Yeah, ND brings in some GREAT speakers

Tonight, Amy McInerny gave a talk sponsored by the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture. This is a talk she's given at several other venues around Indiana, including last semester, at the Edith Stein Project conference. She is, as the advertisements stated, the founder of an organization that calls itself Women's Injury Network. A Google search doesn't turn up much other than this:

"Represented by attorney Joseph P. Stanton, a Pennsylvania teenager had sued abortionist Charles Benjamin and the Cherry Hill Women's Center. She successfully settled her medical malpractice case on October 17, the eve of trial, in a Philadelphia County Court," announced the Women's Injury Network (WIN). "Her case is the first medical malpractice lawsuit in the United States to reap a settlement based on a claim over the failure of an abortionist and/or clinic to inform a woman of the increased risk of breast cancer due to abortion. The clinic required that the settlement amount be kept confidential."

This piece is dated November 17, 2003. They provide this quotation from the executive director of Women's Injury Network:

Asked whether abortion directly increases a woman's risk of suffering from breast cancer, Gertz said, "That is much more controversial but there is a lot of evidence."

The problem is that the scientific consensus in February of 2003 -- months before the settlement -- was precisely the opposite:

Several studies have provided very strong data that induced abortions have no overall effect on the risk of breast cancer. Also, there is no evidence of a direct relationship between breast cancer and spontaneous abortion (miscarriage) in most of the studies that have been published. Scientists invited to participate in a conference on abortion and breast cancer by the National Cancer Institute (February 2003) concluded that there was no relationship. A recent [relative to 2006] report of 83,000 women with breast cancer found no link to a previous abortion, either spontaneous (stillbirth) or induced.

I don't like to casually accuse people of lying. In order to lie, you must (at least) know that the falsehood you're telling is not true. So it may very well be the case, for example, that the conservatives Amanda of Pandagon calls liars are, in fact, just spectacularly ignorant -- quite plausibly so ignorant that they fail to even realize how ignorant they are -- and are making shit up. That is, rather than liars, it may very well be the case that they're just bullshitters. Likewise, Gertz may be lying, or she may be bullshitting.

But both lying and bullshitting are (or really should be) utterly contemptible acts in the context of an intellectual forum. Even if McInerny herself presented nothing but facts firmly accepted by the mainstream medical community, her continued association with this organization, even if in name only, tarnishes her reputation.