Wouldn't More Women Die if Roe Fell?


Deceived or lying?
A common claim among abortion advocates is that although legal abortion deaths are indeed sad, they're only a pale shadow of the carnage that would ensue were legal protection restored to unborn children. They use these claims to garner support among those otherwise reluctant to support legal abortion as well as to slander life advocates.

I find no fault with people who innocently believe what they've been told. by people and organizations that they considered trustworthy. But once you have learned the truth, you have a responsibility to hold those who deceived you accountable and to stop passing on the deceptive claims. If you can't defend your stand without lying, should you be defending it at all?

There are two approaches Big Abortion takes when trying to scare people into supporting legal abortion as a means of protecting women's lives:
  1. Outright lying. They will trot out the long-disproven claim that 5,000 to 10,000 women were dying every year from abortion before legalization.
  2. Lying by omission. They will use numbers that are accurate, but will totally remove them from context in order to draw a conclusion that is demonstrably false.
Let's start with the outright lie: that 5,000 to 10,000 were dying annually in the US from abortions prior to criminalization.

Where did the numbers come from? Here's an interesting exercise: When you see the 5,000 to 10,000 deaths claim, check and see who they cite (if they even bother to cite a source at all). Odds are it will be Lawrence "Larry" Lader or some other late 1960's early 1970's abortion guru. This gives the impression that Lader (or whoever) looked at whatever the then-current situation was and wrote up his findings. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Dr. Frederick Taussig
The original source was a book -- Abortion, Spontaneous and Induced -- published in 1936 by Dr. Frederick Taussig, a leading proponent of legalization of abortion. Taussig calculated an urban abortion rate based on records of a New York City birth control clinic, and a rural abortion rate based on some numbers given to him by some doctors in Iowa. He took a guess at a mortality rate, multiplied by his strangely generated estimate of how many criminal abortions were taking place, and presto! A myth is born!

At a conference* in 1942, Taussig himself apologized for using "the wildest estimates" to generate a bogus number.

Although it took Taussig six years to reject his own faulty calculations, at least he did admit that he'd been wrong. Other abortion enthusiasts lacked Taussig's compunctions.

Bernard Nathanson, co-founder of NARAL,** admitted that he and his associates knew that the claims of 5,000 to 10,000 criminal abortion deaths were false. They bandied them about anyway, Nathanson confessed, because they were useful. This, too, is old news -- Nathanson came clean in 1979 when he published Aborting America.

The abortion lobby has had nearly three quarters of a century to drop the numbers after Taussig himself admitted that they were wrong. Abortion supporters have had over thirty years since they were outed in public for lying. Still, as Nathanson said, the number is useful. It's scary. This is why friends of Big Abortion, such as Barbara Boxer, still continue to lie.

If you have to lie and scare people into joining your cause, it seems like it's time for a little quiet reflection.

Now for the lying by omission, which typically involves taking fairly reliable abortion mortality numbers from before and after legalization then crediting legalization for the drop. No less prestigious organization than the Alan Guttmacher Institute uses this statistical legerdemain: "As the availability of legally induced abortion increased, mortality due to abortion dropped sharply: The number of abortion-related deaths per million live births fell from nearly 40 in 1970 to eight in 1976."

The truth is that you can take virtually any time period from when public health officials first started collecting the data and you'll find that abortion mortality fell.The only exception is a strange leveling-off in the 1950s that I've been unable to account for:

Are abortion advocates suggesting that somehow the loosening of abortion laws in some states in 1968 and 1969, the open gates to abortion-on-demand in New York in 1970, and Roe vs. Wade in 1973 somehow retroactively caused the fall in abortion mortality during the 1940s?

Milan Vuitch
What caused abortion mortality to fall precipitously wasn't legalization. Legalization didn't even make a blip in the trends, likely because for every non-physician whose business fell away, a physician abortionist became sloppy once the risk of a prison sentence for botching an abortion was gone. I know of three erstwhile criminal abortionists -- Jesse Ketchum, Milan Vuitch, and Benjamin Munson -- who kept their noses clean prior to legalization but each went on to practice appallingly sloppy abortions that killed two patients after legalization.

What does this mean for a Post-Roe America?

It means we're not going to see a huge surge in abortion deaths. It was improvements in medical care that reduced abortion mortality before legalization, and those improvements in medical care will keep abortion mortality low after Roe falls.

This doesn't mean that Big Abortion won't get somebody killed and then parade the corpse around. They're pushing hard to convince vulnerable women that if there isn't a handy-dandy abortion clinic on the corner, there will be no choice but to reach for the rustiest coathanger in the closet. In times of stress, people tend to run on autopilot, so a woman who has heard nothing for years but "You'll have no choice but to resort to a dangerous abortion" will likely do just that: resort to a dangerous abortion.

The truth, though, is that everything is already in place to prevent any woman from ever dying from a botched abortion ever again. Prolife pregnancy help centers already outnumber dedicated abortion facilities three-to-one. As aging abortionists retire and seedy mills get shut down by the authorities in the wake of the Gosnell scandal, the balance will shift even further toward organizations that help women to address the issues that make them think abortion is their only choice. The abortion lobby, however, is doing everything in their power to hamstring  these resources and to maintain the illusion that if a pregnant woman is facing challenges, somebody has to die.***

There is still much work to do, but we can be ready so that when legal protection is removed from abortionists and restored to the unborn and their vulnerable mothers, Big Abortion gets shut down once and for all.

Nobody -- not one mother, not one baby -- needs to die.

*The Abortion Problem: Proceedings of the Conference Held Under the Auspices of the National Committee on Maternal Health, Inc., at the New York Academy of Medicine, June 19th and 20th, 1942

**National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, later renamed National Abortion Rights Association, now called NARAL Pro-Choice America

***Why don't the champions of "choice" offer alternatives other than abortion? If the point is choice, rather than abortion, shouldn't there be a whole movement of prochoice activists running pregnancy help centers that are like what they say the prolifers should be running -- offering all of the services prolife centers offer and referring for abortion if the woman doesn't want the other services?

15 comments:

Rosanna Miller said...

The sad truth is that even though people are aware that women died when abortions were illegal, they don't give a crap! The truth is they harbor murder in their hearts for women who have abortions as it is. They make me sick!! I know I make the know it all idiots sick for standing for God, who tells people to stop playing Him but GOOD!! If only it helped! May they get a taste of the hell they force on others, all in God's name!

Rosanna Miller said...

And why don't champions of "pro-life" (what a joke), point to a solution for the many of actual issues we have in the world....rape, murder, starvation, kidnapping, etc... that CHILDREN have to deal with once born??? No, it is just easier to call women murderers!! What a bunch of self-righteous hypocrites!!! Keep standing for child abuse and rape of women!! There is nothing new in the God forsaken world!!! Wait until you and your children beg for death and even suicide doesn't work and you are trapped in this disgusting pig sty of a world you worship and hold dear!! PATHETIC!! God help you!!

Faith said...

When pro-lifers give, they often give as individuals. Their care for born people isn't publicly connected to the cause of pro-life. In contrast, when a liberal government program is established, it is typically associated with pro-abortion politicians.

YOURLORDANDSAVIOUR said...

This blog reeks of bull stop writing shit.

Maria said...

The haters are out in droves here. None of them helping women who go to pregnancy crisis centers. What is Planned Parenthood doing to feed born children?

Chastity White Rose said...

"If you have to lie and scare people into joining your cause, it seems like it's time for a little quiet reflection."

Exactly. Fear causes people to make quick decisions without thinking. I think people need to consider the effects of what they do BEFORE they are in a situation that requires them to make a decision.

The pro-choice side uses fear often to promote abortion, but nothing is more scary than a society where the first proposed solution to a problem is killing children.

Unknown said...

"The sad truth is that even though people are aware that women died when abortions were illegal, they don't give a crap! The truth is they harbor murder in their hearts for women who have abortions as it is. They make me sick!! I know I make the know it all idiots sick for standing for God, who tells people to stop playing Him but GOOD!! If only it helped! May they get a taste of the hell they force on others, all in God's name! The sad truth is that even though people are aware that women died when abortions were illegal, they don't give a crap! The truth is they harbor murder in their hearts for women who have abortions as it is. They make me sick!! I know I make the know it all idiots sick for standing for God, who tells people to stop playing Him but GOOD!! If only it helped! May they get a taste of the hell they force on others, all in God's name! "

That's a lot of hate there, sure sounds like you've got some "murderous intent" in your heart.
What do we do? We teach about abstinence (because birth control sometimes fails) and the importance of condoms and birth control and spermicides, MORE than 1 method is always best.
We teach our children that anothers life has VALUE unlike people like you who call it tissue with "involuntary reflexes" "It's not even human!" "It's not a person so it's not killing" but when you WANT the pregnancy it's a little baby isn't it? It's a human you love isn't it? So where is the line dfrawn for you? OH THAT'S RIGHT: "IT'S ONLY OK FOR A PERSON TO EXIST IF WE WANT THEM TO"
You'r kind scream about equality and crap but you don't even know what that MEANS. You have a responsibility FOR yourself and TO everyone around you, you teach your children to devalue life, abortionists (that pick apart living bodies on a daily basis, you know, like those crazies in slasher flicks)rapists, murderers, molester and kidnappers result from devaluing lives.

So suck on that and try and keep your legs closed once and a while because I'm sure as hell not paying for your mess ups. If you don't want a baby that bad GET STERILIZED. Think of it this way, when you ARE ready, you can adopt some of those abandoned children you abortionists love to scream about existing because somebody somewhere didn't have an abortion.

The Winding Ascent said...

Rosanna, you are misinformed -- pro-life Americans (can't speak for other nations) adopt at much higher rates than average. They also give more of their time volunteering to help those living in poverty and are generous when it comes to financial donations. These are things the abortion lobby doesn't want you to know, Rosanna, because they legitimize our cause and they'd prefer to demonize us so that you can rationalize abortion rights. But none of it is true. And even if it was, you're applying faulty logic. Do the moral values one applies elsewhere negate the truth that rape is wrong? Does the fact that some pro-lifers are hypocrites alter the fact that abortion kills a human being? Nope. You may hate us or feel repulsed by those of us (fewer than you think) who are hypocritical. I'd include the commenter above since she just told you to get sterilized, which was rude. But there are many more of us who exhaust ourselves on behalf of the poor and needy AND hate abortion. How will you categorize us? Is abortion still a good thing when those who are NOT hypocrites are against it? Do you see your dilemma? You're taking information about a people group and applying it to a dogmatic stand for abortion. It doesn't matter who likes abortion and who doesn't. It's wrong or it's not based on fact and reality, not who agrees with it and what their personal lives are like. Shall I analyze your life and decide your beliefs are all wrong, too?

Zoe said...

Here's a counter argument for you: Conservatives are all in favor of the unborn and will do anything for the unborn. But once you’re born, you’re on your own. Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don’t want to know about you. They don’t want to hear from you. No nothing. No neonatal care, no day care, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you’re pre-born, you’re fine; if you’re preschool, you’re fucked.

Conservatives don’t give a crap about you until you reach “military age.” Then they think you are just fine. Just what they’ve been looking for. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers.

You don’t see many of these white anti-abortion women volunteering to have any black fetuses transplanted into their uterus’s, do you? No. You don’t see them adopting a whole lot of crack babies, do you? No. That might be something Christ would do. And, you won’t see a lot of these pro-life people dousing themselves in kerosene and lighting themselves on fire. You know, morally committed religious people in South Vietnam knew how to stage a demonstration and put on a protest! Light yourself on fire! Come on, moral crusaders, let’s see a little smoke to match that fire in your belly.

How come when it’s us, it’s an abortion, and when it’s a chicken, it’s an omelet?

Is a fetus a human being? Well, if a fetus is a human being, how come the census doesn’t count them? If a fetus is a human being, how come when there’s a miscarriage they don’t have a funeral? If a fetus is a human being, how come people say “we have two children and one on the way” instead of saying “we have three children?” People say life begins at conception, I say life began about a billion years ago.

Some people will tell you life begins at fertilization. But even after the egg is fertilized, it’s still 6-7 days before it reaches the uterus and pregnancy begins, and not every egg makes it that far. 80% of a woman’s fertilized eggs are flushed out of her body during her period. They end up on pads, and yet they are fertilized eggs. So basically what these anti-abortion people are telling us is that any woman who’s had more than more than one period is a serial killer!

The longer you listen to this abortion debate, the more you hear the phrase “sanctity of life." You know where the sanctity of life came from? We made it up. Why? Because we’re alive. Living people have a strong interest in promoting the idea that somehow life is sacred. You don’t see Abbott and Costello running around, talking about this, do you? We’re not hearing a whole lot from Mussolini on the subject. What’s the latest from JFK? Not a thing. Because they’re dead. And dead people give less than a crap about the sanctity of life. Only living people care about it so the whole thing grows out of a completely biased point of view. It’s a self serving, man-made story.

It’s one of these things we tell ourselves so we’ll feel noble. Even with all this stuff we preach about the sanctity of life, we don’t practice it. Look at what we kill: Mosquitoes and flies because they’re pests. Lions and tigers because it’s fun. Chickens and pigs because we’re hungry.

The sanctity of life doesn’t seem to apply to cancer cells, does it? You rarely see a bumper sticker that says “Save the tumors.” Or “I brake for advanced melanoma.” No, viruses, mold, mildew, maggots, fungus, weeds, E. Coli bacteria. Nothing sacred about those things. So at best the sanctity of life is kind of a selective thing. We get to choose which forms of life we feel are sacred, and we get to kill the rest. You know how we got that deal? We made the whole thing up!

Kathy said...

"Unknown", I can address your issues, but since I think you're not going to even read a response, I don't want to waste my time unless you admit that you want a conversation.

You are quite argumentative and seem a little confused (how "pro-life" is it to kill yourself? ... Is fetal transplantation even possible? No? then why bring it up? ... Is it legal to kill toddlers for no other reason than that the mother doesn't want to care for them any more or that they're expensive? No? Then it's not hypocritical to try to stop the slaughter of innocent unborn humans when there is no similar legal wholesale slaughter of born humans).

You said "some people will tell you life begins at fertilization". Yep. Those people would include all embryologists. Seriously. Check any embryology textbook. Prior to fertilization there is a sperm (which has a lifespan of anywhere from 30 minutes to several days at most) and an egg (which has a lifespan of 24 hours at most); put them together and it ceases to be sperm and egg and becomes a separate human being (again, science -- DNA) capable of living up to 100 years or more.

It's true that not every zygote (which you mistakenly call a "fertilized egg") develops into a newborn, but then, not every newborn develops into an adult much less a senior citizen, yet that does not make them any less human, nor does it make it any more acceptable nor any less murder to kill the newborn, simply because it is not guaranteed to have a long and healthy life.

Oddly enough, the most pro-abortion people in the world (the Chinese, whose govt has had a one-child policy for decades that is only now being relaxed, and which forced abortions on unwilling women) count the baby's age from conception.

I could go on, but will make sure you will actually respond before I spend any more time on it.

Unknown said...

The information you have put in this article about Ectopic Pregnancy are false and dangerous. I know at least 2 very faithful Christian women that had ectopic pregnancies and had to go through the agony of ending the pregnancies. And if they had continued they would have died. And having this type of information not only makes women who have been through it feel like monsters, but you are putting other women at risk. Do you know why these stories you so proudly posting made it to THE NEWS STATIONS in the first place? Is because that it is literally a miracle. Most of the time when an ectopic pregnancy is not found and treated in time. A woman is raced into surgery and most of the time loses the tube the pregnancy was in. And do you know that when that happens it reduces fertility a great deal when you only have ONE tube? And my sister (who BTW is a very faithful Christian woman who has done missionary work in Africa) had a friend who had an ectopic pregnancy that was not found in time, and she not only lost her tube but her life. Please for the life and health and fertility of the people who come to this site. After you post all your miracle stories explain that 98% of the time the woman either loses her tube and maybe her fertility but also maybe her life.

Christina Dunigan said...

I cover that in the article.

wife said...

Thanks for your great blog, Christina. The information is invaluable.

wife said...

Christina, I gave a reference to https://cemeteryofchoice.wikispaces.com/Jennifer+McKenna-Morbelli on youtube and noticed an error. Disseminated intavascular coagulopathy (DIC)is a disorder in which many small clots form in the body; you state that "the inability of her blood to clot" occurred. See https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/199627-overview: "Disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC) is characterized by systemic activation of blood coagulation, which results in generation and deposition of fibrin, leading to microvascular thrombi in various organs and contributing to multiple organ dysfunction syndrome (MODS)."

I don't see any comment section at cemeteryofchoice, so I'm writing to you here. Thanks again for both your blogs!

Christina Dunigan said...

wife, I double checked, and as time goes on the names are changing and now DIC is more often used to refer to disseminated intravascular coagulation, rather than disseminated intravascular coagulopathy. Alas, right now I can't edit the Cemetery of Choice, since it's salvaged off a wiki and I don't have any way to edit what's there. I can't even fix the dead links.