Outlawing abortions doesn’t lead to ‘coat-hanger’ deaths – Study
Redstate.com 10 May 2012
For decades, supporters of abortion on demand have insisted on two completely unproven assertions concerning what would happen if abortion were made generally illegal in this country. First, they have asserted, somewhat counter-intuitively and again without any proof, that such a law would not work, and women would continue to get abortions. Second, based on the first unfounded assertion, they insist that therefore women would be forced into “back alley abortions” which would presumably always be performed with a dirty coat-hanger, thus leading to massive maternal mortality.
Of course, these assertions have been from day one based on fabrications generated by the abortion industry. As Bernard Nathanson, co-founder of NARAL, admitted:
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.
“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.
Enter Dr. Elard Koch, an epidemiologist from the Department of Family Medicine, Faculty of Medicine at the University of Chile. Chile provides a somewhat unique opportunity to study the issue of the effects of making abortion illegal. In recent history (in particular since a number of advances that have overall reduced maternal mortality worldwide), most countries that have changed their abortion laws have made abortion more widely accessible, not less. Chile, on the other hand, has moved in the opposite direction. Before 1989 in Chile, abortion was largely legal, but in 1989, Chile banned all “therapeutic” abortions, thus providing an actual laboratory in which we might study the question, “What happens when abortion is made illegal?”
The study by Dr. Koch and his team is vitally important and should be read in its entirety. Most importantly, the study conclusively showed that a) outlawing abortion is remarkably effective at reducing the number of abortions that take place in a country, including clandestine ones, and b) there is absolutely no link between making abortion illegal and an increase in the number of deaths from clandestine abortions.