guttmacher, “Despite Bans, Number of Abortions in the United States Increased in 2023,” March 2024, https://www.guttmacher.org/2024/03/despite-bans-number-abortions-united-states-increased-2023 (11/04/2024).

[4] USAFacts, (11/04/2024).

[5] Jeff Diamant, Besheer Mohamed and Rebecca Leppert, “What the Data Says About Abortion in the U.S.” Pew Research Center,March, 25, 2024, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/03/25/what-the-data-says-about-abortion-in-the-us/#:~:text=The%20four%20reporting%20areas%20that,hospitals%20and%20other%20medical%20facilities (11/04/2024).

[6] Many complaints were ignored or buried by officials. Abortion clinics were often given a pass on many safety regulations. One official claimed that nail salons were held to a higher standard than some abortion clinics. See Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer (2018) Directed by Nick Searcy.

[7] Sanger, Margaret, The Autobiography of Margaret Sanger, Mineola, New York: Dover Printing Publications Inc., 2004, pp. 111–112; https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1qWIXf9Rk8yT24YOpqQeek4dNdFBp4_5t (11/21/2023).

[8] https://www.webmd.com/sex/birth-control/plan-b (11/04/2024)

[9] Jamie Smyth and Oliver Roeder, “Demand for Morning-after Pill Rises in US as Abortion
Restrictions Spread,” February 16, 2023, Financial Times, https://www.ft.com/content/946272b3-0216-467a-bc1e-5be888b3b7dd
(11/04/2024).

[10] There is a wonderful discussion on this score in the ask Historians section of Reddit, https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/941sg9/comment/e3jufjx/ (11/04/2024). Even in this discussion they somewhat misrepresent what Solzhenistsyn used as a basis for his calculations of 60 million dead. He discusses the way records were kept and who did and didn’t get counted in various type of records. For every man who disappeared into the Gulag system he recommends assuming two, three, or four others whose lives were cut off by that disappearance.