Those gazillion illegal abortions
The Guttmacher Institute states up to 1.2 million illegal abortions were committed a year in the U.S. before abortion were legalized.
This was demonstrated to be a wildly inflated number when about the same number of abortions went on to be committed legally every year. Logic says that with the ease of finding legal abortionists and fear removed, that figure should have at least doubled, if not tripled or quadrupled, or maybe more.
Well, abortion proponents decided to stick with the 1 million figure when pushing legalized abortion in Mexico City earlier this year. If it worked once, they thought, it could work again. And it did. They were successful.
But Newsbusters has busted the abortion embellishers and their willing accomplice, the Los Angeles Times….
Staffer Hector Tobar has been covering the developments in Mexico for the Times. Back in March of this year, before the legalization, Tobar reported a claim from abortion activists that “about 1 million [largely illegal] abortions are performed in Mexico each year.” In April, a Times editorial echoed the line: “It’s estimated that up to 1 million Mexican women seek abortions every year.”
Yet on Saturday (11/3/07), Tobar reported that in the first six months since abortion was legalized, “more than 3,400 women have received abortions at 14 of the capital’s public hospitals.”
Let’s do some math. The 3,400 number covers the first six months since legalization. At this pace, Mexico City’s public hospitals will perform about 7,000 abortions in one year’s time.
Seven thousand is 0.7% of one million. Tobar and the Times apparently want us to believe that one million women a year used to seek out dangerous, costly, and (almost entirely) illegal abortions, yet now less than one percent of that number will have a “safe,” legal, and free abortion over the same period of time in the capital’s public hospitals?
Excllent sleuthing, Newsbusters. And once again we catch the abortion industry lying.
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
I saw that article too. The lies of the pro-aborts are so telling. They can’t be honest about their actual position (death to fetuses up to the moment of birth for any reason) and they can’t be honest in their reasoning (fetal development, statistics, etc.)
“Let’s do some math.”
Woo hoo!
Bobby, let the count down begin…fatherhood awaits!
Indeed! She’s due today! But alas, I think she’ll be overdue…
I think so too.
Yes, didn’t you hear? This is a new math being used…it’s called “Aurora math” (I believe it’s the same math PP uses, too!) I think I’m going to start using it to calcualate my payroll!!!
I call that “junk math,” Laura.
Speaking of math and those who do it for fun and profit.
Patrick Carroll, who did the stats for the new breast cancer rate study, has worked for different companies as a certifying actuary for the pension plans of different companies. His name is listed as such on different annual reports of corporations. His PAPRI may be his independent consulting firm. He has also contributed his opinions to the UK gov’t regarding pension plan regulations, as evidenced by at least one gov’t document.
At it again…
“We persuaded the media that the cause of permissive abortion was a liberal enlightened, sophisticated one. Knowing that if a true poll were taken, we would be soundly defeated, we simply fabricated the results of fictional polls. We announced to the media that we had taken polls and that 60% of Americans were in favor of permissive abortion. This is the tactic of the self-fulfilling lie. Few people care to be in the minority.
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 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. Another myth we fed to the public through the media was that legalizing abortion would only mean that the abortions taking place illegally would then be done legally. In fact, of course, abortion is now being used as a primary method of birth control in the U.S. and the annual number of abortions has increased by 1500% since legalization.” — Dr. Bernard Nathanson, co-founder of NARAL and former abortionist, long since turned pro-life.
Another constant lie is the myth that most illegal abortions were self-induced with coathangers, knitting needles, etc. Some were, and some still are; I know of one woman, a medical student, who died from an illegal abortion induced by her boyfriend and fellow med student. Shades of Gerri Santoro…only she didn’t hemorrhage to death; the proceedings didn’t get that far, since she died before the actual abortion got underway from misapplied anesthesia.
But the fact is that most illegal pre-Roe abortions were done in doctor’s offices by certified physicians, using many of the same techniques they still use, only they probably were safer then, since the abortionists had to be on their toes lest a botch job lead to their doing jail time, etc. Now they can get away with murder, and do…only many more of them now than then.
What credulity to think that the inherrent dangers of such barbarity can be reduced by the stroke of a judge’s pen!
Thanks for the quote of the day, Jill.
I have long posited that one of the fundamental flaws of the feminazi movement (as opposed to the “mother earth”/founding feminists) was confusing a health aversion to diabolical men with an arguably unhealth diabolical aversion to men…This is good! May the trend spread; There are dysfunctional nuclear families, but Big Brother at “his” best is a lousy substitute for the traditional family at its best!
Bobby,
“junk math”, “Aurora math”, “PP math” – it’s all the same!!! sad…so very sad!
also, God bless you, your wife & your bundle of blessings!…I’ll be praying for all of you!!!
Hey, Jill,
Your poll is like Sophie’s Choice.
Sick, sick, sick.
The little nay-saying gremlins are at it again. It is so predictable.
JTM –
1. Can you provide me more information on the woman who let her med-student boyfriend do the abortion on her? Since he was using some sort of anesthesia I’m assuming she’s not Daisy, who let her boyfriend try to abort her with a piece of aquarium tubing.
2. Here are the results of some of those illegal abortions performed by doctors. Strange, but when there is ink in a law book that says, “Don’t do abortions or we’ll arrest you,” and a woman goes to a doctor and he kills her, the abortion lobby is outraged and can’t say enough to condemn that line of ink in the law book for killing that hapless woman. But if you draw a line through that sentence, then there is no longer any outrage if the same doctor kills a woman doing the same thing he’d been doing before. What is it about that ink?
I love it when RTLs make this argument: Let’s criminalize abortion because doctors will do it anyway!
I don’t mean to dispute that the estimate of one million illegal abortions in Mexico may be greatly inflated. There’s no really good way to track illegal abortions; data are hard to get because they’re illegal. You can make estimates based on how many women come into ERs with foreign objects inserted into the cervical os but those are largely guesswork.
And now with methotrexate, misoprostol, and mifepristone (“the three ms”) even illegal abortions are becoming safer than they used to be.
But the overall argument: We should criminalize abortion and create a black market because black markets in the past have been less lethal than alleged, is goofy.
It’s saying: “Let’s pass a law because we know it won’t be enforced”. It’s self-contradictory.
SoMG, the idea is that you criminalize it so that fewer people do it.
Saying, “Gosh! What a wonderful, liberating thing abortion is! Let’s legalize it and subsidize it and most of all, stop penalizing the aboritonists who kill their patients!” isn’t going to reduce abortion or the harm it does to women.
You might as well propose to reduce drunk driving fatalities by setting up legal drive-through bars and selling hiballs in sippy cups so people can drink them while driving without risking a spill.
The legal abortion rate certainly indicates a low demand.
Legalization in spite of low demand will encourage the practice of abortion.
More people will feel justified in pressuring women into abortion since it is legal and free.
As for safety, those of you who support legal abortion please raise your hand if you would feel safe having a legal abortion in Mexico.
The legal abortion rate certainly indicates a low demand.
Legalization in spite of low demand will encourage the practice of abortion.
More people will feel justified in pressuring women into abortion since it is legal and free.
As for safety, those of you who support legal abortion please raise your hand if you would feel safe having a legal abortion in Mexico.
Posted by: hippie at November 8, 2007 11:48 PM
……………………………
My goodness! What a biggot you are. Do you fantasize that Mexican doctors recieve their training and degrees at your local Wal-Mart?
I’d feel perfectly safe having an abortion in any country performed by a qualified practioner. Why do you feel that a Mexican doctor would be less capable?
Worldwide, laws against abortion do not prevent abortions.
For instance, in South America, where abortion is mostly illegal, there were (estimated) 33 abortions per thousand fertile women in 2005, but in North America, where abortion is mostly legal, there were only 24 abortions per thousand fertile women.
Laws against abortion accomplish only one thing: they make abortions more dangerous.
Christina, maternal death from legal abortion occurs less than once per hundred thousand abortions. That’s safer than injecting penicillin into a patient.
In Russia they’ve lowered their abortion rate impressively. How? By contracepting.
Somg,
you wrote,
And now with methotrexate, misoprostol, and mifepristone (“the three ms”) even illegal abortions are becoming safer than they used to be.
Posted by: SoMG at November 8, 2007 10:53 PM
The FDA specifically noted in its testing of medical abortions that it was reluctant to approve it because it is not as safe nor as effective as surgical abortion.
Generally new drugs must be safer and more effective than the current methods in order to gain FDA approval.
The FDA also complained that the process was rushed and sent a document to congress complaining about the political pressure to approve a less safe and less effective drug. The document was entitled, “Lowering the Standard for Women’s Health.”
Members of the FDA are not prolife fanatics, they are research scientists who feel certain safety and effectiveness standards should be met for all drugs.
The results of the FDA tests clearly stated that medical abortion drugs were not as safe nor as effective as the current surgical method.
Somg,
you wrote,
For instance, in South America, where abortion is mostly illegal, there were (estimated) 33 abortions per thousand fertile women in 2005, but in North America, where abortion is mostly legal, there were only 24 abortions per thousand fertile women.
Posted by: SoMG at November 9, 2007 12:14 AM
…………………………………………
This statement is based on estimates of illegal abortion.
The above article demonstrates the falliability of estimates.
You argued at length less than a month ago that it was impossible to accurately assess illegal activity.
You said I would just have to live with that. No offense, but if I have to live with it, so do you.
Based on the evidence of very low demand for abortion in Mexico, why should anyone believe estimates that have been resoundingly disproven?
Laws against abortion reduce abortions, albeit not to zero.
However, no law against any activity reduces it to zero.
Sally,
you wrote,
My goodness! What a biggot you are. Do you fantasize that Mexican doctors recieve their training and degrees at your local Wal-Mart?
I’d feel perfectly safe having an abortion in any country performed by a qualified practioner. Why do you feel that a Mexican doctor would be less capable?
Posted by: Sally at November 8, 2007 11:59 PM
I am not basing the comment on assumption, rather on reported rates. Based on the rate of 88 deaths from abortion in Mexico from abortion just last year despite a low number of abortions.
In 1972, there were 39 deaths in the US due to illegal abortion.
And there was far more abortion based on the notion that in 1974 there were 100 times more abortions in the US than in Mexico in 2006. And that US number is with old technology.
Of course there is some estimation error, but 3 orders of magnitude? probably not.
It is not bigotry, it is math.
2006 in Mexico – 88 deaths from 7,000 procedures
1972 in the US – 39 deaths from 500,000 procedures.
BTW Sally,
My grandma is Mexican.
SoMG, explain to me how taking away the threat of prison will take a “back alley butcher” and make him more concientious? Because it certainy didn’t seem to improve how Milan Vuitch, Jesse Ketchum, or Benjamin Munson plied their trade.
SoMG, do you have the cite on that safety of abortion versus penicillin claim? I know that when called upon to defend the bogus “Koop Report” cooked up by AGI staffers under the direction of George Walter of the Surgeon General’s office, David Grimes claimed that the risk of death from legal abortion is “less than the risk of death from an injection of penicillin,” and cited as his source the 1982-83 CDC Abortion Surveillance Summary, which never even mentioned penicillin. Grimes assumed — rightly, it turned out — the he could say absolutely anything in support of his claims, and cite absolutely anything as his source, and not a single prochoicer would go check the source out.
Mona said she tracked the original “abortion is safer than penicillin” claim down to somebody who got a fatality rate from a study of a community VD clinic that was giving everybody with a chancre a shot in the ass. I can’t remember when the VD clinic study was but I know it was prior to the 1970s. And I would love to have the original cite.
And if a woman is undergoing an abortion, a shot of penecillin might well be included in the procedure. How can any one portion of the procedure be riskier than the entire process? That makes as much sense as trying to say that it’s safer to drive from New York to Los Angeles than it is to drive from New York to Hackensack.
Use a bit of logic. And check the source for the penicillin claim.
I figured that the odds of SoMG actually proding a cite were slim to none, so I looked it up myself, and I can see where somebody who actually trusts the CDC’s abortion surveillance charade — er, irreproachable and dedicated research and surveillance — would conclude “abortion is safer than a shot of penicillin”. The CDC’s estimate of abortion mortality (based on their lackadaisical and slipshod data collection) is that 1.1 women die per 100,000 abortions. Whereas Medicine.net says that there is one fatal reaction to penicillin for every 50,000 people exposed to it. (They don’t cite their source.) Which says to me that penicillin ought to be administered under circumstances where professionals are on hand and ready to respond to anaphalactic shock.
So if the CDC’s numbers are right, if there is a tooth fairy, if pigs fly, if Sirius Black is gonna show up on his flying motorcycle and take me away to teach Muggle Studies at Hogwarts, then yeah, you’ve proved it. Abortion is safer than a shot of penicillin. But again, it fails the logic test, since women will often be given penicillin prophylactically prior to an abortion, and will be treated with penicillin for resulting infections. It just makes no sense that one portion of a process can be riskier than the entire process.
What this says to me is that the CDC’s abortion mortality numbers have to be much, much further off than I suspected, if something that is done as part of abortion practice has that high a fatality rate.
What other antibiotics are typically used for abortion practice, and how do their mortality rates stack up? We may be able, from this, to start getting a more accurate estimate of exactly how far off the CDC’s numbers are.
Agh! Jill, I posted about the CDC and the penicillin numbers and it’s not showing! That was a tidy bit of reasearch and I’d not saved it elsewhere!
It helps us get an idea what the real abortion mortality numbers must be, because they have to be higher than just penicillin alone, since penicillin is often administered either prophylactically or to treat a resulting infection.
I wonder if we can get a statistician to look at the component parts of abortion — cervical dilation, the various drugs administered, uterine curretage, etc., and come up with a range. The risk has to be the combined risk of the typical anesthesia/analgesia medications, plus the risk of dilation, plus the risk of a uterine curretage, plus the risk of any drugs administered afterward. It won’t give us anything precise, but it will give us an idea.
Christina,
I heard that account on one of Ravi Zacharias’ broadcasts several years ago. The pastor who had married that couple shared that with Ravi not long after receiving a late night or wee hours of the morning call from the young man, sobbing, “I think I’ve killed her.” I don’t really have any other details on it except that, to his credit, he did not bolt and run like Gerri Santoro’s boyfriend, or like legal abortionist Tommy Tucker did when Angela Tucker was hemorrhaging to death in his Birmingham, AL office, and other colleagues of his have done in similar instances. I don’t know how much information they have or are at liberty to share with you, but you might try contacting R.Z. via RZIM.org.
Injecting penicillin into a patient also has some legitimate medical purpose, unlike abortion, which deliberately kills at least half of those subjected to it, whether male or female, though most are female, since sex selection abortions tend to favor killing girls and sparing boys.
————————————————- Carol Everett, a former director/owner of several abortion mills, stated that her operation killed or maimed roughy 1 out of every 500 women who came to them for abortion.
Two other famous abortionists, one of them now staunchly pro-life and the other still killing, have this to say:
Christina, I have posted the source here so many times I’m amazed anyone has to ask for it anymore. But here, just for you, it is ONE MO’ TIME!
http://www.annals.org/cgi/content/full/140/8/620
Posted by: SoGM at November 9, 2007 7:45 PM,
That’s funny…I’ve seen this posted before by a “SoMG”, but never by you, SoGM!!!
LMAO…..sorry…had to do it…i’m a bit “testy” tonight…
i’m a bit “testy” tonight…
Uh oh, what’d you do, take a male hormone pill by mistake? 8=O