My abortion mortality research to date

For those of you who come in searching for abortion deaths in particular years or decades, I've done the work for you.

Let's start with abortion deaths prior to widespread legalization:

The 19th Century: I have found information on 52 deaths. Of those cases in which I was able to determine who the perpetrator was, 66.67% were performed by doctors.

1900-1909: I was able to find information on 25 deaths. Of those cases in which I was able to determine the profession of the perpetrator, 65.22% were done by doctors.

1910-1919: I was able to find information on 22 deaths. Of those in which I was able to determine the profession of the perpetrator, 93.75% were performed by doctors.

The 1920s: I was able to find 120 deaths. Of those in which I could determine the profession of the perpetrator, 64.95% were done by doctors.

The 1930s: I was able to get information on 38 deaths. Of those where I was able to determine the profession of the perpetrator, 87.50% were performed by doctors. It was in 1936 that sulfa drugs for treating infections were introduced in the United States. The first blood bank in the United States was introduced in Chicago in 1937.

The 1940s: I was able to find information on 17 deaths. Of those where I was able to identify the perpetrator, 73.33% were performed by doctors. It was in the early 1940s that penicillin was first introduced in the United States.

1950s: I was able to find information on 14 deaths. Of those cases in which I was able to determine the profession of the perpetrator, only 27.27% were performed by physicians. I found this breakdown quite surprising, and a departure from the other pre-legalization decades, where physicians were the primary parties responsible for fatal abortions. I am theorizing that there might be some connection between this and the rise in abortion deaths during this decade.

The 1960s: I was able to find information on 12 deaths, 83.33% of which were performed by physicians.

Thus endeth the officially recognized era of "back alley abortion".



And now we enter the era of safe and legal abortion. You can look on the chart below for the impact widespread legalization had on abortion deaths. I marked vertical lines at 1970 (when New York and California became the first states to legalize abortion on demand) and 1973 (when Roe vs. Wade legalized abortion on demand nationwide).



If you're having a hard time spotting it, I'll zoom in a bit on abortion deaths since 1960. Note that I marked New York and California's legalization and Roe vs. Wade for you:

The 1970s: The US government entities charged with counting abortion deaths noted 235 that I was unable to find information about; I noted 5 that these government entities, for all their funding and access to confidential records, missed. During this period, the CDC's researchers did not merely count the deaths that fell on their doorstep. They also sent out letters to emergency, family, and OB/GYN physicians asking for information about abortion deaths. This aggressive seeking out of information on abortion deaths evidently proved fruitful.

The 1980s: The CDC switched to a passive reporting system and started missing more abortion deaths.

The 1990s: Here is where my data collection system lost a major source of information: researcher Kevin Sherlock, who did an extensive study of abortion deaths in the 1980s. Since he did no such study for the 1990s, I have been unable to tap indirectly into the resources Kevin had in the '80s.

Since 2000: The CDC counts only through 2003, counting 25 more deaths than I've been able to find. Again, we see the effects of my having lost the contributions of Kevin Sherlock. But I'm ahead of the CDC in that at least I count abortion deaths after 2003, of which I've found 7.

Now, why am I looking at all these abortion deaths?

It's very important that we understand history. Prochoicers need to grasp that abortion being illegal doesn't mean no alternative but the coathanger, and prolifers need to understand that simply criminalizing abortion isn't enough. Only when we study the impact of laws and attitudes on abortion practice can we develop effective strategies for what most of us agree is a common goal: Reducing abortion. For, as with any other human evil, we can never make it entirely go away.

For more abortion deaths, visit the Cemetery of Choice:



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