Twitter Exchange of the Week: "Do Some Research"

Anybody who has followed this blog is aware of the massive amount of research that goes into my Cemetery of Choice, a wiki which looks at women's abortion deaths in the United States, both before and after legalization. In fact, I have a case from back to before there even was a United States, when the colonies were still part of the British Empire: the death of Sarah Grosvenor in 1742. For that death, my sources are depositions from the investigation into Sarah's death, along with the exhaustive work of researchers that came before me: The Grosvenor/Sessions Abortion: Timeline, A Colonial Abortion Drama, and An Abortion Case in 1742 Connecticut. I cite those sources and provide links. 

The first abortion deaths I ever researched are two I stumbled across in 1985. I had gone to NewsBank (then on microfilm in a library because the internet wasn't a thing yet) and looked for everything I could find on abortion. I discovered the deaths of Gloria Aponte and Ellen Williams. For Gloria's death I cite an Associated Press article from 1989 and a document from the  Connecticut Medical Board. For Ellen's, I cite three articles from the Miami Herald, Dade County (FL) Circuit Court Case No. 85-14112, and Ellen's death certificate. Gloria's abortionist had a receptionist administering general anesthesia. Ellen's abortionist poked holes in her uterus and intestines then sent her home with a bottle of oral antibiotics, which of course did nothing to stop the raging peritonitis that killed her. So I learned not only that legal abortion was killing women, but that there was appalling quackery in Choiceland.

This is the tip of my research iceberg. I spent six months badgering every vital records office and public health department in the United States learning how abortion morbidity (injuries) and mortality were detected, reported, and compiled. What I discovered was that it takes an extraordinary series of coincidences for the Centers for Disease Control to learn about an abortion death, yet their publications gave the impression that they're identifying all of them and giving accurate numbers. 

I also learned about how the CDC investigated abortion deaths: Lisa Koonin "verified" the abortion deaths (though I couldn't learn how she "verified" them) and then handed the information off to a research fellow, who at the time was Clarice Green. Ms. Green would then gather as much substantiating information as she could find and then presented her information to a committee that would deem each abortion death as from a "legal" abortion, an "illegal" abortion, or an "undetermined" abortion. I learned that "legal" and "illegal" as defined by the CDC had nothing to do with whether the abortion facility was operating openly and giving the impression to patients that everything was above-board. Nope. In fact, when investigating four abortion deaths at one clinic in Miami, the CDC classified one of the three as from an "illegal" abortion because the doctor's license was suspended at the time. This would raise the "illegal" numbers and lower the "legal" numbers to make legal abortion appear safer and to give the impression that women were resorting to obviously criminal abortions that could be blamed on prolifers.

I learned how lackadaisical Ms. Koonin was about uncovering abortion deaths. She was in attendance at a National Abortion Federation Risk Management Seminar in Dallas in 1992. At that seminar, Dr. Robert Crist discussed a patient who had died in 1991 after an abortion at his clinic. Unless he had two patients who died that year, he was clearly talking about Latachie Veal. There was massive publicity about Latachie's death, to the point where her death could only have been more obvious if she had crawled to Atlanta and expired on the floor of Lisa Koonin's office with her aftercare instructions clutched in her hand. Did Koonin "verify" her death?

The CDC doesn't give specifics about deaths they count, but we could get a breakdown by year, age group, and race. Latachie, a 17-year-old Black girl, obviously wasn't counted because the CDC had counted exactly zero deaths of Black patients in the 15-19 year age range in 1991.

But that's still not all the research I've done. I've tracked down the work of other researchers who found the source of the oft-claimed "5,000 to 10,000 women were dying of back-alley abortions before Roe vs. Wade" claim. It was a proponent of abortion legalization, Frederick Taussig, who had put forth this claim in a book he published in 1936. Six years later at a conference, he apologized for publishing bogus numbers based on "the wildest estimations." I found contemporary research on abortion mortality and found how thorough the research into abortion deaths was prior to the mid-1970s, and how sloppy it became afterward. I tracked down a copy of the summary report, prepared by then-Planned Parenthood Medical Director Mary Calderone, for a 1955 conference on abortion in America.

I've tracked down the source of the claim that "abortion is safer than a shot of penicillin." I tracked down the real story behind the "Koop Report" that abortion-rights advocates claim "proves" the safety of legal abortion. 

So one could hardly argue that I haven't done my research. Not by the wildest stretch of the imagination.

But lo! I've had this exchange this week on Twitter! Let me show you the three key tweets. Audrey begins with this oft-repeated abortion-rights tweet: "Roe vs. Wade was NOT the beginning of women having abortions. Roe vs. Wade was the end of women DYING from abortions." It included, of course, the obligatory coat hanger.

I responded with a tweet about an abortion death that had taken place on that date. With a link to the summary, complete with cites, I posted:

So... these 16 entities weren't women? Or they didn't die?

With this graphic:

"At a prestigious NAF member clinic: Nakia was not properly monitored. She was not given oxygen. Her oxygen saturation fell to 74%. She was given the wrong medicine. She became one of at least 16 patients to die in that chain of reputable clinics. "Safe and legal" didn't protect Nakia or those 15 other vulnerable women. Stop trusting the abortion lobby.

Audrey responded with what she evidently considered a clincher to the discussion: "stopped dying from back alley, self-induced abortions, you piece of shit. Do some research.

Of course, if Audry had bothered to click on the link she'd have found the research. But finding out that this "piece of shit" has done a staggering amount of very thorough research over a period of thirty years would mean that Audry would have to question her assumption that "anti-choicers" are ignorant savages. And she might have to question if what she's been told by abortion-rights organizations -- which are really lobbying and public-relations organizations for abortion businesses -- was really true. And that might mean she'd have to question her own beliefs.

And we wouldn't want THAT, would we?

Would 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 and NARAL ProChoice Oregon, 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?