How Many Women Died Due to Illegal Abortion Complications?

       "Before Roe v. Wade, hundreds of thousands of women had illegal abortions [annually], and one in 10 of them died."
- July 7, 1989 USA Today staff editorial.

       Introduction. In October of 1989, when several minor restrictions on abortion were enacted by the Pennsylvania State legislature in its modified Abortion Control Act, local pro-abortion activists and lawmakers immediately began to make numerical claims that even most other pro-abortionists found embarrassing. The local pro-aborts claimed that Mexico has the same number of abortions that the United States does, although they are all illegal there and the Mexican population is much smaller than that of the United States (101 million vs. 278 million at the time); that 140,000 women died of illegal abortions every year in Mexico (according to the United Nations, the actual number is 159); and that this many women would die in the United States if abortion were criminalized again.[15] This is a factor of exaggeration amounting to one hundred thousand percent, or a thousand times the actual number!
       Although this is one of the most extreme claims recently made regarding criminal abortion mortality, the pro-abortionists bandy about many round numbers without substantiation, and all of them seem to end in "000." There are literally hundreds of examples of such lying;

• Two days after the Supreme Court's Webster v. Reproductive Health Services decision, the daily newsmagazine USA Today stated as fact in an understandably unsigned staff editorial that "Before Roe v. Wade, hundreds of thousands of women had illegal abortions [annually], and one in 10 of them died."

       Using the pro-abort's own figures of 200,000 to one million illegal abortions per year, USA Today is therefore stating that 20,000 to 100,000 women died of illegal abortions every year before Roe. This amounts to an exaggeration factor of 55,555 percent over the actual figure!

• A San Francisco pro-abortion group calling itself "Men Who Care About Women's Lives," which including Brian Willson (the 'peace' activist who lay on railroad tracks in front of a 200-ton locomotive and lost his legs as a result), echoed the most popular figure when it mailed 10,000 wire coathangers to President George Bush in 1989, representing the "number of women who will die annually should pro-choice be outlawed."[16]

• A New York Times writer claimed that "Their histories date back to women who had back-alley abortions that resulted in internal infections and other, more disturbing, complications. Legalization has largely eliminated these things, as well as the estimated 5,000 annual abortion-related deaths in the years before Roe ... Unfortunately, their [19th Century doctors] successful effort to make abortion illegal simply drove it into the back alley, where, according to some estimates, as many as two million abortions a year were performed - a number that if even half accurate should sober up today's Victorian nostalgists. ... [Abortionist David Bingham says] "I save lives. I respect these people who have picketed outside my office for 25 years, in and out of snowstorms ... I know what would happen if they were successful politically - a lot more tragedy, a lot more deaths. I saw what it was like when it was illegal. Look - we have saved tens of thousands of lives, maybe hundreds of thousands. ... The day abortion became legal in New York State was also the day that we - in Detroit - noticed that the number of patients coming into the hospital with 'miscarriages' plummeted."[17]

       Pro-Abortionists Repudiate the Claims. Without question, the most effective lie the pro-abortion movement used to obtain abortion on demand in the USA and many other countries was the allegation that thousands of women died of illegal, unsanitary abortions each year before the procedure was legalized.
       The numbers "5,000 to 10,000" were nice and round and sounded eminently plausible. They were therefore uncritically accepted by most of the media, some of the Courts, and many members of the public.
       However, the pro-abortionists never presented a particle of solid evidence whatever to support their statistics. They didn't have to - the media and the courts were on their side. Therefore, they could lie with total impunity.
       However, in the early 1970s, numerous pro-abortionists acknowledged that these numbers were greatly exaggerated even as they were being used as a potent tool for advancing abortion rights.
       Dr. Bernard Nathanson, one of the founders of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (now NARAL Pro-Choice America), and the former owner of the largest abortion clinic in the world (the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health, or C*R*A*S*H) states in a quote widely used by pro-lifers to highlight the dishonesty of pro-abortionists;

How many deaths were we talking about when abortion was illegal? In NARAL, we generally emphasized the frame of the individual case, not the mass statistics, but when we spoke of the latter it was always '5,000 to 10,000 deaths a year.' I confess that I knew the figures were totally false, and I suppose the others did too if they stopped to think of it. But in the 'morality' of our revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics? The overriding concern was to get the [abortion] laws eliminated, and anything within reason that had to be done was permissible.[18]

       Many other pro-abortionists freely admitted that the "pro-choice" movement simply lied about the number of women who died of complications due to illegal abortions;

• Pro-abortion writer Marian Faux confirms the thought processes behind what she labels "propaganda" in her book Roe v. Wade; "An image of tens of thousands of women being maimed or killed each year by illegal abortion was so persuasive a piece of propaganda that the [pro-abortion] movement could be forgiven its failure to double-check the facts."[19]

       We have to wonder if Faux would be so "forgiving" of pro-lifers who deliberately lied and exaggerated the numbers of women currently dying of legal abortion.

• Dr. Malcolm Potts of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, one of the original activists who helped promote abortion throughout the world, claimed in 1970 that "Those who want the [abortion] law to be liberalized will stress the hazards of illegal abortion and claim that hundreds, or thousands, of women die unnecessarily each year - when the actual number is far lower."[20]

• Even the gender feminist "Bible," Sisterhood is Powerful, recognized that "A study made in the 1930s, before the development of antibiotics made even illegal abortion less deadly than it used to be, came up with this number of 10,000 deaths; but it is no longer anywhere near the truth and has no place in any serious discussion of abortion."[21]

       The "Official" Figures Are Confirmed By European Experience. According to the United States Bureau of Vital Statistics and the Centers for Disease Control, the last time 1,000 women died of illegal abortions in the United States was in the year before penicillin became widely available to the public - in 1942. From this date, the number of maternal deaths due to illegal abortions declined steeply until it stabilized at about 90 to 150 per year during the decade preceding Roe v. Wade.[22]
       It is important to note that the most impressive drop in abortion mortality was prior to legalization in 1973. The United States maternal mortality rate (which accounts for all deaths due to abortion, childbirth, and ectopic pregnancies) per 100,000 live births declined almost linearly from 37.1/100,000 in 1960 to 9.9/100,000 in 1978, for an average annual decline of 1.5/100,000. The rate was 29.1 per 100,000 in 1966, the year before the first state legalized abortion and 14.6/100,000 in 1974, the year after Roe v. Wade, representing an average annual decline of 1.8/100,000. In 1987, the rate was beginning to flatten out at 6.6/100,000 as the lowest practicable level was being approached.[23]
       Note that Figure 7-1 shows a steady and steep decline in abortion deaths from 1942 on, finally stabilizing at about 25 to 30 per year in 1976 and then dropping again to about 20 per year in 1980. This decline is clearly unrelated to the legal status of abortion. Once again, it is critical to note that the most impressive drop in abortion mortality was prior to legalization. This steady trend reflects advances in medicine and the introduction of safer abortion techniques, both legal and illegal.

       This steady trend reflects advances in medicine and the introduction of safer abortion techniques, both legal and illegal. This statistical inclination is accompanied by a steady decline in overall maternal mortality, and some pro-abortion activists have claimed that easy availability to abortion has been a key factor in this trend. However, Dr. Bernard Nathanson has also said that

In fact, the lowering of maternal mortality has been due largely, if not entirely, to advances in anesthesia techniques; the development of new and more powerful antibiotics; the emergence of realtime ultrasound; major strides in laboratory technology with a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of infectious disease; more sophisticated transfusion techniques and - perhaps most important - a higher and more standardized level of training of nurses, medical students and resident physicians in obstetrics and gynecology.[24]

       It is important to note that the death rates for legal abortions in European countries were virtually identical to the death rates for illegal abortions in the United States. Since legal abortions in Europe were performed under the best prevailing conditions at the time, we must conclude that the vast majority of illegal abortions performed in the United States took place under similar favorable and sanitary conditions, not seedy back-alley abortion mills, as described later in this Chapter.
       The actual maternal death rates for abortions in three countries in the late 1940s were;

Sweden (legal), 250 per 100,000, 1946-1948;
Denmark (legal), 195 per 100,000, 1940-1950;
U.S. (illegal), 165 per 100,000, 1940-1950.[25]

       Another fact the pro-abortion movement absolutely cannot afford to admit is that the country with the lowest maternal mortality in the world in 1996 was the Irish Republic, with 1.83 per 100,000 live births - a nation where abortion is illegal. By contrast, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, where abortion is free for all women, have 7.72 and 9.64 deaths per 100,000 live births respectively.[26]

        Documentation Problems? The argument most often used by pro-abortion groups against these "official" illegal abortion-death figures is that almost all of the deaths caused by illegal abortion before 1973 were not reported or properly documented.
       However, this obviously cannot be the case. As described above, the maternal death rate declined smoothly during the legalization period 1966 to 1974. If the cause of thousands of annual maternal deaths was suddenly removed during this time frame, a precipitous drop could have been expected in the absolute numbers of maternal deaths attributable to all causes. However, there were only about 1,100 maternal deaths from all causes in 1966, and there was a smooth decline in the numbers of maternal deaths each year not only over this time period but in the several years following it as well, after abortion had been fully legalized throughout all fifty states (see Figure 7-3).[27]
       Additionally, when a woman died of a botched or self-inflicted illegal abortion before 1973, the cause of death became quite obvious during the autopsy (which is required for deaths under unknown circumstances), and this type of death was officially recorded as such by a physician who had no personal interest in the case and had no reason to falsify the death certificate. Illegal abortion deaths were invariably reported to the Bureau of Vital Statistics of the U.S. Public Health Department. In fact, many physicians who wanted to see abortion legalized went public with such deaths in order to push for abortion law reform or repeal.
       The abortion-death reporting situation is now exactly the opposite of what it was before abortion was legalized. Instead of being properly reported, many abortion-caused deaths are covered up for obvious reasons by attribution to other causes, as described later in this Chapter.

Go to Next Topic: The Way it Was--Illegal Abortions Before Roe v. Wade

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Footnotes for "How Many Women Died Due to Illegal Abortion Complications?

[15] United Nations Demographic Yearbook, 1978 [New York: United Nations, 1979].

[16] National Newsline. "Feminist Men Take Action on Women's Rights." The Lavender Network [an Oregon homosexual monthly magazine], May 1989, pages 58 and 59.

[17] Jack Hitt. "Who Will Do Abortions Here?" The New York Times Magazine, January 18, 1998. On the cover of this issue of the magazine is a doctor standing in a hospital hallway with his hands on his hips, wearing a surgical mask. Part of the caption reads "he's wearing a mask because he fears for his life and reputation." Really? We thought it was to prevent the spread of infection!

[18] Bernard Nathanson, M.D. Aborting America [Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1979], page 193.

[19] Marian Faux. Roe v. Wade: The Untold Story of the Landmark Supreme Court Decision That Made Abortion Legal [Philadelphia: MacMillan, 1990].

[20] Malcolm Potts, Peter Diggory and John Peel. Abortion [Cambridge University Press, 1970].

[21] "Unfinished Business: Birth Control and Women's Liberation." Sisterhood is Powerful (Robin Morgan, editor) [New York: Vintage Books, 1970], page 260.

[22] Matthew J. Bulfin, M.D. "Deaths and Near Deaths with Legal Abortions." Presented at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists Convention at Disney World, Florida, October 28, 1975.

[23] Monthly Vital Statistics Report. Provisional Statistics, Annual Summary for the United States, 1978 [United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Office of Health Research, Statistics, and Technology, National Center for Health Statistics, 1979].

[24] Bernard N. Nathanson, M.D., FACOG. "A Pro-Life Medical Response to ACOG's January 1990 Publication: 'Public Health Policy Implications of Abortion'" presented by William F. Colliton, M.D., et.al., American Life League, 1990.

[25] Christopher Tietze, M.D., and Stanley K. Henshaw, M.D. Induced Abortion: A World Review [New York: The Population Council, 1986] (6th Edition). page 107.

[26] Letter by John Kelly, M.D., Birmingham Women's Hospital. The Lancet, Volume 348 (August 17, 1996), page 478.

[27] Monthly Vital Statistics Report. Provisional Statistics, Annual Summary for the United States, 1978 [United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Office of Health Research, Statistics, and Technology, National Center for Health Statistics, 1979]; Statistical Abstract, Table 80, "Live Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Divorces: 1950 to 1988," and Table 110, "Infant, Maternal, and Neonatal Mortality Rates, and Fetal Mortality Ratios, By Race: 1960 to 1987."