The Detroit News reports on the tragic death of Tamiia Russell, a fifteen-year-old Detroit girl who died due to complications from a second-semester abortion. As the article points out, abortion-related deaths are very rare; unsurprisingly, pro-life groups are attempting to turn Tamiia’s death into a referendum on abortion in general and late-term abortions in particular (Tamiia was 24 weeks pregnant when she died).
This pro-life news source gives more details, but I’m not sure how reliable it is. If it is reliable, however, then WomanCare – the clinic which performed Tamiia’s abortion ? deserves to be shut down, and some of its employees should face real penalties. However, since the article doesn’t attribute many of its allegations, read it with a grain of salt. (Link via The S.I.C.L.E. Cell).
When her mother and aunt called WomanCare, they said the abortion could not be stopped once the laminaria is inserted.
However, according to eMedicine Journal, though there are some medical risks, “pregnancies have safely been carried to term after laminaria insertion and removal.” In fact, many crisis pregnancy centers offer laminaria removal for women who have changed their minds after beginning an abortion procedure.
Russell’s mother drove her daughter to the abortion facility the next day to finish the abortion, which was performed by Alberto Hodari. Upon her return home, she experienced severe bleeding — “so much so she soaked an entire mattress,” Redden told LifeNews.com.
WomanCare told her family that such bleeding was “normal” following an abortion, and not to take her to the hospital.
Concerned for Russell, the family called paramedics who rushed her to Sinai-Grace Hospital. Russell died on the way to the Hospital.
Her death is a tragedy. But to argue that her death proves that abortion should be banned is ridiculous. All surgical procedures – however safe – occasionally have complications leading to death. There are sometimes irresponsible doctors in every medical field.
Right now, abortion is an extremely safe procedure (although no procedure, including birth, is absolutely safe). That won’t be the case if abortion is outlawed..
If there’s anything, there *may* be medical malpractice here, especially with advice not to take someone who’s bleeding severely to an emergency room.
Then again, you’ll be happy to know that the same people who are anti-abortion are also for caps on medical malpractice awards!
This girl’s death seems to be indicative of what happens to women when they don’t have abortion on demand. Her family fought her every step of the way, she had to get $2,000 to pay for it, and therefore she had to wait 24 weeks to even get a chance and even then she had to do it illegally.
*braces for hurricane Annie B.*
I’ve criticized Ben Bateman for similar argumentative tactics, and I feel I should do the same here – –
I recognize your frustration Aaron, but bringing up malpractice stuff here is unfair. It’s true there are several conservative political leaders who oppose abortion and support caps on malpractice, but the caps on malpractice ahve nothing to do with a pro-life stance. There’s plenty of legitimate criticisms to bring up against pro-lifers without bringing up irrelevant stuff.
DRA, hopefully said hurricane won’t come. But man, I sure do enjoy ignoring huge posts of copy-and-pasted irrelevant stats.
All surgical procedures – however safe – occasionally have complications leading to death. There are sometimes irresponsible doctors in every medical field.
Right now, abortion is an extremely safe procedure (although no procedure, including birth, is absolutely safe).
Abortion is actually safer than birth, as far as I know, which means that banning abortion to protect women’s lives would be quite contrary. It drives me crazy when the anti-abortion crowd freaks out because a woman dies from an abortion when the option they want to force on women would likely result in more death.
If that’s the way it went down, then that doctor should lose his license. But I find the sudden concern for this girl suspect. As Amanda pointed out, if she didn’t have to battle so hard to get an abortion, she wouldn’t have to wait until she was 24 weeks along.
This column in the Detroit Free Press sums up my feelings pretty well on the subject.
Abortion safer than childbirth? Not according to this study, which puts the mortality rate from abortion at nearly 3 times higher.
The statistics for the United States show abortion as much safer. But this study is a hefty reason to distrust those statistics, quite apart from the fact that abortionists here have no requirement (and certainly no incentive) to report on deaths that they cause, and the U.S. has many people who will go to court to argue that it is an unconstitutional violation of privacy to require anything of abortion clinics.
Don’t have time to adress Joe M. in detail right now, but here’s a quick something that caught my eye in that link of his. The induced abortion statistic makes no distinction between the very safe early abortions and the much more dangerous late term abortions, where large and hazardous malformed or dead fetuses make up the majority. I’m willing to bet that the vast majority of that mortality statistic is due to the late term procedure, where your choice is often between risking a much higher mortality rate trying to bear and deliver the dangerous fetus, or a lower mortality rate for evacuating it through surgical means.
This of course assumes Joe is telling us the whole story. I’m sure there are qualifiers and contexts that are being ignored here, but we’ll see about that later. In any case it is silly to conclude that the evacuation of a pea sized glob of tissue is more deadly that the bearing and birthing of a melon sized one.
Sidenote: I may be misinterpreting, but isn’t this sentence:
The age-adjusted mortality rate for women during pregnancy and within 1 year of pregnancy termination was 36.7 deaths per 100,000 pregnancies, which was significantly lower than the mortality rate among nonpregnant women, 57.0 per 100,000 person-years
saying that pregnancy is safer than, well, living?
Also, in response to Deep River’s post:
“Nevertheless, the authors [of this study] estimate that for the years 1988 to 1997 up to 87% of the deaths in women whose pregnancies were terminated after 8 weeks of gestation might have been avoided if the women had obtained earlier abortions.”
There are more studies that show that abortion is safer than childbirth, such as this one.
Joe, death rates from abortion are kept by the CDC in the United States. Are you suggesting the CDC is enganged in some sort of conspiracy to cover up abortion deaths? Or that abortion providers are engaged in a widespread conspiracy to hide bodies from the CDC?
I haven’t commented on the “is abortion or childbirth safer” question in the USA because 1) both sides can make reasonable-sounding cases, and I haven’t researched it in detail, and 2) both childbirth and abortion are safe procedures in the US. (Except for black women – childbirth for black women in the US is the equivilent of childbirth in a third-world country.)
However, the “conpsiracy theory” explanation of low abortion mortality rates in the USA is ridiculous.
You, know, that’s the funny thing about the anti-choice faction that tries to argue abortion is always bad for the vast majority of women. They depend on conspiracy theories where greedy doctors manage to flim flam the country into supporting choice so that they can profit from it, because otherwise they have to admit the right to choice was mainly gained by and is mainly defended by women.
Despite the carefully cooked financial statistics such anti choicers use to try and bolster their theory, abortion is simply not a profitable enterprise to begin with, and is even less so when you factor in the lawsuits, harassment, and murder attempts of anti-choicers. Ask the bullet-proof vest wearing abortion doctor how much he is enjoying his imaginary booty as he makes his way through brick throwing anti-choicer to enter his fortress-like, bomb-resistant (but sadly not bomb immune) clinic.
If you had the power of the supposed conspiracy it would have taken to pass Roe Vs Wade despite the fact that abortion “obviously maims most women most of the time” (actual anti-choicer quote!) wouldn’t it have been easier to just manipulate US finance rather than become a magnet for the hatred of a frightening chunk of the public?
Oh wait, I forgot, we’re just ghouls who looooooove to kiiiiiiill!
Raznor…..I wouldn’t agree that malpractice caps are totally irrelevant in this instance, if the doctor performing the abortion did do something not in accordance with good medical practice.
The anti-choice people are likely screaming for criminal prosecution of the doctor, when the appropriate remedy would be, at best, a malpractice claim. And I wonder if the conservatives who hate abortion would be all for malpractice caps in a malpractice case involving an abortion doctor?
If you ever meet a conservative who is for malpractice caps except specifically where abortion is concerned, you have my permission to slap some sense into him plus kick him in the balls once for me. (you may apply this metaphorically if you don’t like violence or if said conservative is a woman or eunuch) Still, it remains a separate issue, and there’s no reason to put words in our opponents mouths.
No, the CDC isn’t engaged in some sort of conspiracy. (Nice, isn’t it, how theories with which one disagrees can be so easily dismissed by claiming that the other person believes in a conspiracy.)
But where does the CDC get its facts in the first place? Through voluntary reporting, that’s where. And why would abortionists have any incentive to take responsibility for the women they kill? Who is going to go out of their way to blame abortionists? Why do abortionists run screaming into court every time a state tries to make abortion clinics obey the same safety regulations that apply to other health clinics? Doesn’t take a genius to figure out that there must be some reason abortion clinics hate health regulation so much.
It’s a proven fact that women die from abortions yet don’t make it into the official statistics. See this article, for example, or this article, or this article by an emergency room physician who has personally seen cases of abortion-related deaths that were not reported as such. I don’t expect the rabid pro-abortion sort to pay attention to these articles, but Amp seems fairly open-minded. Take a look.
Um, Joe, even Amp will take links from a blatantly judgmental anti-choice stomping ground with a grain of salt the size of Poland. You’ve been visiting this site for a while now, so you should know he wasn’t born yesterday.
But then you aren’t really after him. Like Annie B. you’re fishing for nervous fence sitters who aren’t yet wise to the, ah, “incompleteness” of your perspective, the kind still fresh enough to be emotionally manipulated and intellectually steam-rolled.
Oh wow, I started browsing Joe’s links, and the fond memories just came back like a flashflood! The bibliography for the “research” is a veritable who’s who of anti-choice hot-shots, including:
Kevin Sherlock, the saintly man who penned “Operation Rescue of California, Presents Abortion Buster’s Manual,” filled with tips on how to obtain the personal information of abortion providers and put it to “good use” *wink*
Ann Saltenberger, persistent proponent of the roundly dismissed myth that abortion causes breast cancer.
Pamela Zekman and Pamela Warrick, who are pretty much summed up by one of their hilarious quotes: “Doctors have been known to race one another, competing for big bucks in the game of Who Can Perform the Most Abortions Today.” [quote from “The Abortion Profiteers: Making A Killing In Michigan Avenue Clinics.”]
What was that you were saying about no kooky conspiracy theories Joe? Nah, I’m certain you don’t think of us as ghouls who deserve to be blown up.
Oh look, good ol’ David Reardon! He’s been debunked left right and center, and you can start with this link: http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/168/10/1257
Etc, etc, etc. Given time my friends, given time…
No no, I think Joe’s links by rabidly anti-choice people who use terms like “abortionist” in their title and come from the same single anti-choice site completely proves his point. I have seen the light. If you excuse me, I shall embark to beat women with sticks until they accept their place as vessels for my seed. Hallelujah.
(and yes joe I was exaggerating for humorous intent. I don’t actually believe you support beating women with sticks. *pre-emptive sigh*)
Like I said, some of the pro-abortion fanatics won’t pay any attention, for the simple reason that they are full of scorn for everything written by someone who disagrees with them. But as they have absolutely no evidence whatsoever as to the uncounted women killed by legal abortion, Amp will hopefully be just a little bit more open-minded.
Joe said:
“Like I said, some of the pro-abortion fanatics won’t pay any attention, for the simple reason that they are full of scorn for everything written by someone who disagrees with them. But as they have absolutely no evidence whatsoever as to the uncounted women killed by legal abortion, Amp will hopefully be just a little bit more open-minded. ”
I didn’t see much that can be trusted in any of those links you provided Joe. And that is coming from somebody who isn’t even close to being a “pro-abortion fanatic” (I am generally anti-abortion though I am pro-choice meaning I think that women should have the choice to have an abortion or not–there is a big difference between pro-choice and pro-abortion). The anti-choice crowd has shown their willingness to lie and distort statistics and facts in order to support their viewpoint therefore they have necessitated taking their articles and “facts” with a grain of salt. I’m sorry, but that is the way it is.
So the evidence we have regarding abortion mortality is from a trusted organization. The data is there and they present it openly. The evidence we have from our side is–nothing really. One study that may or may not have merit and a bunch of anti-choice doctors with a history of misrepresentation giving anecdotal testimony. I’m sorry, again, but there really is nothing there to support your contention.
According to CDC and NIH figures, the mortality rate associated with completing a pregnancy in the United States is on the order of ten times higher than the mortality rate associated with induced abortion.
While there is likely to be some margin of error in both figures, there is no credible basis for Joe M’s claim that the enormously greater risk that these figures show for completing a pregnancy is in doubt.
The findings are also confirmed by other major health agencies, such as the World Health Organization. The WHO found a similar disparity in health risks between pregnancy completion and abortion at the global level. On a worldwide scale, abortion is also much, much safer than completing a pregnancy.
I’m not going to bother repeating myself, especially for Don P., whose fanaticism on the subject of abortion can be explained only by the suspicion that he must have inconveniently impregnated a woman (or more than one) at some point. (Sorry, Amp, I don’t mean to be rude, but believe me, Don P. can take it.)
Anyway, go up and start reading the post where I said, “Abortion safer than childbirth? Not according to this study, which puts the mortality rate from abortion at nearly 3 times higher.”
Joe M:
I’m not going to bother repeating myself,
Good. Repeating claims that have already been rebutted would be a waste of time.
Anyway, go up and start reading the post where I said, “Abortion safer than childbirth? Not according to this study, which puts the mortality rate from abortion at nearly 3 times higher.”
I’ve already read it. I don’t think you read the study abstract very carefully. It does not “put the mortality rate from abortion at nearly 3 times higher” than the mortality rate from pregnancy. It doesn’t say anything about a causal relationship between either pregnancy or abortion and mortality.
Even if there were studies that found a greater health risk from abortion than from pregnancy completion, and I have never seen even a single such study, they are contradicted by the overwhelming weight of evidence, as reflected in reports from organizations such as the CDC and the WHO, that unequivocally conclude that induced abortion is much, much safer than taking a pregnancy to term and delivering a baby.
Joe M:
But where does the CDC get its facts in the first place? Through voluntary reporting, that’s where.
This claim is just factually incorrect. That’s what happens when you parrot anti-abortion propaganda you find on amateur websites instead of investigating the facts. Abortion mortality statistics are compiled and cross-checked from a variety of independent sources. As I said before, there is no credible basis for asserting that these rates are unreliable, let alone that they are wrong by a factor of ten–the margin by which mortality related to completed pregnancies exceeds mortality related to induced abortion.
The CDC’s Abortion Surveillance – United States 2000 report includes an extensive discussion of mortality data procedures. Here’s the bottom line:
“CDC has periodically reported data on abortion-related deaths since these deaths were first included in the Abortion Surveillance Report in 1972 (5,6). An abortion-related death was defined as a death resulting from 1) a direct complication of an abortion, 2) an indirect complication caused by the chain of events initiated by abortion, or 3) aggravation of a preexisting condition by the physiologic or psychologic effects of the abortion (1,2). Sources of data for abortion-related deaths included national and state vital records, maternal mortality review committees, surveys, private citizens and groups, media reports, health-care providers, medical examiners’ reports, and computerized searches of full-text newspaper databases. All deaths associated with any type of abortion, induced or spontaneous, were investigated. For each death possibly related to an induced abortion or an abortion of unknown type, clinical records and autopsy reports were requested and reviewed by two clinically experienced medical epidemiologists to determine the cause of death and whether the death was abortion related. Each abortion-related death was then categorized as legal induced, illegal induced, spontaneous, or unknown (whether induced or spontaneous). Abortion-related deaths for 1972–1999 are provided in this report.”
[snicker] I love the expression “pro-abortion fanatic.” Yeah, every Sunday I stand outside the local Catholic hospital’s pediatric ward brandishing a sign that says, “Please Please KILL YOUR BABY !!!” I then proceed out to the parking lot where I stuff flyers depicting baby-barf-spattered college textbooks emblazoned with the phrase “CHILDBEARING STOPS A THINKING BRAIN !!” under people’s windshield wipers. Later, it’s on to my private shooting range where I put many, many bullet holes in life-size paper models of the Pope, Ralph Reed, and various and sundry Archbishops.
It’s a beautiful existence, let me tell you. :p
Go ahead Joe, make my day, say it, say:
“Evacuating a pea sized lump of tissue is more dangerous than bearing and birthing a melon sized one.”
Nevermind the factual thrashing you’ve received from Don P, the fact that the above sentence is the end conclusion of your argument is laughable enough. You clearly need to experience pregnancy or spend more time around pregnant people.
When my cousin was little, he’d do something he knew was wrong, and apologize while doing it, as if that made it okay. Which brings me to this:
for Don P., whose fanaticism on the subject of abortion can be explained only by the suspicion that he must have inconveniently impregnated a woman (or more than one) at some point. (Sorry, Amp, I don’t mean to be rude, but believe me, Don P. can take it.)
Joe, you’re being an asshole here. If the best you have is complete bullshit smears then go away. We don’t need you.
Once again, for the umpteenth time, Don P. does not — even on the anonymous internet — deny that the reason he cares so much about abortion is the same reason that motivates many men: The fear of a woman who dares to show up pregnant.
Anyway, Don P. said: I’ve already read it. I don’t think you read the study abstract very carefully. It does not “put the mortality rate from abortion at nearly 3 times higher” than the mortality rate from pregnancy. It doesn’t say anything about a causal relationship between either pregnancy or abortion and mortality.
Wrong. The study said this: Objective To test the hypothesis that pregnant and recently pregnant women enjoy a “healthy pregnant women effect,” we compared the all natural cause mortality rates for women who were pregnant or within 1 year of pregnancy termination with all other women of reproductive age.
* * *
The mortality was lower after a birth (28.2/100,000) than after a spontaneous (51.9/100,000) or induced abortion (83.1/100,000).
Pay close attention: 28.2 deaths is lower than 83.1 deaths. Almost 1/3, in fact, which is exactly what I said. Is this a causal relationship? As much so as any study that (according to Don P.) is based on surveys and newspaper reports, among other things.
And as usual, Don P. has absolutely no argument against the plain fact that the abortion statistics in the United States do NOT capture nearly all the abortion-related deaths, as proven by the many articles about women who died after having an abortion but whose deaths were not officially recorded as such. No one has any reason to doubt that this happens, except that they prefer to stick their heads in the sand and pretend everything is ok.
Joe M:
Once again, for the umpteenth time, Don P. does not — even on the anonymous internet — deny that the reason he cares so much about abortion is the same reason that motivates many men: The fear of a woman who dares to show up pregnant.
I do deny that that is the reason. You will doubtless now make yet another accusation, “challenge” me to deny it, and declare my motives suspect if I do not. That’s your little game.
By the way, have you stopped beating your wife yet?
Joe M:
Wrong.
It is not wrong. The abstract makes no claims as to a causal link between pregnancy and mortality or abortion and mortality. This is not suprising given that the findings do not support any such causal link.
The mortality was lower after a birth (28.2/100,000) than after a spontaneous (51.9/100,000) or induced abortion (83.1/100,000).
Yes, and it was also lower amoung pregnant women (36.7/100,000) than amoung non-pregnant ones (57/100,000). On your account, this means that becoming pregnant causes a woman’s risk of dying to decrease. But that conclusion is absurd. All pregnancies impose major physical trauma on a woman’s body and elevate rather than reduce her risk of dying. You are simply confusing a correlation with a causation. An obvious alternative explanation for the disparity is age. Pregnancy tends to correlate inversely with age. Mortality tends to correlate positively with age. Thus, the average age of women in the non-pregnant sample was likely to be significantly older than the average age of women in the pregnant sample, and the cause of the disparity in mortality rates was likely age rather than pregnancy. A similar effect is likely to account for the disparities in mortality rates for completed pregnancies and aborted ones.
This should all be pretty obvious to anyone who has the slightest familiarity with statistical analysis. Rule number one is to never assume that a correlation constitutes a causal relationship.
Raznor: Funny, that you of all people tell someone to go away on the basis of having been insulting.
Anyway, I once saw a Howard Stern show. He was talking to a woman guest, and he asked her, “What would you do if we had sex and you turned up pregnant?” She said, “Oh, I’m totally against abortion.” Then Stern said, “Then forget it. I’m absolutely in favor of abortion.”
Three guesses as to why a slimeball like Stern would support abortion. (Hint: It’s not because he has such a great respect for women.)
Point is, lots of men think this way: Support abortion, because that’s the best way to use women as sex objects without the fear of pregnancy. You must have your head in the sand as well if you haven’t come across men who think this way.
Anyway, I’ve asked Don P. repeatedly (on Matthew Yglesias’ site and on Jane Galt’s site and on Sebastian Holsclaw’s site, if I’m not mistaken) something like this: What motivates you? Why do you show up on every abortion post to put up a nearly infinite number of posts, all with the theme that there is never anything wrong with any abortion, that there should never be the slightest restrictions on any abortion anywhere, etc., etc? What motivates someone to be so defensive about abortion?
I suspect that he must be the Stern-type. Who else would care so much? It’s one thing to be in favor of abortion, but to spend as much time on the issue as Don P. does is just weird unless there is some personal involvement in the issue.
If correlation is not causation, can we expect Don P. to stop trotting out the statistic that abortion is somehow 10 times safer than childbirth? As I said, statistics based on newspapers and surveys, among other things, don’t show causation either. Something else is likely involved — as I’ve said, this might be the fact that abortionists have no reason to track or report on the women they kill, and there’s perfectly good proof that at least some women weren’t counted by the statistics here.
Anyway, Don P. is wrong, as usual. He says that pregnant women have a lower death rate than women as a whole because pregnant women tend to be younger. True.
Where he is staggeringly wrong is when he says that a “similar effect” accounts for the fact that women who have abortions die almost 3 times as often. This can’t be right. When one compares pregnant women who deliver their babies as against pregnant women who kill their babies, age obviously has nothing to do with the outcome. All the women involved are of child-bearing age. There might be other reasons involved, but we don’t know what those are. At any rate, Don P. should be a little more careful with his pet theory of “abortion is ten times safer.”
DRA said: Go ahead Joe, make my day, say it, say:
“Evacuating a pea sized lump of tissue is more dangerous than bearing and birthing a melon sized one.”
I see no prima facie reason that abortion would be any safer. It might or might not. It involves dealing with the baby at a smaller stage, of course. But 1) abortion is an artifical halt to a natural process; 2) there is no telling what this artificial halt does to the hormones; 3) abortion often involves metal tongs being stuck into the woman’s body. Pregnancy can be difficult, but with modern medicine it is awfully safe. I haven’t figured out the statistics, but an average pregnant woman probably has a higher chance of being injured in a car accident on her way to the ob/gyn’s office.
Joe M. I suspect the reason why your against abortion is that you hate women and want them to be merely vessels for your seed without thinking or any indication of independence. Since you haven’t denied this, I assume it’s true.
Also, ooh, Howard Stern is for abortion. Nice little “argument” there. You know who was anti-abortion? Hitler. Do you agree with Hitler? Ooh, the shame!
It’s one thing to be in favor of abortion, but to spend as much time on the issue as Don P. does is just weird unless there is some personal involvement in the issue.
Or maybe he . . . y’know . . . respects women and believes that treating them as brood-cows is so morally wrong that it deserves special attention.
Ascribing vile motives to your opponent in a debate instead of engaging his arguments is pretty shitty, and is the mark of arguing with someone who’s more interested in “scoring points” than discussing anything in an adult fashion.
I mean jeez, Joe M, I could just as easily say, “It’s one thing to be against abortion, but to spend as much time on the issue as you do is just weird unless you have a pathological hatred of women. I guess your mommy must have been mean to you and you insist on taking your unresolved psychological baggage out on the rest of us.”
Sound fair?
—JRC
Heh.
You rock, Raznor.
Great minds and all that.
Raznor: I suspect the reason why your against abortion is that you hate women and want them to be merely vessels for your seed without thinking or any indication of independence.
The reason your response doesn’t work is that no pro-lifer actually thinks this way. Whereas there are plenty of men who, like Stern, want to be able to sleep around but are frightened at the thought of producing a baby. It’s only natural. Why do you think many polls show that men support abortion by a wider margin than women? Is it really that most men are more sensitive to anti-female discrimination? Or, as I think, is there a more obvious reason why many men would be so worried about whether abortion is available?
Joe M:
If correlation is not causation, can we expect Don P. to stop trotting out the statistic that abortion is somehow 10 times safer than childbirth? As I said, statistics based on newspapers and surveys, among other things, don’t show causation either.
The statistics that show that abortion is about 10 times safer than taking a pregnancy to term are not “based on newspapers and surveys.”
I see no prima facie reason that abortion would be any safer.
That’s because you don’t know what you’re talking about. Pregnancy imposes substantial physical trauma on a woman’s body. During the 9-month course of a completed pregnancy, a woman’s uterus increases in size by a factor of five hundred to a thousand. Her body weight will increase by 25 pounds or more. Even healthy pregnancies are often accompanied by frequent urination, water retention, nausea, vomiting, labored breathing, back pain and fatigue. According to the American Medical Association, up to 30% of pregnant women in America experience a major medical complication, and 60% experience some kind of medical complication. Labor and vaginal delivery impose unique and painful physical demands that can last for hours or days. C-section, a procedure that under current practise is required in at least one out of every four births, involves invasive surgery, including abdominal incision and, often, general anaesthesia. Pregnancy also carries significant risks to mental health, including, but not limited to, pre- and post-partum depression.
The risks of all this to even young and healthy women, let alone to older women, many of whom already suffer from some kind of chronic medical condition when they become pregnant, should be obvious. The risks are even greater if the woman suffers from, or has a family history of, any of a wide variety of common medical conditions, including heart disease, hypertension, diabetes and cancer.
The reason your response doesn’t work is that no pro-lifer actually thinks this way. Whereas there are plenty of men who, like Stern, want to be able to sleep around but are frightened at the thought of producing a baby.
See, Joe, that’s why such men use “condoms” and make sure their partners use “birth control”. I mean really Joe, do you expect me to teach you about the birds and bees.
Why do you think many polls show that men support abortion by a wider margin than women?
Nice blatant lie. Or can you name a single poll that confirms this?
Or, as I think, is there a more obvious reason why many men would be so worried about whether abortion is available?
You’ve got nothing, Joe, nothing except for pure speculation and anger at people for not believing that you are the most intelligent person on earth. I’m sorry you think I’m unfair to you Joe, but maybe if you didn’t make such blatant arogant statements that ignore all facts, as seems to be your MO judging from your posting here, I wouldn’t think you were an arrogant idiot, and would treat you accordingly.
Joe M. sez:
“But 1) abortion is an artifical halt to a natural process; 2) there is no telling what this artificial halt does to the hormones”
Ooooh riiiight, I remember this one. It was used to explain how abortion causes breast cancer…in the widely discredited anti-choice MYTH.
Oh but you probably weren’t talking about that. You were probably talking about the next imaginary abortion disease you and your buddies are cooking up for the new scare tactic campaign right?
Raznor sez
“Joe M. I suspect the reason why your against abortion is that you hate women and want them to be merely vessels for your seed without thinking or any indication of independence. Since you haven’t denied this, I assume it’s true.”
Oh but it’s worse than that Raznor. I’ve personally read the minds of all my male anti-choicer foes using Joe M.’s amazing PartisanRay and discovered the horrible truth. I always found it weird how folks who couldn’t get pregnant got so worked up about something so woman-centric, but now I know it’s because the sight of fetus filled fillies TURNS THEM ON! For them to look upon a bulging female abdomen is to be reminded that no matter how far a woman makes it down the road of success that men used to monopolize, she can always be knocked off by being knocked up, and this sense of superiority makes them horny as hell! After being exposed to a pregnant poodle Joe M. just can’t wait to run home and batter his perpetually drained wife as she struggles through her fourteenth pregnancy (which she hopes won’t be her sixth C-section).
This is the terrible reason why all anti-choice men want to ban choice, it deprives them of their jollies. Don’t try to deny it Joe, it’s the only possible reason, because all reasonable experts know you are a subhuman morlock ;-P
Joe M:
Where he is staggeringly wrong is when he says that a “similar effect” accounts for the fact that women who have abortions die almost 3 times as often. This can’t be right. When one compares pregnant women who deliver their babies as against pregnant women who kill their babies, age obviously has nothing to do with the outcome. All the women involved are of child-bearing age.
Gosh, you just expose yourself as more and more clueless with every post. The abstract does not define the precise age range it describes as “of reproductive age,” but for adult women that range generally covers 18 to the mid-to-late 40s. A woman in her 40s is substantially more likely to die than a woman in her 20s. That’s why life insurance premiums increase as you get older: the risk to the insurance company that you will die and that it will have to pay out on your policy increases each year. The risk a pregnancy poses to a woman’s health also increases as she gets older. Young women are less likely to have a pre-existing medical condition that pregnancy could worsen, and in general young women’s bodies are just better able to cope with the physical trauma of pregnancy than older women’s bodies. Thus, older women have a significantly greater incentive to terminate a pregnancy than younger ones. Thus, the average age of the sample of women who had an abortion is likely to be higher than the average age of the sample of women who completed their pregnancies. And as I explained in my previous post, mortality correlates positively with age. This is how age is relevant to the mortality rate disparity the study found between pregnancies ending in abortion and pregnancies ending in childbirth. Do you understand yet, or do I have to explain it again?
Joe M. sez:
“Or, as I think, is there a more obvious reason why many men would be so worried about whether abortion is available?”
Oh I see what your saying Joe, women couldn’t possibly support choice because EVERYONE knows women don’t want recreational sex! They’d never abort a fetus because the only reason they have sex is to be impregnated! Duh, how silly of me to forget that, thanks for reminding me how real people really think and behave.
(above is sarcasm, just in case some people couldn’t figure it out)
Damn, I gotta get me one of them mindreading PartisanRays.
Don P. — is there any evidence whatsoever for why the study found that abortion is nearly 3 times more dangerous? Why would this one study be the only one affected by age to such a huge extent when you claim that abortion is 10 times safer? That’s a difference of 30 times, if you do the math. 30 times the difference, because that study didn’t control for age and your supposed study did? Where’s the evidence for that??
Raznor: You shouldn’t use terms like “blatant lie” when you don’t know what you’re talking about. A lot depends on the questions asked, of course, and results differ, but several polls show greater support for abortion among men.
From this article:
If there is a “gender gap,” polls show that it is women, not men, who are more likely to oppose abortion! In the 1998 Wirthlin poll conducted for the Family Research Council (FRC), women consistently expressed a more pro-life position (61% willing either to prohibit abortion in all circumstances, to allow abortion only to save the life of the mother, or to allow abortion only in cases of rape, incest, or the life of the mother) than did men (53% expressing a pro-abortion position). While middle-aged women were slightly more pro-abortion than those under 34 or over 55, in all age cohorts, women were more pro-life than men. The 1998 poll by the Catholic bishops found the same thing, with more women (58%) than men (50%) willing to outlaw most abortions.
Or see this article that describes an ABC poll that shows men supporting abortion by a 6% margin over women.
So that’s at least three polls. I know there were more in the 1980s that showed greater support among men, but I don’t have time to dig up those footnotes.
Oh, and there’s the left-wing Center for the Advancement of Women, whose poll (to their dismay) found that a majority of women would allow abortion only in cases of rape/incest/mother’s life. (Don P. always tries to change the subject when that poll is mentioned.)
Great one relevant poll. That’s what I call “many”.
Okay, maybe “blatant lie” was a bit too much. But you have one poll thats 6 years old and performed by a conservative organization, one poll that doesn’t compare attitudes between women and men, and then a recent enough independent poll that has a 6% margin. Good show. And polls from the ’80s don’t count because attitudes change in 20 years.
Oh, and there’s this:
That’s a difference of 30 times, if you do the math.
Well, yeah, if you do the math incorrectly. You’re assuming that either the death rate per birth or death rate per abortion remain constant, but since the CDC’s data and your cited study’s data are collected differently, we can’t really assume this.
But what are you saying here? That the CDC is lying, that they don’t exist? You can’t just ignore the CDC because their data doesn’t comform to your prejudices. Well, I guess you can, but it’s generally not a good idea.
“Oh, and there’s the left-wing Center for the Advancement of Women, whose poll (to their dismay) found that a majority of women would allow abortion only in cases of rape/incest/mother’s life. (Don P. always tries to change the subject when that poll is mentioned.)”
I don’t call 51% a significant majority, but then it’s irrelevant anyway. As I said to Annie B. dozens of times in the other thread, it doesn’t matter how many people dissaprove, male or female, that still doesn’t negate a woman’s fundamental right to her own body. If we use your reasoning then women should never have been recognized the right to vote in 1920 since at the time there was such strong majority opposition to it.
Besides, your statistics speak only for women in the US, a country notorious for the surprising backwardness of its abortion views. If we go beyond the views of Americans on this issue to the views of most other developped nations, including our neighbor Canada and soon-to-be defectors from anti-choice policies like Portugal, I’m sure you’ll find that the overwhelming momentum of the argument is already in our side’s favor.
Although yet again, it wouldn’t matter how many people were for or against choice. Fundamental human rights like bodily control are not circumstantial, they apply whenever and wherever you find yourself.
How you phrase the question makes a huge difference. If you want a poll that shows overwhelming support for reproductive rights, ask people if they agree that the abortion decision should be made by individual women in consultation with their doctor, versus by the federal goverment.
My view is that the polls show that many americans have mixed feelings on abortion, and so give contrary answers.
Regarding “women are more pro-life then men,” it’s easy enough to find polls showing the opposite (here and here, for example). The truth is, women and men support choice in more or less similar numbers. Poll-shopping to claim that there’s a clear-cut trend one way or the other is deceptive, and doesn’t help clarify the issues in any way at all. So why do it?
Raznor: See, Joe, that’s why such men use “condoms” and make sure their partners use “birth control”.
Yeah, that’s why no one ever has an abortion. Anyone who doesn’t want children would have used birth control. Right.
Back in the real world, it’s obvious that lots of men 1) know that birth control fails, or 2) know that they or their partners can’t be trusted to use birth control reliably. So they desperately want to have abortion around, not because of “women’s rights,” but because of their own convenience.
Raznor wants to pretend that such men don’t exist and focus on insulting me. Fine. He can pretend all he wants. Maybe someday he’ll grow up and realize that not all men are pious beings who are all just altruistically interested in helping women.
Oh, and it’s nice of Don P. to cut-and-paste his usual litany of why pregnancy is so unhealthful and horrible. Yeah, urination or fatigue — those are killers alright.
One more thing: Don P. said, “The statistics that show that abortion is about 10 times safer than taking a pregnancy to term are not ‘based on newspapers and surveys.'” The correct quote is “newspapers and surveys, among other things.” This is perfectly true, as shown by Don P. himself. Maybe he should take the time to read what he pastes here: Sources of data for abortion-related deaths included national and state vital records, maternal mortality review committees, surveys, private citizens and groups, media reports, health-care providers, medical examiners’ reports, and computerized searches of full-text newspaper databases.
You’re right, Amp. Polls do differ in their results, and it depends heavily on what questions are asked.
Still, the fact that many polls show greater support among men should make people uneasy. Even equality should make people uneasy. If support for abortion was purely determined by whether someone “supported women,” then women’s support would exceed men’s by a vast margin. As I’ve said before — and as no one really can dispute — men, by and large, are not such saints that they are going to support something just for women’s sake without any regard for their own interests. Some men do, but that’s definitely not the rule. If men support abortion as much or more than women, there’s probably a lot of self-calculation going on.
Or think of it the opposite way: If the only reason to oppose abortion was a desire to keep women in their place, or to oppress women (or something similar), then why would so many polls show that about half of women oppose abortion? Even a majority in the left-wing poll I mentioned. More staggeringly, why would some polls show that women oppose abortion more often than men? If opposing abortion was only about opposing female equality, I’d suggest that this just couldn’t happen, no matter how the question was phrased.
Of course, the reason is obvious: Opposing abortion, for the vast majority of people, has nothing to do with a desire to oppress or to keep women in their place. For the tens of millions of men (and possibly even more women) who are against abortion, the only thing going on is a desire to protect human life. One can disagree with this desire if you like, but one can’t ignore it and pretend that it’s all just about men who want women to stay in the kitchen.
Don P. sticks to his age-based explanation by asserting (not proving) that women who have abortions are older than women who let their children live. He says, This is how age is relevant to the mortality rate disparity the study found between pregnancies ending in abortion and pregnancies ending in childbirth.
Well, as I said before, is there any evidence that THIS is the reason why one study would find abortion mortality 30 times higher than what Don P. claims? Come on.
And Raznor, you don’t seem to get the point. You said that I was doing the math incorrectly, and said, You’re assuming that either the death rate per birth or death rate per abortion remain constant, but since the CDC’s data and your cited study’s data are collected differently, we can’t really assume this.
That’s the entire issue. One study says that abortion mortality is about 3 times higher. Don P. likes to think that abortion is ten times safer. That’s a difference of 30. There is no question that these results differ by a margin of 30 times. The real question is why? Don P. wants everyone to think that it’s all due to age, i.e., that 1) age affected the study I cited, but 2) age didn’t affect his study at all. There is absolutely no reason to think that his study controlled for age, let alone that age by itself would account for a difference of 30 times.
Now it could be that abortion leads to complications over time that in turn lead to death. But these deaths wouldn’t show up as directly caused by abortion. So that’s why the study I cited is interesting, because it looked at the entire mortality rate within a year of having an abortion.
It also could be that women who have abortions lead more dangerous lives in some other ways, and that this causes their deaths. As one article said, “The study also revealed the difficulties involved in identifying direct and indirect effects of pregnancy on subsequent deaths. An examination of deaths from natural causes that were identified as “not pregnancy related” revealed that women who had abortions were significantly more likely (1.7 times) to die from natural causes that were not attributed to pregnancy on the death certificates. They were also 6.3 times more likely to die from violent causes.”
Or you could look at this the opposite way: Maybe the sort of women who let their children live are also more likely to make healthy and safe choices in other ways.
Who knows? The point is, Don P. should be more careful before extolling the glories of abortion and the awfulness of pregnancy. He might be completely wrong, and there is no reason to think that the official statistics here are complete.
Then there’s the recent article from the Southern Medical Journal. Findings:
Compared with women who delivered, those who aborted had a significantly higher age-adjusted risk of death from all causes (1.62), from suicide (2.54), and from accidents (1.82), as well as a higher relative risk of death from natural causes (1.44), including the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) (2.18), circulatory diseases (2.87), and cerebrovascular disease (5.46). Results are stratified by age and time.
ACtually, Joe, that some studies show more men are pro-choice, others show more women are pro-choice, suggests that the numbers are roughly equal and can change from survey to survey due to random sampling effects. You seem determined to believe that men in general are more pro-choice than women, but the stats as a whole (as opposed to in carefully selected surveys) don’t support the idea that either sex is clearly more pro-choice.
My guess is that for both women and men, support for abortion is determined more by factors like religion, political ideology, and education than by sex. While I don’t doubt that some individual men support abortion for the reasons you say, Joe, I don’t see any evidence to support the idea that this is a common motivation, and you certainly haven’t presented any. It’s equally possible that some individual men support abortion because they love their wives, mothers, sisters and daughters, and want them to be free. But I’m not going to start claiming that’s a statistically significant motivation without proof.
If the only reason to oppose abortion was a desire to keep women in their place, or to oppress women (or something similar), then why would so many polls show that about half of women oppose abortion?
I don’t think that’s the only reason to oppose abortion. Obviously, many people oppose abortion because they mistakenly believe that there’s no difference between a zygote and a baby. However, it’s not one or the other. Why don’t pro-lifers support mandatory blood and organ donations from fathers to their needy children?
As I recall, many women opposed suffrage, as well. That doesn’t mean that denying women suffrage wasn’t an anti-woman position; it just means that people don’t determine their positions on these issues based primarily on sex, but instead choose a position based on other factors (ideology, religion, etc). This fits in pretty well with my version of feminism; people’s thoughts and votes are determined by their brains, not their genitals.
It also means, I suspect, that what’s anti-woman may be much clearer in retrospect than it is in the thick of the debate.
* * *
Joe, according to what I read on the CDC website, the CDC uses newspaper articles (among many other sources) to find cases that require further investigation. They base their statistics on the results of their investigations, not on the newspaper articles themselves.
Don P. is flat wrong when he claims that older women are more likely to get abortions. The opposite is the case: Women in their twenties get 4 or 5 times as many abortions as women in their thirties. See table 4 of the CDC report that Don P. himself cited: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5109a1.htm
Why Don P’s CDC statistics are not complete:
[Description of four women’s deaths following abortion.] These are four deaths that occurred in one small state that reported no abortion deaths for 1989. For that same year, the Abortion Surveillance Unit of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported only 12 deaths for the entire country. But, as we will see, the CDC doesn’t look very hard.
Question: If there were really only 12 deaths reported to the CDC for the entire country in 1989, what are the chances that this process is remotely accurate given that it missed 4 known cases in a single small state? On a nationwide basis, taking the real figures from one state leads to a 33% higher death rate.
If the same proportion of women were missed in the rest of the country, that would mean the CDC claimed there were only 12 deaths when there were actually over 200.
Joe M. sez:
“Or think of it the opposite way: If the only reason to oppose abortion was a desire to keep women in their place, or to oppress women (or something similar), then why would so many polls show that about half of women oppose abortion? Even a majority in the left-wing poll I mentioned. More staggeringly, why would some polls show that women oppose abortion more often than men? If opposing abortion was only about opposing female equality, I’d suggest that this just couldn’t happen, no matter how the question was phrased.”
Try this for size. A huge number of women in this country grow up in a culture of feminine subservience, guilt, religious fear and other insidious factors that impede their ability to see their own self interest. If you’ve always been told abortion is a sin by everyone you grew up around and have been raised to be meek and deferrential to authority (especially male authority) you aren’t very likely to stand up for your controversial right. In fact you are likely to adopt the views of your father/husband/preacher, because they could only have your best interest at heart right? Even if you don’t know anyone like that personally Joe, how many women in your “anti choice majority” are there because they never dared to really THINK about it?
Joe sez:
“Still, the fact that many polls show greater support among men should make people uneasy. Even equality should make people uneasy. If support for abortion was purely determined by whether someone “supported women,” then women’s support would exceed men’s by a vast margin. As I’ve said before — and as no one really can dispute — men, by and large, are not such saints that they are going to support something just for women’s sake without any regard for their own interests. Some men do, but that’s definitely not the rule. If men support abortion as much or more than women, there’s probably a lot of self-calculation going on.”
OK, let’s imagine for argument’s sake that your scenario is true. So what? A lot of people who opposed slavery didn’t think African Americans were their equals, but no one on the abolitionist side would have dreamed of barring their support. Let some men think they will get extra jollies from defending choice, as long as the legality of a fundamental right is preserved. After all, a woman still gets to choose who deserves jollies, so its not like such men have gained some sinister sexist advantage.
Joe sez:
“Oh, and it’s nice of Don P. to cut-and-paste his usual litany of why pregnancy is so unhealthful and horrible. Yeah, urination or fatigue — those are killers alright.”
Fuck you Joe. I mean really, FUCK YOU. YOU try getting pregnant some time. Make sure they perform a C-section on you as well.
Honestly, for a guy trying to pretend he isn’t a sexist, you sure make obvious mistakes.
Actually, Left-Wing women oppose abortion because we’ve gotten tired of being outnumbered nation-wide by morons like Joe. They’re constantly outbreeding us, which is why we have to keep having these stoopid arguments over and over again and why we’re so often outnumbered when we do. We must return fire with the only true weapons at our disposal: OUR WOMBS.
Now, which one of you Left-leaning studmuffins wants to help me breed two dozen Leftwing Soldiers for our glorious revolution ? I’d ask Aaron, but I can’t tear him away from his Atlantic, his steaming cup of Italian Roast, and the Sunday re-re-broadcast of “Car Talk.” (BTW, this is the other reason the Left isn’t on the ascendency, you Lefty men are all a bunch of lazy, shameless dilletante hedonists who are perpetually tainting your precious bodily fluids with big words and overpriced caffiene. I bet Joe’s sperm count is wayyyyy the hell more studly than yours.) But don’t worry, changing diapers and applying teething meds for our future righteous brood of revolutionaries will make you a better, more productive man. Just ask Kevin Moore. :p)
Actually, I’m leaning toward Deep River as the brood-stallion. Assuming that Deep River is male. I mean, anyone who can contribute a phrase like “fetus filled fillies” to a debate simply MUST have their genes preserved for posterity. However, the rest of you proper-thinking male Lefties are welcome to compete for the prize. I expect you all to by lined up outside my door with offers of Che Guevara T’s and organically-raised roses by the time I return from my trip to Whole Foods.
Viva La Revolucion !!!
Amy S.
Amy,
I’m all for a hot evening of listening to the “Internationale”, reading Das Kapital and some hot Soviet-style sex so that we may produce more proletarian workers for our glorious revolution. Don’t trust anyone to the right of Stalin!!
Joe M:
Don P. — is there any evidence whatsoever for why the study found that abortion is nearly 3 times more dangerous?
How many times do we have to go over this? The study did not find that abortion is nearly 3 times more dangerous. The study didn’t report any findings about the relative risks of abortion and completing a pregnancy, because the data do not support any such findings. The overwhelming weight of evidence indicates that abortion is about 10 times safer than completing a pregnancy.
One more thing: Don P. said, “The statistics that show that abortion is about 10 times safer than taking a pregnancy to term are not ‘based on newspapers and surveys.'” The correct quote is “newspapers and surveys, among other things.” This is perfectly true, as shown by Don P. himself. Maybe he should take the time to read what he pastes here: Sources of data for abortion-related deaths included national and state vital records, maternal mortality review committees, surveys, private citizens and groups, media reports, health-care providers, medical examiners’ reports, and computerized searches of full-text newspaper databases.
You seem incapable of understanding even the clearest text. Searches of newspaper databases are one of the sources the CDC uses to identify potential abortion-related deaths. As the report states, “For each death possibly related to an induced abortion or an abortion of unknown type, clinical records and autopsy reports were requested and reviewed by two clinically experienced medical epidemiologists to determine the cause of death and whether the death was abortion related.” What part of that statement do you not understand?
Moreover, since you appear to believe that abortion providers themselves often fail to report abortion-related deaths, one would expect you to be glad that the CDC searches media reports and other sources of information to identify potential abortion-related deaths. But instead, you seem to think this somehow detracts from the credibility of the statistics. This shows how utterly irrational you are on this subject.
Don P. is flat wrong when he claims that older women are more likely to get abortions. The opposite is the case: Women in their twenties get 4 or 5 times as many abortions as women in their thirties. See table 4 of the CDC report that Don P. himself cited: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5109a1.htm
First, I did not claim that “older women are more likely to get abortions.” I said that one likely explanation for the finding of the Finnish study is that the average age of the women in the abortion sample was higher than the average age of women in the completed pregnancy sample.
Second, the CDC table you cite is irrelevant to that explanation, even if we assume that the breakdown of abortions by age group is similar for Finnish women and American women. The table reports total number of abortions by age group. This tells us nothing about the rate of abortion by age group, because to compute that number you would also need to know the total number of pregnancies by age group. Since that is likely to be significantly higher for younger women than older ones, the total number of abortions by age group is irrelevant.
Your posts are littered with statements that are factually incorrect. Even when you do get the facts right, you draw conclusions from those facts that they do not support. You also consistently misrepresent the statements and arguments of others.
Joe M:
Don P. — is there any evidence whatsoever for why the study found that abortion is nearly 3 times more dangerous? Why would this one study be the only one affected by age to such a huge extent when you claim that abortion is 10 times safer?
I don’t know. It doesn’t say. The most likely explanation is that it failed to control for age, pre-existing medical condition, or other likely confounding factors. Another possibility is selection bias in the samples. There are many possible explanations. The overwhelming weight of evidence from other research into the question, including the CDC’s own direct investigation of the causes of maternal deaths, is that abortion is much, much safer than completing a pregnancy.
What I love about Joe is this:
The fact that men are more likely to support abortion than women is disturbing.
[Amp posts that it’s more likely to be an equal split]
We should be concerned that men are as likely as women to support choice.
[new study conclusively proves women support abortion more frequently than men]
We should be concerned about all those selfish women and men. How horrible.
ACtually, Joe, that some studies show more men are pro-choice, others show more women are pro-choice, suggests that the numbers are roughly equal and can change from survey to survey due to random sampling effects.
Could be. But it also could be that such shifts in numbers are a result, not of random sampling effects, but of changes in the wording of the questions. Not having seen the survey results in question, I’m not sure which is more likely.
Example of how Don P. misrepresents other people:
Moreover, since you appear to believe that abortion providers themselves often fail to report abortion-related deaths, one would expect you to be glad that the CDC searches media reports and other sources of information to identify potential abortion-related deaths. But instead, you seem to think this somehow detracts from the credibility of the statistics.
I didn’t say or imply that this “detracts from the credibility” of the statistics. What I said, in as many words, is that the CDC’s sources of evidence don’t make it possible for them to determine the level of CAUSATION, which Don P. had harped upon. In other words, if causation is the issue, there is no reason to think that the CDC statistics show any more about causation than the other studies that find a much higher death rate after abortion. As I’ve said — and NO ONE even tries to dispute it — the CDC statistics most certainly do not capture nearly all the abortion-related deaths here.
Example of how Don P. tries to blow smoke by arguing over irrelevancies:
First, I did not claim that “older women are more likely to get abortions.” I said that one likely explanation for the finding of the Finnish study is that the average age of the women in the abortion sample was higher than the average age of women in the completed pregnancy sample.
Baloney. That’s really the same thing, as anyone can see. If the average age of women getting abortions is greater than the average age of women giving birth, that could only be true if older women are more likely to get abortions. There is no other way that could be true. (Think of it this way: If the pool of people who get fired are more likely to be black, that could only be because blacks are more likely to be fired. Same thing.)
Yet Don P., with absolutely no evidence, wants to pretend that we can ignore the Finland study because maybe the fact that women who had abortions died 30 times more often is because of age. Well, saying it doesn’t make it so. Don P. has no reason to say such a silly thing, other than that he really wants to believe in abortion for some reason.
In fact, according to the CDC itself, the rate of getting abortion is something like a bell curve — very young women and older women are the least likely to have abortions. It says, “Abortion ratios were highest for the youngest women (708 abortions per 1,000 live births for women aged
All right. I’m game. I dispute the statement by Joe M. that, “…the CDC statistics most certainly do not capture nearly all the abortion-related deaths here.”
Please provide me with a list of all the abortion-related deaths here in 2001 & the corresponding list that is accounted for in the CDC statistics for the same year in order to support your assertion.
Thanks in advance.
All right, all right, we GET it Joe, you have a vendetta against Don that spans several boards, enough with the rivalry shtick.
In any case you can’t win. Don has more than adequately demonstrated that your prize exhibit has far too many vague dimensions and is way too open to interpretation/distortion to say anything reliable, especially when we consider that your version of it stands in atypical opposition to several dozen widely accepted studies. More importantly, it’s one place at one juncture in history, under a very specific array of circumstances. Only your complex partisan conspiracy theories (good old imaginary abortion/breast cancer “link”) can hold it afloat.
But for the sake of argument, let’s make believe that your contention that abortion is super dangerous to women is true. In this science fiction story, what happens as medical science inevitably advances, making abortion safer than childbirth? What do you anti-choicers do without the excuse that you are supposedly looking out for women’s health?
Are you aware that as for the breast cancer link, the most that anyone on either side can say with honesty is that the studies are mixed? Some studies show a link, some don’t. There’s no use in pretending that the first group of studies don’t exist.
Joe, you said:
(Think of it this way: If the pool of people who get fired are more likely to be black, that could only be because blacks are more likely to be fired. Same thing.)
My god, are you this ignorant? Is your partisan anti-choice ravings making you blind to any semblance of logic?
Let’s say there’s a firm whose employees are 98% black. And if you take a look at the group of those fired, they are 60% black. That means a person fired is more likely to be black than not. But an individual black person would be less likely to be fired than an individual non-black. It’s called basic statistics.
Joe M. sez:
“Are you aware that as for the breast cancer link, the most that anyone on either side can say with honesty is that the studies are mixed? Some studies show a link, some don’t. There’s no use in pretending that the first group of studies don’t exist.”
Oops, Joe just tipped his hand, and it contains five aces.
The abortion/breast cancer “link” has been one of the most soundly debunked myths in recent times. To quote Gloria Feldt, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America: “The few studies cited by proponents of of the link between breast cancer and abortion have all been old, small, and flawed. Put their claims up against the conclusions of a study of 1.5 MILLION women that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1997: “Induced abortions have no overall effect on the risk of breast cancer.” And in case there is any question about the validity of this conclusion, in 2001 the prestigious British medical journal Lancet Oncology reanalyzed this study, as well as others on the subject, and concluded-again-that no link between abortion and breast cancer has been proven. Furthermore, after reviewing ALL the literature on the topic, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists concluded: “There is no evidence supporting a causal link between induced abortion and subsequent development of breast cancer.”
Later she takes on the politically motivated flip flop of the National Cancer Institute (which it later reversed again): “Some studies have reported statistically significant evidence of an increased risk of breast cancer in women who have had abortions, while others have merely suggested an increased risk,” the NCI site stated. This statement replaced the language which used to be there, which did give an accurate summary of the available literature on the subject: “The current body of scientific evidence suggests that women who have had either induced or spontaneous abortions have the same risk as other women for developing breast cancer.” The NCI made this change after being lobbied hard by anti-choice members of congress.”
But that was then, this is now. In February 2003, NCI convened the Early Reproductive Events and Breast Cancer Workshop to “provide an integrated scientific assessment of the association between reproductive events and the risk of breast cancer.” After reviewing the body of scientific literature, NCI concluded that “Induced abortion is not associated with an increase in breast cancer risk” (NCI, 2003).
But wait, there’s more! The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the World Health Organization conclude that the link if specious.
In 2004, an international collaborative analysis of data about 83,000 women with breast cancer who were involved in 53 studies that took place in countries with liberal abortion laws found that pregnancies that end in abortion do not increase a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer (Collaborative Group…2004).
And we can dig up more if necessary.
You now officially have no significant credibility. Here’s your ceremonial tinfoil hat and copy of “How Everyone Killed Kennedy.” See you at loch ness!
But wait, before the little grey aliens pack your bags and put you on that Illuminati Airlines flight, I have to ask you this hypothetical question again. Assuming your scare tactic was real, what do you do when medical science takes it away from you, depriving you of the excuse that you are supposedly looking out for women’s health?
Raznor once again joins with a response that is full of venom but totally irrelevant to the real world. He says:
My god, are you this ignorant? Is your partisan anti-choice ravings making you blind to any semblance of logic?
Let’s say there’s a firm whose employees are 98% black. And if you take a look at the group of those fired, they are 60% black. That means a person fired is more likely to be black than not. But an individual black person would be less likely to be fired than an individual non-black. It’s called basic statistics.
Irrelevant. What I meant was this: Take a firm whose employees are 60% black. But 90% of the people fired are black. More than their percentage of the population, in other words. That could only be because blacks were more likely to be fired.
So here. If 20% of women who get pregnant are over 35, but women who get are abortion are 40% over 35 (which is the only sort of thing that would cause this group to be older), then that means by definition that women over 35 must be more likely to get abortions.
That’s what Don P. was clearly trying to say — falsely, because he can’t stand to admit that there might be any piece of information that puts abortion in a bad light.
And again, I offered a perfectly good theory as to why this study MIGHT not show that abortion is more dangerous: Maybe the types of women who get abortions also make bad choices elsewhere, or lead dangerous lives, etc. Maybe this is why they die 3 times more often. But we don’t know.
Joe sez:
“And again, I offered a perfectly good theory as to why this study MIGHT not show that abortion is more dangerous: Maybe the types of women who get abortions also make bad choices elsewhere, or lead dangerous lives, etc. Maybe this is why they die 3 times more often. But we don’t know.”
Ah, so now your argument is nuanced, and you confess that there might be some critical complexities that might compromise your interpretation of this information. How noble of you to admit you might not be right, so that vulnerable women will not take your frightening pronouncements at face value even though that would serve your agenda.
Except it looks like you flip-floped. Here’s your very first post on this thread:
“Abortion safer than childbirth? Not according to this study, which puts the mortality rate from abortion at nearly 3 times higher. The statistics for the United States show abortion as much safer. But this study is a hefty reason to distrust those statistics, quite apart from the fact that abortionists here have no requirement (and certainly no incentive) to report on deaths that they cause, and the U.S. has many people who will go to court to argue that it is an unconstitutional violation of privacy to require anything of abortion clinics.”
Hmm, practically no disclaimers or nuance here, and a healthy dose of paranoia wishfully passed off as fact…
You know what this looks like Joe? It looks like you only revised your position when we started to pull it appart. I wonder what would have happened if no one had challenged your declaration?
Actually, we can find out what would have happened by following Joe to watch what he says to the next woman he talks to about abortion. I can guarantee he will only tell her the first thing he posted. He won’t tell her that his data is questionable, that there might be other explanations, that the vast majority of the scientific community is willing to stake its reputation on the absence of a link, that he is a rabid partisan posing as a reasonable advisor. No, he’ll only give her the scare tactic, and actively steer her away from information that questions it. Maybe because of him a vulnerable woman will make a decision she will regret for the rest of her life.
Such a nice guy Joe.
Nice — I volunteer a reason why abortion might be safer than the Finland study implies. My reason is far more plausible than that suggested by the Official Internet Defender of Abortion, Don P., whose speculations about age are completely ridiculous and counterintuitive. And for that, I get faulted.
Still waiting to see evidence supporting your assertion that the CDC greatly under reports abortion-related deaths here.
Thanks in advance again.
Look back at what I had to say about Maryland, and the articles I cited there. I’m not an investigative reporter, and I don’t have the time or resources to accept your little assignment. Suffice it to say, every time that an investigative reporter has sniffed around, they have found numerous deaths (i.e., of women) that were caused by abortion but that didn’t show up in the official statistics. If you find that several deaths were covered up in one state in one years — enough to raise the national figure by 33% alone — you can bet that there are more deaths elsewhere. Look, even Don P. doesn’t try to refute this evidence. He just ignores it.
Joe M.,
I read the links that you provided. The problem is that they are all from one vehemently anti-choice site & 2 of them are by Reardon who is notoriously unreliable. Have these assertions been corroborated by any issue neutral publications? Or even major media publications?
I admit that I was suspicious of your assertions from the beginning, but if I were provided with credible documentation supporting your assertion I would have no choice but to agree with you. So, if you can find a source that is neutral or, if not neutral, at least widely considered to do objective reporting I will admit that you are correct. Until then I will continue to think that this is a very strange claim. And that you are incorrect.
Joe sez:
“Nice — I volunteer a reason why abortion might be safer than the Finland study implies.”
Get my accusation straight, you only volunteered a reason when your earlier “absolute” statement started leaking credibility juice. I’ll bet the Brooklyn bridge you would never have conceded possible incorrectness if you hadn’t been challenged.
Jake Squid sez:
“… 2 of them are by Reardon who is notoriously unreliable.”
“Unreliable”!? Reardon would give his left arm to have a reputation as mild as “unreliable”! Read that earlier link I posted on his work, then do an internet search for respectable sites dealing with him. You’re very charitable Squid.
Folks might want to read my two most recent posts before continuing this thread.
Also, although I really value all your comments and want you to keep posting here, PLEASE try your best to be polite to each other. Especially try to be polite to Joe – not because Joe hasn’t been rude himself, but because he’s outnumbered on “Alas.” As I hope my two new posts show, it’s possible to refute Joe’s points without being rude to him.
One more comment on politeness (and again, I really value all your comments; please don’t feel like I’m asking you not to post here).
The point of being polite isn’t just to be polite. The point is that if there are fence-sitters on the issue (any issue) who happen to be reading this discussion, it’s usually more persuasive to be polite in how arguments are presented. So if you want to be the best possible advocate for reproductive rights, it’s better to be civil, if you can.
Not that I’m perfect; I’ve lost my temper plenty of times. Especially on abortion-related issues, I know it’s really hard to NOT get angry, because we all feel so passionately about it.
Thanks, Amp.
DRA’s comments are spurious. She says, “Get my accusation straight, you only volunteered a reason when your earlier ‘absolute’ statement started leaking credibility juice.”
Wrong. The Finland study was attacked by Don P., whose statements here are obviously unbelievable. (For the umpteenth time, he 1) tried to pretend that the Finland study’s results were due to age; 2) utterly ignored the fact that he had absolutely no reason to say this; 3) utterly ignored the fact that younger women both get more abortions (by a margin or 4 or 5) and are more likely to get abortions when pregnant.) Don P.’s attack on the Finland study, in other words, was completely out of line and absurd.
Yet I went out of my way to volunteer a reason why abortion might not be so harmful as the study might suggest. It would be nice, at the least, if DRA could at least agree with that.
Jake Squid (real name?) said, I read the links that you provided. The problem is that they are all from one vehemently anti-choice site & 2 of them are by Reardon who is notoriously unreliable. Have these assertions been corroborated by any issue neutral publications? Or even major media publications
Well, hmm. Let me guess why people who see problems with abortion might write articles about the problems they see? To discount an article just because it comes from a pro-life site is silly — maybe people are pro-life precisely because they know something you don’t.
There are dishonest pro-life people, sure, just like there are dishonest people on every side of every issue. There have been plenty of lies coming from the pro-choice side too: That Doe in Doe v. Bolton wanted an abortion, that Roe in Roe v. Wade was the victim of a rape, that 10,000 women per year were dying of illegal abortion (the plan: Lie about how dangerous illegal abortion was, but once it’s legal, lie about how safe it is), that fetuses are killed by anesthesia, that partial-birth abortions are mostly done for health reasons, etc., etc. Why pick just one side to never trust on anything?
Bottom line is that no one has any reason to doubt those articles, except you don’t agree with the author. It’s not as if you have a shred of evidence that he is making things up, or that those women didn’t exist, or that their deaths weren’t due to abortion.
I think that there are very good reasons to doubt Reardon and his source for 2 of the cases, Marx, as Amp laid out in his most recent post.
Let’s face it. The accusation is tremendously important. If the CDC is covering up deaths caused by abortion what else are they covering up? The story should be huge. But it hasn’t been covered by any major media publication. Think of how many copies a rag like Newsweek would sell with that as the cover story.
I don’t claim that there are no pro-choicers who lie. I just don’t cite them once I realize that they lie. I try to find sources other than pro-choice organizations to support my views. If I can only find sources on pro-choice sites I try to make sure that the sources for their claims are credible.
Reardon and Marx are not credible & I haven’t found a credible source that supports the assertion that the CDC systematically under-reports abortion mortality statistics.
Point me to a credible source for the claim & I am open to changing my mind. Just keep repeating that Reardon (and an anti-choice organization) said it and it serves no purpose. “Cause I (or they) said so,” is not a valid argument.
Since no one’s discussing the topic of this post; and since there are more recent posts about the topics this thread IS discussing; I’m thinking maybe I should close this thread.
Would anyone object to that? I don’t want to close the thread if anyone feels it really should be kept open.
“Wrong. The Finland study was attacked by Don P., whose statements here are obviously unbelievable. (For the umpteenth time, he 1) tried to pretend that the Finland study’s results were due to age; 2) utterly ignored the fact that he had absolutely no reason to say this; 3) utterly ignored the fact that younger women both get more abortions (by a margin or 4 or 5) and are more likely to get abortions when pregnant.) Don P.’s attack on the Finland study, in other words, was completely out of line and absurd. Yet I went out of my way to volunteer a reason why abortion might not be so harmful as the study might suggest. It would be nice, at the least, if DRA could at least agree with that.”
READ Joe, READ. It is implicit that I agreed with your one possible hypothesis the stats might not say what you want them to. In fact I think this only demonstrates that there is room for dozens of factors that make the stats innaplicable to the use you wish to put them to.
Also, READ the first thing you posted. If Don P and the others didn’t have any impact, why did you back off from that earlier statement in offering nuance?
Oops, first paragraph of my above post was a quote from Joe which I forgot to label as such.
Don’t close this thread just yet Amp, there is some unfinished business left to be adressed that might not get picked up in the other threads.
“…maybe people are pro-life precisely because they know something you don’t.”
Then maybe they should reveal this secret knowledge to me. And back it up with verifiable & reliable sources & facts.
But then again, maybe people are pro-choice precisely because they know something that you don’t.
That is an absurd statement meant to suggest that I am stupid or willfully ignorant. Which I have clearly shown that I am not by reading your sources, voicing my discomfort with them & asking for any credible corroboration.
Joe sez:
“Why pick just one side to never trust on anything?”
A lot goes into that Joe,
I guess for a start the anti-choice side has become the “boy who cried wolf” to some extent. I’ve been studying the saga of your end of the spectrum for some time now, and the sheer amount of falsehood, distortion, and plain old terrorism (the bombings, the shooting, etc) that has come from it has made me extremely wary of anything connected to it. You have established yourselves as the side that will stoop to any low in the minds of many reasonable people.
And lets face it, you have no backing from the major health organizations of the world, just isolated studies that may or may not say what you want them to, frequently produced by tunnel-visioned researchers who believed choice was wrong going into the research. For every one supposed “proof of the obvious truth” you extract from its context we can find five from unbiased sources that say the opposite. The media doesn’t even look into 9/10s of what you generate, which forces you to entertain conspiracy theories, the very bottom of crypto-intellectualism.
Then there’s motivation, both real and imagined. I mean come on, why would anyone conceal abortion deaths? For profit? Come on, abortion doctor is one of the most controversial and detested occupations in the nation, one that leads to a lifetime of looking over one’s shoulder for the bomb wielding fanatic. If anyone had the power to conceal and supress this kind of statistic, I think they would be using this talents in more low-profile scams don’t you? And how can a succession of anti-choice administrations overlook such a conspiracy?
Then there’s the insulting duplicity. I strongly suspect that the vast majority of anti-choicers only put on this charade about caring for women’s well being as a means to an end. Historically speaking, the whole anti-choice message of “supporting women” only started to appear after a decade of “abortion is sin” campaigning proved inneffective on its own. Similarly, many of you pretend to be reasonable and polite while concealing absolute contempt for the “baby murdering ghouls,” you’d rather jail than talk to. We can sense this thinly veiled contempt, and it riles us up. You don’t want debate because there can be no compromise. Your civility is an advertising pitch to fence sitters, nothing more.
Wow, my last post was typo city. Sorry folks, I just keep getting more riled up than I should.
Amp –we’re still talking about the safety of abortion, right? That’s what the original post was about.
Jake said: Let’s face it. The accusation is tremendously important. If the CDC is covering up deaths caused by abortion what else are they covering up? The story should be huge.
No, I didn’t say that the CDC is covering anything up. Just that they do not have perfect knowledge, and they don’t go around looking into every possible cause of death for every woman of childbearing age. It’s perfectly imaginable that women might die of internal bleeding or whatever, without abortion clinics being so kind as to volunteer the true reason. And it’s perfectly imaginable that doctors might turn a blind eye to in such circumstances. Just as do the police; good cops try to ignore the bad cops in their midst. No one wants to be the snitch who rats on one’s colleagues.
All this is just realistic and true. It’s the Don P.s and the DRAs of the world who think that everyone is so good and honest that anyone who committed misconduct in an abortion would volunteer that information to the authorities, and that anyone who works in the health industry would be happy to be the whistleblower who sends their colleagues to jail. Just on abortion, mind you; I doubt if they are that crazily optimistic about any other type of conduct.
I asked this earlier, and no one has an answer: If abortion clinics are so safe, how come they squeal like stuck pigs every time some state government tries to make them obey health/safety regulations just like any other health clinic? No one really likes regulation, I guess, but how come it’s only abortion clinics that go to court to stop it?
Oh, right, I forgot: The subject is abortion, and therefore anyone who does something in favor of abortion just has to be as pure as the driven snow. There’s no way that any person who favors abortion could ever do anything wrong. So if abortion clinics oppose health regulation, it’s only because they are pure-hearted and altruistic on the issue; they just don’t want all those poor women to have to pay a few extra dollars. Why it would be so expensive! The clinics themselves would be just fine with any health regulation, but it’s all for the women’s sake. Right.
Joe sez
“I asked this earlier, and no one has an answer: If abortion clinics are so safe, how come they squeal like stuck pigs every time some state government tries to make them obey health/safety regulations just like any other health clinic? No one really likes regulation, I guess, but how come it’s only abortion clinics that go to court to stop it?”
Well off the cuff I’d say such hypothetical clinics are afraid of the slippery choice regulation slope. They know that if they give an inch, lawmakers and politicians who think like you Joe will take a mile. Perhaps there are regulations being neglected, but where the real solution would be to revise and tighten them up, people like you are just itching to shut them down completely at the slightest hint of imperfection. Imagine if hospitals had to function under that threat.
All the above assumes of course that you are right. How ’bout you give us the long list of specific court cases I know you have ready to copy and paste (and I do believe these court cases exist by the way, I just don’t think they’ll say what you think they do)?
Joe wrote: No, I didn’t say that the CDC is covering anything up.
Yes, but Kevin Sherlock – who is the main “expert” cited in the article you linked to – does say the CDC is covering things up. :-P
By the way, I’d appreciate it if you’d comment on my two newest posts, since they were responses to you. If you get the chance.
I believe the manner in which the CDC investigates possible abortion related deaths is satisfactory. They don’t rely only on reporting by clinics. They also check a number of other sources as has been quoted several times. Do you think that the number of abortions per year that they report is too low as well?
As to the tangent of, “If abortion clinics are so safe, how come they squeal like stuck pigs every time some state government tries to make them obey health/safety regulations just like any other health clinic?”… I am not aware of this. Can you point me to some info that shows that they are different in their response to regulation than other facets of the medical industry? And it would be really, really helpful if at least some of the info comes from sources that are not anti-choice. But I’m open to the possibility that they do address regulation differently. And then I’ll look to see if I can find an answer to your question.
D’oh, all that huffing and puffing earlier and I didn’t even mention what had made me mad!
Joe sez:
“…that 10,000 women per year were dying of illegal abortion (the plan: Lie about how dangerous illegal abortion was, but once it’s legal, lie about how safe it is)…”
Where to begin…I mean, it was already pretty smugly sexist of you to dismiss the hardships of pregnancy given that you would never have to endure it, but for you to disrespect the women who died by pretending they didn’t…to compare a procedure performed openly in sterilized clinics by qualified professionals using real medical equipment to the hazards of lonely secrecy, motel rooms, charlatans, and kitchen utensils (not to mention cruder methods)…this is exactly the kind of low I was talking about.
There are many official refutations of your…error, but I’ll start by using this one:
Medical and Social Health Benefits Since Abortion Was Made Legal in the U.S.
Despite the claims of anti-choice ideologues, many demonstrable health benefits – physical, emotional, and social – have accrued to Americans since 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in its decision, Roe v. Wade.
The most important benefit, of course, has been the end of an era that supported the proliferation of “back alley butchers” who were motivated by money alone and performed unsafe, medically incompetent abortions that left many women dead or injured. And compassionate mainstream physicians, who provided clandestine, medically safe abortions, who did not exploit their patients, and who were motivated by principle rather than by financial concerns, no longer had to fear imprisonment and the loss of their medical licenses for performing abortions after Roe was decided (Joffe, 1995). Today, as the 30th anniversary of this landmark decision approaches, it is important to remember how far Roe has brought us as a society and to note some of the many benefits that resulted from the legalization of abortion.
Roe v. Wade did not “invent” abortion.
• Estimates of the annual number of illegal abortions in the 1950s and 1960s range from 200,000 to 1.2 million (Tietze & Henshaw, 1986).
• In 1969, one year before New York State legalized abortion, complications from abortions accounted for 23 percent of all pregnancy-related admissions to municipal hospitals in New York City (Institute of Medicine, 1975).
• After California liberalized its abortion law in 1967, the number of admissions for infection resulting from illegal abortion at Los Angeles County/University of Southern California Medical Center fell by almost 75 percent (Seward, et al., 1973).
Since Roe v. Wade, women have obtained abortions earlier in pregnancy when health risks to them are at the lowest.
• In 1973, only 36 percent of abortions were performed at or before eight weeks of pregnancy (CDC, 1999).
• Today, 88 percent of all legal abortions are performed within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, and 56 percent take place within the first eight weeks of pregnancy. Only 1.4 percent occur after 20 weeks (CDC, 2002).
Deaths from abortion declined dramatically during the past two decades.
• In 1965, when abortion was still illegal nationwide except in cases of life endangerment, at least 193 women died from illegal abortions, and illegal abortion accounted for nearly 17 percent of all deaths due to pregnancy and childbirth in that year (NCHS, 1967).
• In 1973, the risk of dying from an abortion was 3.4 deaths per 100,000 legal abortions. This rate fell to 1.3 by 1977 (Gold, 1990). Today, abortion is one of the most commonly performed clinical procedures, and the current death rate from abortion at all stages of gestation is 0.6 per 100,000 procedures. This is eleven times safer than carrying a pregnancy to term and nearly twice as safe as a penicillin injection (Paul et al., 1999; Gold, 1990).
Medically safe, legal abortion has had a profound impact on American women and their families.
• Couples at risk of having children affected with severe and often fatal genetic disorders have been willing to conceive because of the availability of amniocentesis and safe, legal abortion (Milunsky, 1989).
• Following the legalization of abortion, the largest decline in birthrates were seen among women for whom the health and social consequences of unintended childbearing are the greatest – women over 35, teenagers, and unmarried women (Levine, et al., 1999). Today, thirty-one percent of the abortions in the U.S. are provided to women over 35 and to teenagers (Jones, et al., 2002).
• More than half of all abortions are performed at or before eight weeks of pregnancy, when the procedure is the safest – 0.2 deaths per 100,000 procedures (Gold, 1990).
• Half of all pregnancies in the U.S. each year are unintended, and about half of these are terminated by medically safe, legal abortions. In 2000, 1.31 million abortions took place, down from an estimated 1.61 million in 1990. From 1973 through 1997, more than 35 million legal abortions occurred (AGI, 2002; Henshaw, 1998).
• If safe, legal abortion were not available, more women would experience unwanted childbearing, and unwanted childbearing affects the entire family. Mothers with unwanted births suffer from higher levels of depression and lower levels of happiness than mothers without unwanted births. They spank and slap their children more often than other mothers, and spend less leisure time outside the home with their children. Lower-quality mother/child relationships are not limited to the child born as a result of the unwanted pregnancy – all the children in the family suffer (Barber, et al., 1999).
• The legalization of abortion has also improved the average living conditions of children. Because of increased access to abortion, cohorts born after 1973 are less likely than those born before 1973 to be in single-parent households, to live in poverty, and to receive welfare. They also experience lower infant mortality rates (Gruber, et al., 1999).
The health and well-being of women and children suffer the most in states that have the most stringent anti-abortion laws.
• Compared to pro-choice states, anti-abortion states spend far less money per child on a range of services such as foster care, education, welfare, and the adoption of children who have physical and mental disabilities (Schroedel, 2000).
• The states that have the strongest anti-abortion laws are also the states in which women suffer from lower levels of education and higher levels of poverty, as well as from a lower ratio of female-to-male earnings. They also have a lower percentage of women in the legislature and fewer mandates requiring insurance providers to cover minimum hospital stays after childbirth (Schroedel, 2000).
The legalization of abortion was a significant factor in the dramatic drop in crime in the U.S. in the 1990s.
• Previous research has established that a strong link exists between an adverse family environment and future criminal behavior; that maternal rejection is counted among the various qualitative aspects of parenting that provide the most accurate predictors of juvenile delinquency; and that having been born of a pregnancy that was unwanted by one’s mother is a circumstance that increases a person’s risk of committing violent crime (David, et al., 1988; Donohue & Levitt, 2001).
• At least one study reported that legalized abortion can account for about half the observed decline in crime in the U.S. since 1991. Homicide rates have fallen more than 40 percent, and violent crime and property crime have fallen more than 30 percent.
• The timing of the drop in crime corresponds to the period in which the first generation of children born after the legalization of abortion are reaching what are considered to be the peak ages of criminal activity (18-24 years old). Furthermore, states that legalized abortion before the rest of the nation did so were also the first states to experience decreasing crime rates.
• States with high abortion rates have seen a greater fall in crime since 1985, even after taking into account other factors that would be expected to influence the crime rate. Furthermore, these declines in crime rates in high-abortion states are disproportionately concentrated among those under the age of 25. (Donohue & Levitt, 2001)
In sum, no amount of controversy over abortion can negate the evidence that American women, men, children, and families have reaped great benefits to their physical, mental, and social health from the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic decision in Roe v. Wade. Any erosion of a woman’s right and access to medically safe, legal abortion jeopardizes the health of women, their families, and the nation as a whole.
Cited References
AGI – Alan Guttmacher Institute. (2002, accessed October 16). Facts in Brief: Induced Abortion [Online]. http://www.agi-usa.org/pubs/fb_induced_abortion.html
Barber, Jennifer S., et al. (1999). “Unwanted Childbearing, Health, and Mother-Child Relationships.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 40 (September), 231-257.
CDC – Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (1999, July 30). “Abortion Surveillance – United States, 1996.” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 48(SS-4).
_____. (2002, June 7). “Abortion Surveillance – United States, 1998.” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 51 (SS-3).
David, Henry P., et al. (1988). Born Unwanted. New York: Springer Publishing Company.
Donohue, John J. III, & Steven D. Levitt. (2001). “The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 66(2), 379-420.
Gold, Rachel Benson. (1990). Abortion and Women’s Health: A Turning Point for America? New York: The Alan Guttmacher Institute.
Gruber, Jonathan, et al. (1999). “Abortion Legalization and Child Living Circumstances: Who Is the “Marginal Child”?” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 114(1), 263-291.
Henshaw, Stanley. (1998). “Abortion Incidence and Services in the United States, 1995-1996.” Family Planning Perspectives, 30(6), 263-270 & 287.
Institute of Medicine. (1975). Legalized Abortion and the Public Health. Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences.
Joffe, Carole. (1995). Doctors of Conscience: The Struggle to Provide Abortion Before and After Roe v. Wade. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Jones, Rachel, et al. (2002). “Patterns in the Socioeconomic Characteristics of Women Obtaining Abortions in 2000-2001.” Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 34(5), 226-235.
Levine, Phillip, et al. (1999). “Roe v Wade and American Fertility.” American Journal of Public Health, 89(2), 199-203.
Milunsky, Aubrey. (1989). Choices, Not Chances: An Essential Guide to Your Heredity and Health. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company.
NCHS – National Center for Health Statistics. (1967). Vital Statistics of the United States, 1965: Vol. 11 – Mortality, Part A. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO).
Paul, Maureen, et al. (1999). A Clinician’s Guide to Medical and Surgical Abortion. New York: Churchill Livingstone.
Schroedel, Jean Reith. (2000). Is the Fetus a Person? A Comparison of Policies across the Fifty States. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Seward, Paul N., et al. (1973). “The Effect of Legal Abortion on the Rate of Septic Abortion at a Large County Hospital.” American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 115(335), 353-338.
Tietze, Christopher & Stanley K. Henshaw. (1986). Induced Abortion: A World Review, 1986. New York: The Alan Guttmacher
And since the above offers a fairly America-centrist take:
Unsafe Abortion Around the World
Of the 46 million abortions that occur each year, roughly 20 million are performed under unsafe conditions because of poorly trained providers, unsanitary circumstances, and crude and dangerous methods of self-inducement. Each year, an estimated 80,000 women die from complications of unsafe abortion, accounting for at least 13 percent of global maternal mortality. The vast majority of these deaths are preventable. Unsafe abortion also causes long-term health problems that range from chronic pelvic pain to infertility (AGI, 1997; WHO, 1998a; AGI, 1999).
Women often choose abortion when faced with an unwanted pregnancy. Unplanned and unwanted pregnancies are a fact of life. They occur for a number of reasons: failure to use contraception; lack of access to family planning information and supplies because of political or economic circumstances; pressure from a sexual partner to not use contraceptives; contraceptive failure; and changes in circumstances that make a wanted pregnancy unwanted, such as abandonment, health problems, and financial difficulties (WHO, 1998a). In every society, across all religious, cultural, and economic differences, women face unplanned pregnancies as a result of trying to negotiate the difficult balance between having sexual relations and choosing whether and when to have children.
As long as there are unplanned and unwanted pregnancies, abortion will be a fact of life. When a woman decides to end an unwanted pregnancy, she will often go to extreme lengths to do so, regardless of whether the procedure is safe or legal. The rates at which women seek abortion are strikingly similar for women living in developed and developing countries (AGI, 1999). However, the chances of receiving a safe abortion vary widely and are determined by a variety of socioeconomic, legal, and cultural factors.
The Scope of Unplanned Pregnancy
Globally, nearly four in 10 pregnancies are unplanned (AGI, 1999). Many unplanned pregnancies result from the nonuse of contraceptives or from contraceptive failure. Couples may not use contraceptives because of traditional cultural beliefs and/or stigmas associated with particular methods. The World Health Organization estimates that between eight and 30 million unplanned pregnancies are the result of inconsistent or incorrect use of contraceptive methods, or from method-related failure (WHO, 1998a).
The Unmet Need for Family Planning
The sheer number of unplanned pregnancies — about 80 million each year — illustrates the enormous unmet need for family planning. Currently, 350 million couples around the world lack access to information about contraception and to modern methods of family planning. Between 120 and 150 million married women want to limit or space their pregnancies but lack the information and services to do so (WHO, 1998a; AGI, 1999).
How Many Women Undergo Abortion?
Each year, 46 million women around the world undergo abortion. Twenty-six million women who undergo abortion do so in countries with liberal abortion laws. The remaining 20 million undergo abortion in countries where abortion is either restricted or illegal (AGI, 1999).
Why Do Women Choose Abortion?
The reasons that women cite for choosing abortion are broadly similar throughout the world: Women may want to stop or postpone childbearing. They may have socioeconomic reasons for ending a pregnancy — they may not be able to afford the costs of having and raising a child, or they may want to continue pursuing their educational and career goals. Others may choose abortion because of relationship problems or because their pregnancy is the result of rape or incest. And still others may cite age or health reasons — they feel too young or too old to have a baby or that pregnancy will affect their own or their baby’s health (AGI, 1999).
Factors that Determine the Safety of Abortion
When performed by trained providers in sanitary conditions, abortion is one of the safest medical procedures. But for many women, abortion can be cost-prohibitive, and trained providers can be hard to come by. Because of these limitations, a woman may delay getting an abortion until later in her pregnancy when the risk of complications rises.
In developing countries, regardless of the legal status of abortion, poor women in rural areas are at most risk of undergoing unsafe abortion. Trained providers may not be available or affordable. Women might choose to go to traditional practitioners or to self-induce abortion. Many of the methods used are based on cultural or traditional practices — prolonged, hard massage of the abdomen; repeated blows to the abdomen; insertion of stones, twigs, or sharp wire objects into the vagina and cervix; drinking or flushing the vagina with caustic substances, for example (AGI, 1999).
The Scope of Unsafe Abortion
Every day, 55,000 unsafe abortions take place — 95 percent of them in developing countries (WHO, 1998a). Worldwide, the maternal mortality rate due to unsafe abortion is 0.4 per 100 unsafe abortions. The highest rates occur in the developing world — 0.6 in Africa and 0.4 in Asia ( Mundigo & Indriso, 1999). In the developed world, the risk of dying from an unsafe abortion is one in 3,700 procedures (Mundigo & Indriso, 1999), but in Europe (primarily Eastern Europe) the risk is one in 1,900 procedures. In Latin America and the Caribbean the risk is one in 900 procedures, in Asia (excluding Japan, Australia, and New Zealand) it is one in 250, and in Africa it is one in 150 (WHO, 1998a; WHO, 1998b).
Another way to look at this disparity is to note overall death rates from abortion (whether safe or unsafe): in the developed world there are 0.2-1.2 maternal deaths per 100,000 abortions, whereas in the developing world (excluding China) the rate soars to 330 maternal deaths per 100,000 abortions. In Africa the rate is 680 per 100,000 abortions, in South and Southeast Asia it is 283, and in Latin America it is 119 per 100,000 abortions (AGI, 1999).
Because of anti-abortion social stigma and/or poverty, in the developing world, it is unsafe abortion, either self-induced or performed by an unqualified abortionist, that non-married adolescent girls most often seek — regardless of whether or not abortion is legal in their country. Because adolescents often seek unsafe abortions and because they tend to wait to seek abortion later than do older women, they are at greater risk of complications. Teenagers comprise a significant proportion of victims of unsafe abortion. A study done in Tanzania found that nearly a third of the victims of unsafe abortion were teenagers, of whom almost half were 17 years of age or younger; about one in every four were students in primary or secondary school. A safe procedure is very expensive in Tanzania and, therefore, unaffordable for most non-married young women there (Mundigo & Indriso, 1999; Mpangile et al., 1999).
Restrictive legislation is associated with higher rates of unsafe abortion and correspondingly high mortality. In Romania, for example, abortion-related deaths increased sharply when the law became very restrictive in 1966 and fell after 1990 with a return to the less restrictive legislation (WHO, 1998a).
Complications Resulting from Unsafe Abortion
The World Health Organization estimates that between 10 and 50 percent of women who undergo unsafe abortion have complications (WHO, 1998a). The most common complications are incomplete abortion, tears in the cervix, perforation of the uterus, fever, infection, septic shock, and severe hemorrhaging. It is estimated that 80,000 women die each year due to complications from unsafe abortion (WHO, 1998a). However, the actual number of deaths may be much greater because women who die outside of hospitals or in emergency wards may not have autopsies performed, and may not be identified as victims of unsafe abortion. (Mpangile, et. al, 1999; Paxman, et. al, 1993). Other serious long-term health consequences faced by women who have unsafe abortions include chronic pelvic pain, problems getting and staying pregnant, infertility, tubal blockage, and ectopic pregnancy (AbouZahr & Åhman, 1998).
Treatment of Complications from Unsafe Abortion
Whether a woman receives appropriate medical care for complications resulting from unsafe abortion depends largely on the proximity and availability of emergency facilities and trained health providers. Social, cultural, legal, and economic barriers may prevent women from accessing treatment as well. While most urban centers have hospitals, many poor women in rural areas simply don’t have access to medical treatment when faced with complications. Treatment can be costly as it may require hospitalization, staff time, antibiotics, and blood transfusions.
How to Prevent Unsafe Abortion?
At the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), the world’s nations agreed that unsafe abortion is a major public health concern, and that governments should work to eliminate unsafe abortion and make abortion safer in countries where it is legal (UN, 1994; WHO, 1998a). Eliminating unsafe abortion requires an integrated, comprehensive approach involving health workers, policymakers, and advocates. Societies must
ensure high-quality, compassionate treatment for complications resulting from unsafe abortion that includes post-abortion and family planning counseling
provide universal access to family planning
reform restrictive laws and policies that hinder the availability of safe services and trained providers
ensure safe abortion services
Cited References
AGI – Alan Guttmacher Institute. (1999, accessed 2000, February 1). Facts in Brief: Teen Sex and Pregnancy, 1999 [Online].
http://www.agi-usa.org/pubs/fb_teen_sex.html.
AbouZahr, Carla & Elizabeth Åhman. (1998). “Unsafe Abortion and Ectopic Pregnancy.” Pp. 267-296 in Christopher J.L. Murray & Alan D. Lopez, eds., Health Dimensions of Sex and Reproduction: The Global Burden of Sexually Transmitted Diseases, HIV, Maternal Conditions, Perinatal Disorders, and Congenital Anomalies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard School of Public Health on behalf of the World Health Organization and the World Bank.
AGI — Alan Guttmacher Institute. (1997). Issues in Brief: The Role of Contraception in Reducing Abortion. New York: Alan Guttmacher Institute.
_____. (1999). Sharing Responsibility: Women, Society, and Abortion Worldwide. New York: Alan Guttmacher Institute.
Mpangile, G.S., et al. (1999). “Induced Abortion in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: The Plight of Adolescents.” In Axel I. Mundigo & Cynthia Indriso, eds., Abortion in the Developing World. London, England: Zed Books.
Mundrigo, Axel I. & Cynthia Indriso, eds. (1999). Abortion in the Developing World. London, England: Zed Books.
Paxman, John, et al. (1993). “The Clandestine Epidemic: The Practice of Unsafe Abortion in Latin America.” Studies in Family Planning, 24, 205-224
UN — United Nations. (1994). Report of the International Conference on Population and Development (Cairo, 5-13 September 1994).
WHO — World Health Organization. (1998a, accessed 2000, June 16). World Health Day/Safe Motherhood, 7 April 1998: Address Unsafe Abortion (WHD 98.10) [Online].
http://www.who.int/archives/whday/en/pages1998/whd98_10.html
_____. (1998b, accessed 2000, June 16). Safe Motherhood Fact Sheet: Unsafe Abortion [Online].
http://www.safemotherhood.org/facts_and_figures/unsafe_abortion_fact.htm
Amp — I’m not sure what you said that I should respond to. Indeed, I thought you were deliberately directing comments at other people. Care to elaborate?
DRA: In saying that pro-abortion types lied about how many women died from illegal abortions here, I was thinking primarily of Bernard Nathanson, who co-founded NARAL and did thousands of abortions himself:
We aroused enough sympathy to sell our program of permissive abortion by fabricating the number of illegal abortions done annually in the U.S. The actual figure was approaching 100,000 but the figure we gave to the media repeatedly was 1,000,000. Repeating the big lie often enough convinces the public. The number of women dying from illegal abortions was around 200-250 annually. The figure we constantly fed to the media was 10,000. These false figures took root in the consciousness of Americans, convincing many that we needed to
crack the abortion law.
Of course, he ultimately became pro-life, and that seems to equal untrustworthiness in certain people’s minds (people who never stop to think that maybe he did a change of heart precisely because he had good reasons). But he’s talking about the time when he was pro-choice, so maybe he’s telling the truth after all. When someone changes their mind, it’s so confusing to know whether anything they say thereafter is automatically a lie.
On abortion clinic regulations: This is common knowledge. For some info, you can read pro-choicers’ complaints about various state regulations in Arizona, Texas, South Carolina, and many more. Just click on the state’s link to see what regulations pro-choicers are complaining about in each state.
Note that in most states that have any sort of regulation at all, there at least one court case where the abortion clinics filed a lawsuit saying that they shouldn’t have to obey health or licensing regulations. The observant person will ask: Why? What are they so afraid of?
Interesting cut-and-paste, DRA. Surprising that anyone cites the Donohue/Levitt study favorably. I thought that pro-life people didn’t like it because it made abortion look beneficial, and pro-choice people didn’t like it because it came too close to saying, “Gee, if only we could kill off enough black people while they aren’t born yet, we’d make some progress on crime.” But I was wrong; apparently pro-choice people are citing that study after all.
Joe sez
“Of course, he ultimately became pro-life, and that seems to equal untrustworthiness in certain people’s minds (people who never stop to think that maybe he did a change of heart precisely because he had good reasons). But he’s talking about the time when he was pro-choice, so maybe he’s telling the truth after all. When someone changes their mind, it’s so confusing to know whether anything they say thereafter is automatically a lie.”
To be more precise, he became a religious anti-choicer, a paradigm shift that immediately recasts his world view in stark good vs. evil terms. As he would now be convinced he had lived his life aiding and abetting a “sin” he is especially likely to distort his past to make his salvation that much more “heroic”. Remember, no tactic is too low when you’re trying to “save souls.”
In fact, that’s the argument of the bombers…
“On abortion clinic regulations: This is common knowledge. For some info, you can read pro-choicers’ complaints about various state regulations in Arizona, Texas, South Carolina, and many more. Just click on the state’s link to see what regulations pro-choicers are complaining about in each state.”
Ok, I’ve read those, and the problem is…?
Joe sez:
“Interesting cut-and-paste, DRA.”
Thanks. I said to myself, “why should Joe and Annie have all the fun flooding the place with statistics? Why, that makes it look as though they are the only ones with arguments.”
Joe sez:
“Surprising that anyone cites the Donohue/Levitt study favorably. I thought that pro-life people didn’t like it because it made abortion look beneficial, and pro-choice people didn’t like it because it came too close to saying, “Gee, if only we could kill off enough black people while they aren’t born yet, we’d make some progress on crime.”
Donohue and Levitt aren’t responsible for the fact that through no fault of their own the African American community has been pushed into such dire social circumstances by a history of unfair white exploitation that crime is abnormally high in their population. Donohue and Levitt simply confirmed the common sensical notion that children who grow up in poverty and with a lack of opportunity have few options, and are unfortunately more likely to turn to crime. This sorry state of affairs will dissapear once African Americans are allowed full access to American prosperity, and one good way of helping this process is to make sure African American women can plan their families and futures.
I wouldn’t try playing the race card anyway if I were you Joe. The traditional base of support for anti-choice policies is not known for its universal racial sensitivity. In fact, there’s a pretty hefty contingent of neo-nazi types in your camp who hate abortion because they fear that white women will stop reproducing enough to keep up with Hispanics and African Americans.
OK, I’ve read the links on rules abortion clinics are subjected to that other medical facilities are not in AZ, TX & SC. What is your problem with their challenge of these? Other than the bit in AZ about clinics needing to have ultrasound equipment if they perform abortions after 12 wks (which I’m not sure of one way or the other), it seems unfair to me that ONLY abortion clinics are subjected to these rules. It also seems to discourage doctors from performing abortions by making them register as an abortion clinic (even if that is not their main function) at such low numbers of procedures.
But none of these seem to be rules that apply to all medical facilities in those states or that abortion providers are trying to hide from something by objecting to said rules. I mean, what do you think that they’re hiding when they protest that out of all medical facilities in the state ONLY abortion clinics must follow this rule: “All outside areas, grounds and/or adjacent buildings shall be kept free of rubbish, grass, and weeds…;” ?
What are you seeing that I don’t see here?
Oh, and while I’m at it, are you really in a good position to throw accusations of covert racism when you cite the work of father Paul Marx?
DRA says: I wouldn’t try playing the race card anyway if I were you Joe. The traditional base of support for anti-choice policies is not known for its universal racial sensitivity. In fact, there’s a pretty hefty contingent of neo-nazi types in your camp who hate abortion because they fear that white women will stop reproducing enough to keep up with Hispanics and African Americans.
Hefty contingent? That’s absurd. And about the notion of a “traditional base” — how about the well-known racist beliefs and associations of Margaret Sanger, who founded Planned Parenthood? It’s no coincidence that people who don’t like minorities have found that it is oh-so-convenient to push methods of reducing the population of those groups.
I think I should suggest to Amp that he close this comments thread and try to move it to the other two posts Amp did. I don’t think there’s any progress to be made on the tangent debates going on here.