S
SoCalRC
Guest
Thank you for the links. However, I am going just based on research from public health groups. As Mary bobo notes, these things can often be hard to detect because of secrecy and stigma (a good example would be marital status among certain parts of the population in the 50’s and 60’s - the number of self proclaimed ‘widows’ with children cannot be reconciled to death rates).There were not 500,000 illegal abortions in the US before Roe v Wade. The physician who testified for Roe v Wade said there were approximately 100,000 abortions. He has admitted that this was a made up number. They figured they needed a number that seemed significant enough to get attention and this was the number they settled on.
The actual numbers were very low…but hard to determine. I have read some estimates of wrounf 10,000 per year…far less than the 100,000 that sold the people of the US on a mother’s right to kill a child.
I will research and see if I can find a link…
It is critically important to the ‘law solution’ to believe that prohibition was effective. However, we do not have much strong evidence that is so. For example, in 1999, researchers at UC Davis tried tabulating just maternal death certificates where an abortion was noted and were suprised to find over 5,800 in a single year in the mid 40’s (they specifically looked in the WWII era because the widespread use of antibiotics dropped abortion related deaths dramatically after that).
One thing that always suprises me is how little we seem to think of people and how much we suddenly seem to think of law. Remember, before Roe v. Wade, 4 states had repealed abortion laws, and legal abortions were tabulated by the CDC at 600,000. It seems to me that something that has been done since long before Christ, and what people want bad enough to travel across the country for, is going to get procurred rather it is legal or not.
However, if it would make everyone happy, I’ll accept any value except zero for the purposes of discussion. If our goal is zero abortions and a truly pro-life society, two questions still remain relevant. What happens ‘after’ Roe v. Wade is overturned? And, after 30+ years our major triumph has been to get a ban that only was upheld by the Supreme Court with an opinion that argued that none of the 2000 abortions effected each would be stopped and reaffirmed Roe v. Wade - is it really a good idea to put all our eggs in one basket?