Illegal abortions didn’t kill thousands prior to Roe
Let’s examine a foundational premise of abortion rights: “If abortion is illegal tens of thousands of women will die from unsafe abortions, just like they did in the 1960’s and 70’s.”
Is this true?
Did women die at alarming rates prior to the Supreme Court Roe v Wade decision in 1973?
Readers of the Los Angeles Times last week were led to believe legal abortion saves women, based on the quotes from abortion provider Dr. Warren Hern. 83-year-old Hern provides a few anecdotal examples of patients needing care after illegal abortions in the 1960’s, but the money quote is this:
“I think we’ll see a lot of unsafe abortions and women dying,” he said.
Abortion provider Warren Hern, MD as quoted in the Los Angeles Times, March 10, 2022
The durability and persistence of this myth is astonishing for a number of reasons. Above all, you should know that the creator of this talking point admitted it was a fiction devised for maximum PR value to make the case for legalizing abortion in the Roe v Wade case.
Dr. Bernard Nathanson not only recanted the false and inflated statistics, but he later stopped performing abortions and as an atheistic Jew became a Christian pro-life activist. His book Aborting America, and his autobiography Hand of God detail the manipulation at the heart of the early abortion statistics.
Aborting America is now out of print, but a pertinent quote appeared in the British Medical Journal in 2011 following Nathanson’s death.
How many deaths were we talking about when abortion was illegal? In NARAL (National Association for Repeal of Abortion Laws) we generally emphasized the drama of the individual case, not the mass statistics, but when we spoke of the latter it was always 5,000 to 10,000 a year. I confess that I knew the figures were totally false, But in the “morality” of our revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics?’ The official figures of maternal death due to illegal abortion before abortion was legalised was 160. Dr. Nathanson estimates the actual figure to be around 500 maternal deaths per year.
Bernard Nathanson, Richard Ostling. Aborting America. Pinnacle Books. New York 1979, quoted in BMJ, 2011.
Return to Hern’s LA Times defense of his life’s work–anecdotes and stories which “emphasize the drama of the individual case.” Hern carefully follows Nathanson’s and NARAL’s original playbook, and the LA Times reporter plays along, failing to provide context to Hern’s predictions of unsafe abortions and women dying.
The Times is in good company. The History Channel skews their reporting too.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the estimated number of illegal abortions in the United States ranged from 200,000 to 1.2 million per year, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
Roe v Wade, History.com, May 15, 2019
That’s not only quite a range, but in citing the Guttmacher reference, History fails to report the annual death toll from what they call these “dangerous, back alley” abortions was under 200 by 1965.
Last year Politifact looked into a meme posted on Facebook which claimed, Roe was the end of women dying from abortions, and captioned, “Tens of thousands of American women died while having unsafe back alley abortions before Roe v. Wade.” They rated this claim Half-True while at the same time reporting,
“By the early 1970s, abortion-related deaths had become relatively rare. In 1972 — the year before Roe was decided and the first year for which data for abortion-related deaths was available — 24 women died from legal abortions, and 39 died from illegal abortions, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”
Politifact, Madison Czopek, October 13, 2021
It seems Politifact overlooked the ‘tens of thousands’ claim, and thus decided not to rate that False, as their own reporting indicates.
Don’t fall for it. Making abortion illegal will not lead to maternal death in the tens of thousands. But, of course, every abortion is lethal to the prenatal child.
It’s worth your time to read Nathanson’s Hand of God. His personal history is inextricably linked to his own abortion trauma. Nathanson was both a victim of an abusive father as well as experiencing abortion trauma as a young doctor in love with the mother of his child, before himself performing the abortion of his second child.
What the Scriptures say
How much pro-abortion activism is an unexpressed need for healing? We may never know.
What we call a defense mechanism, an avoidant way of coping with our problems, the Bible calls “covering” as in a cover-up. And the Bible has a lot to say about that.
“The one who covers his transgressions will not prosper, but whoever confesses them and forsakes them will find mercy.” Proverbs 28:12, NET
Ultimately our coping will fail, even if our conscience remains dead to our wrongdoing. God’s Word says, ” Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.” Hebrews 4:13, NIV
In the flattering LA Times portrait by a friendly reporter, Dr. Hern does get specific with one abortion statistic as he owns having taken over 20,000 lives of prenatal children in his abortion practice. It stuns me that Hern, should he repent, can be forgiven this bloodshed, just as I once was for my participation in abortion.
No one is above God’s mercy and grace in Jesus Christ.
If you are ready to begin the healing journey, I hope you will take those steps, into truth and love and support of an abortion recovery ministry, today.
