Abortion often evokes difficult questions from people who genuinely want to know the truth about claims they hear from abortion supporters and the abortion-friendly media. Here are three of those most frequently asked questions below with some bullet point answers:
1. “If abortion were illegal, wouldn’t women still have abortions illegally, resulting in thousands of deaths?”
THE FACTS:
- Abortion deaths prior to Roe v. Wade were deliberately over-inflated to garner support for decriminalizing abortion.
- In 1972, the year prior to Roe, the Centers for Disease Control reported just 39 illegal abortion deaths and 24 legal procedure deaths. By 1973, 19 deaths were attributed to illegal abortion procedures and 25 from legal abortions.
- Today, legal abortion is sold as a “safe” procedure; recent deaths are almost never reported by the media.
- Live Action News has documented several cases of women who have died in recent years from legal abortion, including Cree Erwin, Tonya Reaves, Lakisha Wilson, Keisha Marie Atkins, Diamond Williams, and others.
- Recent national reports touting the “safety” of abortion have been funded by pro-abortion, pro-population control groups, including (according to an analysis published by National Review) “the Packard Foundation and the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, which have given sizable grants to Planned Parenthood.”
- Early abortions, committed using the abortion pill regimen, hold potentially serious risks, even including death. The abortion pill has four times the amount of abortion complications according to a practice bulletin from the strongly pro-choice American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG).
- As previously reported, the first of the two drugs typically given for a chemical abortion has a black box warning about the possibility of severe infection or uncontrolled bleeding. And yet, a 2016 review by the FDA resulted in the pill being allowed up to 10 weeks gestational age instead of seven weeks, a removal of the requirement for a followup visit to make sure that the abortion was complete, and a removal of the requirement to report complications unless they result in the woman’s death.
- A recent report from the FDA found that 24 women who took the abortion pill regimen died and a thousand had serious complications which warranted hospitalization.
- According to researchers Dr. Michael J. New and Dr. Donna Harrison, “A 2015 study of abortion safety in California, based on comprehensive and reliable data from Medicaid billing records rather than surveys, found that medical abortions resulted in four times the complication rate of first-trimester surgical abortions.”
- Pro-life counselors outside abortion facilities, including Planned Parenthood, report abortion-related emergencies regularly. Ambulance transports of abortion patients are among the most reported. At specific abortion facilities, pro-lifers have documented dozens of incidents within a short amount of time.
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READ: Centers for Disease Control report reveals more deaths from legal abortion than we thought
2. “If the risk of death associated with childbirth is higher than that of abortion, wouldn’t that indicate that abortion is safer than childbirth?”
THE FACTS:
- Dr. Byron Calhoun, vice chair of West Virginia University-Charleston’s Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, published a report stating that the claim of abortion being 14 times safer than childbirth is “unsupported by the literature and there is no credible scientific basis to support it.” Read more here.
- OBGYN Ingrid Skop noted that one misleading study “compared abortion-related deaths to the numbers of legal abortions (abortion mortality rate), whereas maternal deaths were compared to 100,000 live births (maternal mortality ratio). A comparison is not valid if it uses different denominators. Additionally, of the four numbers, only the number of live births is accurately known, due to mandated birth certificates. Yet, only two-thirds of maternal deaths are related to live birth… It is estimated that 50% of maternal deaths are not reported as such on death certificates, and the number is undoubtedly much higher for deaths related to abortion… Chemical abortions (the abortion pill) are often assumed to be safer, but the risk of complications is four times greater than with surgical abortions. At least one in 20 women require surgical completion due to hemorrhage, failed abortion, or retained pregnancy tissue. Mifepristone and misoprostol are also known to suppress the immune system, raising the risk of infection; half of the deaths reported after chemical abortions occurred due to infection from a common soil organism…abortion can increase the risk of complications in a woman’s subsequent pregnancy, but these outcomes are never attributed to the prior abortion…”
- According to Dr. Skop, “Black women have a 330% higher risk of maternal mortality compared to white women. Not coincidentally, they are also 370% more likely to end their pregnancies in abortion. Abortion clinics often target poor and minority women, as racism and eugenics are common motivations for pro-choice advocates.”
- Although states may voluntarily report abortion-related deaths, there are no federal requirements to report abortion-related complications or deaths.
- The CDC defines a maternal death as “the death of a woman while pregnant or within 1 year of the end of a pregnancy….“
- According to Clarke D. Forsythe in his book, Abuse of Discretion, the CDC has estimated maternal deaths are underreported by 30 to 150 percent.
- Forsythe also points out, “Maternal mortality rate is defined by the CDC as all maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, rather than pregnancies…. [S]ome end in miscarriage or stillbirth,” which he claims “inflates the mortality rate.”
- Forsythe continues, “… the abortion mortality rate includes only ‘legal’ abortion deaths, while the childbirth mortality rate includes all maternal deaths (including deaths from abortions, ectopic pregnancies, accidents and homicides.) Accidents and homicides – have nothing to do with the biological ricks of pregnancy…. The maternal death numbers are likely inflated, while the abortion death figures are likely undercounted.”
- A 2013 report from Charlotte Lozier found a study “which… illustrates that, compared to women who delivered their babies, women who had an early- or late-term abortion have significantly higher mortality rates within one to ten years of the event.”
- According to a 2019 Washington Post Fact Check, “[S]ince 2007 the United States hasn’t had an official annual count of pregnancy-related fatalities, or even an official maternal mortality rate,” the paper’s Factchecker Glenn Kessler said. “So anyone trying to tie a link between abortion laws and mortality rates is going to run into trouble.” The paper added, “As ProPublica has documented, maternal mortality statistics in the United States are incomplete and highly suspect, prone to undercounting and overcounting. Since 2003, states have added a checkbox to death certificates, asking whether a person was pregnant when they died or had been in the previous year. But the data collection is not consistent, and the addition of a checkbox appears to have resulted in many false positives.”We covered this previously in Live Action News (here).
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3. “It is estimated that there are 42 million abortions a year. If they hadn’t been aborted, would the planet have the resources to sustain all those people?”
THE FACTS:
- The world currently holds 7.6 billion people but reportedly produces enough food to feed 10 billion.
- A 2012 study published in the Journal of Sustainable Agriculture found that, for two decades, the rate of global food production has increased faster than the rate of global population growth.
- The world’s hunger problems are often rooted in corrupt governments and poor distribution systems.
- Fear of overpopulation has led to the abortion deaths of 336 million children in China alone through 2013 because of its One-Child Policy. Recently, China announced that it had ‘relaxed’ to a two-child policy, but abortions and sterilizations still regularly occur. In many other developing nations, including India, tens of millions of unborn children have been aborted in the name of population control, most of them female.
- According to several reports, the true crisis is actually underpopulation. Many countries have fertility rates that are much too low to sustain their populations.
- According to Walter E. Williams, professor of economics at George Mason University, “The entire premise behind population control is based on the faulty logic that humans are not valuable resources.”
Editor’s Note, 5/29/20: This post has been updated.
