Is Legal Abortion = Safe Abortion?

 

I have been engaged in many arguments on social media platforms on the subject of safe Abortions with the Pro-Abortion Advocates. They have always cited that many women due to un-safe Abortions and thus call for legalization of Abortion to make it safe. I have always told them that there is nothing like safe Abortion as long as it involves the murder of an innocent baby. They would respond by telling me statistics of Maternal deaths due to un-safe Abortions, and so on. 

They even produced a Country Report, on our behalf, see cover page above. 

 This Article highlights experts’ analysis from two Doctors.

 In October 2020, during a Webinar hosted by the Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Uganda (AOGU) Dr. Calum Miller (Oxford University) made a presentation on “How Safe Is Abortion? An Ethical and Evidence Based Discussion”

 Let me pull out a few highlights

 Abortion and Suicide Rate

 The suicide rate after abortion is 6-7 times higher than the suicide rates after continuing a pregnancy in the western countries.

 Women who are pregnant have a lower suicide rate than average, and women who have an abortion have a much, much higher suicide rates than average. And this is suicide in the year following the pregnancy.  Implying that that pregnancy and childbirth and childcare are protective factors against suicides.

This also implies that Abortion is a clear risk factor (The risk is 6-7 times higher)

 

 Abortion and Mortality Rate

By contrast, abortion has a mortality rates triple that of pregnancy and childbirth, largely due to the increase in the suicide rates.

Pregnancy is getting safer over time, whereas abortion is not really getting much safer. And pregnancy is soon to become very, very safe in the Western world, while abortion remains just as unsafe as ever for the most part.

 

 The Big Lie

 If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.”—Adolf Hitler

If abortion is not legal, isn't it the case that thousands of women die because they get unsafe abortions in back streets or in illegitimate clinics or self-induced abortions even.

He noted that One of the first countries to legalize abortion in the last 50 years was the United States of America. One of the leaders in that movement was an obstetrician called Bernard Nathanson. Who was the head of NEHRA, which is one of the main abortion advocacy groups in the US.  And he said, when they were advocating for abortion, they said that five to 10,000 women were dying in the US every year from unsafe abortion.  Well, he later basically explained that he was lying, that he made it completely up.

He says, ‘I confess that these figures were totally false, but it was a useful figure, so there was no need to correct it with honest statistics.’

Well, if that's the precedent that's been set in the US, is it the case that this could be happening in other countries?
 

It's actually demonstrable that these statistics are almost universally misrepresented.

Here's one example from Kenya.

Reuters, the news agency, said Kenya condemns women to death by unsafe abortion.

A parliamentarian said, “10 years since the constitutional change in 2010, we are still losing the lives of women and girls in great numbers. These deaths are preventable, but little has been done."

This is a parliamentarian talking about abortion in 2020, and the number of Kenyan women dying from abortion in 2020.

This is based on a report by the Center for Reproductive Rights. And if you look at the citation in there, the reason they can claim this number of women are dying is because they say that 35% of all pregnancy related mortality is from unsafe abortion.

Now, where did they get this from?

They get this from the Kenya Demographic and Health Survey in 1998. And that's nearly a quarter of a century ago now, and even 12 years before the constitution changed.

But what's more remarkable about this is if you read the Kenya DHS from 1998, it doesn't even mention deaths from unsafe abortion once.

And in fact, Dr. Calum Miller spoke to the DHS program and inquiring if the underlying data sets had anything on unsafe abortion, maybe it was unpublished, whether there was any information that could justify the claim but there wasn’t any data on. The information on Safe Abortion was not collected in the survey.

And so it seems that this figure was entirely made up, but it's a very common claim in Kenya.

 

Here's an example from Uganda.

This is from the Center for Reproductive Rights a few years ago now, 2013.

They say unsafe abortion causes as much as 26%,over a quarter, of all maternal deaths.

Well, what's the reference for that?
The reference is a submission to the UK parliament from 2008, which doesn't appear to be scrutinized. It’s certainly not peer reviewed. It's certainly not official data.

 There are 4 problems with this.

1.    This is a written Submission- it is not peer-reviewed or official data. there's no way to really scrutinize it or see the methodology or where these numbers came from

2.    Dr. Mbonye’s own research showed that only 11% of maternal deaths in Uganda were due to unsafe abortion. Yet the research showed that the number was significantly less than this, less than half the apparent claim.

3.    abortion here includes spontaneous abortion, not only unsafe abortions.
the statistics here are really misrepresenting the reality, which is that these deaths, perhaps 11%, are due to a combination of miscarriage and induced abortion, not just unsafe abortion.

4.    This data is now from 2003.

More recent data in Kenya, this is just from last year from the ministry of health, that only 5% of maternal deaths are due to all abortion, whether spontaneous, i.e. miscarriage, or induced abortion.

While you might hear claims that abortion is responsible for thousands of women dying, maybe 25, 30% of maternal deaths, it's a leading cause, the reality is that at most 5% of maternal deaths are due to abortion. And a lot of those are from miscarriage rather than induced abortion.

There are many examples from many different countries, and even the top authorities in the world misrepresent these statistics.

The WHO, for example, clearly misrepresents the data on their website in their fact sheet on unsafe abortion.

 But a key policy question is, would legalizing abortion have saved those women?
Abortion is associated with higher mortality than continuing a pregnancy, at least in countries where there is a very strong and robust healthcare infrastructure

 Maternal Mortality and Legalized Abortion

Legalizing abortion encourages more unwanted pregnancies and encourages more abortions.  A key thing is that abortion remains unsafe even when legal.

Poland had legal abortion under communism in 1990, and 1993, they gave protection to unborn children again. What you can see in green is that maternal mortality drastically fell after they criminalized abortion. And in purple is the deaths from abortion and miscarriage specifically. And even these deaths reduced significantly after abortion was criminalized.

What's the most remarkable about Poland is that it now has the lowest mortality rates, the lowest maternal mortality ratio, anywhere in the world.

It's one of the only countries in the developed world to have legal protection for unborn children. And partly because of that, it has the lowest maternal mortality ratio in the entire world.

Chile is another example.

Chile legalized abortion in 1931. And you can see that the maternal mortality rate shot up straight away.

By contrast, when it criminalized abortion again in 1989, the maternal mortality rate continued to decline along the normal trends.

Chile now has a lower maternal mortality ratio than the United States of America, the most affluent country in the world.

In the US, that deaths from abortive outcomes, i.e. from miscarriages and abortion, drastically reduced long before abortion was legalized.

And that's because of developments primarily in antibiotics not the case that legalizing abortion having a radical effect on the number of women dying from abortion. That radical change happened long before, simply from improvements in emergency care and antibiotics.

In some countries we even see the opposite trend.

After South Africa legalized abortion in '96 and 1997, the maternal mortality rate tripled, the number of maternal deaths, and even the deaths from abortion and miscarriage specifically increased after abortion was legalized.
 

A significant part of the reason is the rapid increase in HIV AIDS deaths around this time. But that's not true of Ethiopia.

Over the previous decade to this last one in the 2000s, Ethiopia had declining deaths from HIV and AIDS.
as a result, it had the declining maternal mortality rates.
Legalizing abortion in 2005, 2006, made absolutely no difference to the maternal mortality rate. It didn't drastically lower it.

what's most remarkable is that while Ethiopia had a generally reducing maternal mortality rate and pregnancy was getting safer, the number of women dying from abortion and miscarriage actually stayed exactly the same.

while every other cause of maternal death was getting lower and safer in Ethiopia, legalizing abortion did not change the number of deaths from abortion and miscarriage at all.


 

More so Dr. Ingrid Skop, M.D in her Family Resource Council publication articulated Top 10 Myths About Abortion.  See the highlights of Myth #6: “abortion is safer than childbirth.”

 The assumption that “abortion is safer than childbirth” was one of the primary arguments that drove the legalization of abortion, and it continues to drive the effort to overturn all legislative safety restrictions on the procedure, both within our country and internationally.

Contrary to the common assumption of a hack job by a medically illiterate abortionist, 90 percent of “illegal” abortions were committed by physicians, usually by surgical dilation and curettage. Most of the rest were done by nurses, midwives, or those with some medical training. The term “back alley abortion” that pro-abortion activists often use as a scare tactic actually refers to the door the women were advised to use to enter the medical clinic, not where the procedure was committed. Although abortion activists claimed that there were over a million abortions yearly prior to legalization, a better estimate is 98,000 a year. Since legalization, USA has consistently reported about 1 to 1.5 million abortions per year (10-15 times more common than before legalization), so in fact, deaths of women from botched abortions have likely increased, if they were reported accurately. The majority of women in abortion clinics have consistently reported that they would not have sought the procedure if it were illegal.

 

How could an abortion cause a woman to die?

Complications that can occur from any abortion procedure include vaginal or intra-abdominal hemorrhage (sometimes requiring transfusion), infection (endometritis which may lead to septicemia, sometimes requiring hospitalization for IV antibiotics, surgery or ICU support), incomplete removal of the remains of the aborted baby, damage to the cervix, uterus, or other pelvic or abdominal organs (sometimes requiring surgery, including hysterectomy or bowel resection to repair), anesthetic reactions or overdoses, amniotic fluid, septic, or thrombotic embolisms, cardiac or cardiovascular events, any of which could lead to death.

 Studies suggest that the immediate physical complication rate of induced abortion may be as high as 11 percent. The safety of abortion is determined less by whether it is legal, and more by other factors such as available technology, gestational age in which it is committed, and the skill of the practitioner.

 

The frequency of complications increases as the pregnancy advances. The likelihood of complications in mid trimester abortions increases due to “inherently greater technical complexity of later abortions related to the anatomical and physiologic changes that occur as the pregnancy advances. The increased amount of fetal and placental tissue requires a greater degree of cervical dilation, the increased blood flow predisposes to hemorrhage, and the relaxed myometrium is more subject to mechanical perforation.” A late-term dilation and evacuation abortion requires multiple blind passages of the surgeon’s instruments into the uterus, which could easily result in damage to a woman, even in experienced hands.

 

When most observers consider safety related to abortion, they are thinking of physical complications such as these, but they should also consider psychologic complications, which can also lead to a woman’s death. One comprehensive study analyzed 22 studies which considered mental health consequences of abortion. There was an 81 percent overall increased risk of mental health problems after abortion. This broke down into 34 percent increased anxiety, 37 percent increased depression, 110 percent increased alcohol abuse, 230 percent increased marijuana abuse, and 155 percent increased suicidal behavior. A task force in Texas found that of the top causes of maternal deaths in the state, drug overdose was second, and homicide and suicide were also listed among the top seven causes. 

 

An attempt to answer the question of whether abortion is safer than childbirth through a meta-analysis (reviewing all available studies) revealed a curious lack of interest by most investigators in the question. Of 989 studies that looked at deaths and pregnancy outcomes, only 11 provided results which allowed comparison between the death rates associated with all possible pregnancy outcomes. Nonetheless, these researchers found that within 180 days, the risk of death is over twice as high following abortion compared to that following delivery, and remains elevated for at least 10 years. in Finland. All death certificates on reproductive aged women from 1987-1994 were reviewed, and deaths on non-pregnant, recently delivered, and post-abortive women were compared. The researchers found the opposite of what Dr. Grimes and his CDC colleagues found. A woman who had an abortion was 3.5 times more likely to die within a year compared to a woman who carried to term. She was 7 times as likely to commit suicide, twice as likely to die of an accident, and 4 times as likely to be murdered!

 

Two follow-up studies from this same data revealed that 94 percent of abortion related deaths, and 73 percent of maternal deaths were not identified from death certificates alone, showing the clear inadequacy of the CDC’s data drawn from death certificates.111 The risk of death in a given year for a woman who had an abortion was 83/100,000 Finnish women, non-pregnant 57/100,000, miscarriage 52/100,000, and for those who carried a pregnancy to term 28/100,000.112 The researchers concluded that these findings may be attributed to two causes: giving birth may have a protective effect for a woman, and having an abortion may have a deleterious emotional effect, leading her to greater risk-taking activities. 

 

In the interest of space, we will not delve into the potential association of long term risks related to abortion, but there is compelling evidence that abortion may increase a woman’s risk of delivering early in a subsequent pregnancy, causing her future children to be at risk of death from prematurity (the number one killer of neonates). When a young woman chooses to abort her first pregnancy, she loses the known protective effect of that pregnancy against breast cancer

later in life. There are also compelling studies that the abortion itself may leave her breast tissue more susceptible to cancers. Though the studies have been mixed, the question has clearly not been answered, yet most medical societies have insisted on no link, and tried to suppress the question. For the reader who is interested in studying the extensive discussion on these issues, please refer to the website of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG.org).

Based on the Findings Above, Does Legalizing Abortion have a significant effect on Maternal Mortality?  Does Abortion become safe by legalizing it?

 

Credit: 

1. Family Watch International
2. Family Research Policy

Source: 

1. https://familywatch.org/2020/09/30/how-safe-is-abortion-an-ethical-and-evidence-based-discussion/ 
2. https://www.frc.org/myths