With lots of talk about the new Supreme Court justice Sen. Barbara Boxer is give false statements about abortion.
This information is from FactCheck.org:
Boxer, a Democrat, claimed that repeal of Roe "means a minimum of 5,000 women a year will die" from illegal abortions. But that's a 69-year-old figure dating to a time before penicillin and the birth-control pill. Experts say nowhere near that many women were dying from abortion complications even in the years just before Roe made abortions legal nationwide.
Boxer's False Statistic
On July 5, Sen. Boxer claimed that overturning Roe v. Wade would cost the lives of more than 5,000 pregnant women a year. That might have been true before the invention of penicillin and the birth control pill, but it's not true now. The best evidence indicates that the annual deaths from illegal abortions would number in the hundreds, not thousands.
Boxer made the claim to support her position that the repeal of Roe would be the sort of "extraordinary circumstance" that could justify use of the filibuster to stop the confirmation of a nominee to the Supreme Court. The Associated Press quoted her this way:
Boxer: It means a minimum of 5,000 women a year will die. So all options are on the table.
But Boxer was just wrong. The figure comes from a 1936 study by Dr. Frederick Taussig who estimated that abortion claimed the lives of 5,000 to 10,000 women a year. It is impossible to know if his figures are accurate, given that no reliable records exist on the total number of illegal abortions that occurred, much less the number of deaths. Taussig extrapolated the data from trends in New York City and Germany.
His estimate is at least plausible. Women had few means to prevent unwanted pregnancies, and illegal abortions were often performed in less than sanitary settings. Furthermore, penicillin wasn't in use until World War II, and not widely available to the civilian population until after the war ended in 1945. And Enovid, the first oral contraceptive, wasn't available until 1957. But whether Taussig's estimate was accurate or not, the conditions of the 1930's don't apply today.
>From the 1940s through the 1960s, in fact, the best available evidence shows a dramatic decline in abortion-related deaths occurring even before the first states liberalized abortion laws in 1967. The Journal of the American Medical Association quotes official estimates from the National Center for Health Statistics showing an 89 percent decrease in abortion-related deaths by 1966. That is based on counting the number of death certificates that listed complications from abortion as the cause of death. The numbers reported for any given year are assuredly low since doctors could easily misstate the cause of death to protect the family. Still, these are the only figures that allow comparisons over time. There's no reason to think that the rate of under-reporting would vary from one year to another, and so little reason to doubt that a steep downward trend took place long before Roe was decided.
Christopher Tietze, one of the leading experts on abortion trends, wrote in 1969 that it was plausible that 5,000 women a year died from abortion in the 1930s, but concluded that "it cannot be anywhere near the true rate now." He said that, although the 235 formally listed on death certificates in 1965 was too low, "in all likelihood it (the actual number) was under 1,000." An abortion statistics expert at the Guttmacher Institute, Stanley Henshaw, is studying abortion rates during the first part of the century. Though his data collection is unfinished, Henshaw concurred that Tietze's estimate of fewer than 1,000 deaths is "reasonable."
Boxer would have been correct to say that some increase in deaths of pregnant women would result should abortions be made illegal. But the number is much lower than she claimed. In 1972, the last year before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion nationwide, CDC counted only 39 deaths from illegal abortions based on surveys of health care providers, medical examiners' reports, state and national records, and news reports. However, Henshaw said it's difficult to quantify the number of deaths that could result today if Roe were overturned. For one thing, it is not clear how many states would actually make abortions illegal again. And Henshaw noted it is unlikely that the numbers of deaths would be as high as they were before 1973 due to medical advances and emergency services available today. In any case, Boxer's 5,000 figure was nearly 70 years out of date, and clearly wrong. <img src="/images/graemlins/rolleyes.gif" alt="" />
