According to Susan B. Hansen,*
State Implementation of Supreme Court Decisions: Abortion Rates Since Roe v. Wade, The Journal of Politics, Vol. 42, No. 2 (May, 1980), pp. 372-395, (
jstor.org/stable/2130465?seq=5)), the number of abortions shot up from 193,000 in 1970 to 1,300,000 in 1977 (p. 375). Meanwhile, the number of maternal deaths related to abortions fell from 39 in 1972 (yes, that’s 36 women, not 36 per capita, or anything else) to 3 in 1975 (p. 378). So 36 mothers lived at the cost of over a million babies.
Additionally, with advances in medical procedures, Hansen was able to conclude that, as of 1980, “as a medical procedure, abortion is now far safer than tonsillectomy or normal childbirth” (p. 380).
In fact, the parts of the country with the *highest *rates of abortion-related maternal deaths were areas like Washington, D.C., which have the most liberal abortion laws. The explanation was that in these areas, more late-term abortions were performed (p. 380). A late-term legal abortion is more dangerous to the mother than a first trimester illegal abortion (and hardly anyone would risk going in for an illegal late-term abortion).
Additionally, (and unfortunately, I don’t have the source for this readily at hand), the abortion maternal mortality rate in the Republic of Ireland and even N. Ireland is lower than (the rest of) the UK, even though abortion laws are much more lax in Britain. So at most, the lives of a few dozen mothers a year are saved via legalized abortion, and it’s entirely possible that more mothers actually die from legalized abortion. At a certain point, the numbers are just too speculative.
Dr. Bernard Nathanson, co-founder of NARAL (and now a pro-life Catholic), admitted that the back-alley abortion statistics NARAL used to help legalize abortion were imaginary, and hyper-inflated for political purposes.
Overcoming this myth of back-alley abortions is hard, but the numbers belie the myth. As to your second point, I think I answered it above, but there’s a huge class of women who are willing to have a legal abortion, but not an illegal abortion (even if it’s just because of an absurd myth). So millions of lives a year are lost to this barbarism. Overturning *Roe * doesn’t outlaw abortions, and outlawing abortions doesn’t stop all abortions. But both of those steps would do a lot to decrease the number of lives lost.
Sorry if this was too long.
*Hansen’s personal views are hard to tell, but I’m inclined to say she’s pro-choice by the nature of her rhetoric, and her proclivity for putting “Right to Life” in quotation marks./QU
Thank you Statistics may be cold but its hard
to argue with numbers.
