Abortion Mortality Trends

I include in this category data on exactly what the cost of abortion has been in women's lives.

It confuses me that abortion advocates still try to inflate the death toll from criminal abortions. After all, those abortions -- self-induced, professional, or amatuer -- were all performed by pro choice advocates. I would hardly consider it smart to brag about how many women one's own movement has killed.

Before the Centers for Disease Control started investigating abortion deaths in 1968, most abortion deaths are all lumped in together: legal, criminal, spontaneous (miscarriages), and undetermined. Although an occasional study would sort these deaths out, most statistics included all deaths from pregnancies that ended prematurely. I made every effort to find out exactly what a researcher or reporter meant when designating "abortion" deaths, and to inform you of exactly what the numbers meant.

You'll notice abortion deaths steadily falling long before anybody even started earnestly advocating abortion on demand. (You'll also notice that Taussig's estimates of 5,000 - 10,000 maternal abortion deaths a year are so far from reality as to utterly discredit anybody who cites them.) Abortion mortality was a problem that was being successfully combatted by fighting abortion and by improving care for the abortin-injured woman. You can't stop an activity from killing people by promoting the activity in question; that's a nonsensical approach. To propose legalization to reduce abortion mortality makes no more sense than for Mothers Against Drunk Driving to lobby for repeal of DUI laws. More drunk drivers on the road will not reduce drunk driving fatalities, and more abortionists doing more abortions will not reduce abortion fatalities. To argue otherwise is fatuous.

The Century in Review Timelines:
1900 - 1950: Pre-Paradigm Shift
1950 - 1970: The Transitional Period
1970 - 1999: The Post-Legalization Era

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