Category: Miscellaneous Abortion Facts

One researcher said:

“Not all unplanned pregnancies are undesired, nor do they necessarily produce unwanted children. Studies… have suggested that whereas possibly a majority of women who have not first planned to conceive experience feelings of grief or anger when they become pregnant, less than one in five remains disappointed and unaccepting throughout the course of the pregnancy.”

Candida Peterson Should We Have a Baby? (Rigby, Australia, 1982) Quoted in Mary Kenny Abortion: The Whole Story (London: Quartet Books, 1986) 36

When pro-abortion activists were fighting to make abortion legal, one argument they tried to use was that women who were denied abortion would kill themselves. Even before Roe V Wade, psychologists granted abortions to women who claimed that their pregnancies would drive them to commit suicide.

Dr. Bernard Nathanson, former abortionist and co-founder of the pro-abortion group NARAL, who later became pro-life, said:

“Women do not kill themselves and never have as a result of being pregnant. Interestingly, when we were pushing abortion – we, meaning the high command of the National Abortion Rights Action League, including myself, (Larry) Lader, (Betty) Friedan, in the late ’60s, we asked the Medical Examiner of New York City to go through his files to discover, to give us a figure on how many women who were pregnant had killed themselves, were suicides as a result merely of being pregnant…The Medical Examiner was unable to give us even one case, one case, where a woman had clearly committed suicide because she was pregnant…this was in New York City – so we were chagrined and never, of course, publicized that finding.”

Testimony before the Court of Queen’s Bench for Saskatchewan in the Borowski case (Borowski v. The Attorney General of Canada, Transcript of Evidence and Proceedings at Trial, page 409, Regina Saskatchewan, May, 1983)

Another report found the following fact:  In the city of Birmingham, with a population of 1,250,000, there was only one case of suicide of a pregnant woman over a twelve-year period.

Sim and Neisser (“Post-abortion Psychoses: A Report from Two Centers,” in The Psychological Aspects of Abortion, eds. D. Mall and W.F. Watts, University Publications of America, Washington, D.C.,1979)

However, based on two studies using medical records, there is a 6-7 times higher suicide rate for women who have abortions. For teens, it is 10x higher. 

In the 1970s and 1980s, late term abortions were usually done by saline induction. In this type of abortion, a caustic saline solution was injected into the woman’s uterus, poisoning the child.

It was a slow death. One medical study found:

“The time interval between saline instillation and fetal death has varied from as early as 1 hour to as late as 7 hours, with a mean of 4 hours.”

Robert S Galen et al. “Fetal Pathology and Mechanism of Fetal Death in Saline Induced Abortion: A Study of 143 Gestations and Critical Review of the Literature” American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 120 (October 1, 1974):353-354

The baby suffered and struggled for life all that time.

Now most late term abortions (except for really late ones, in the third trimester, which are done by induction) are done by D&E, a much quicker process where the baby is dismembered and pulled out with forceps.

 Whether a quick, albeit extremely gruesome death is better for the baby could be considered. But late term abortions still destroy a living human being.

The number of abortions has gone down significantly.

There are now 2000 fewer abortions per day then there were in the early 1990s, despite the fact that the population is 20% higher than it was at that time.

Source:

Mark Crutcher Siege: Pro-Life Field Manual (Denton, Texas: Life Dynamics Inc., 2015) 41

“Women’s preferences for information and complication seriousness ratings related to elective medical procedures” appears in the August edition of the Journal of Medical Ethics. Written by Priscilla Coleman, David Reardon, and Matthew Lee, the study of a diverse sample of 187 largely low-income women seeking obstetric and gynecological services found that they overwhelmingly wanted to be informed of all known risks associated with elective procedures in general and with abortion in particular….

The study revealed that 95% of the women surveyed at the St. Joseph Regional Medical Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, expressed a desire to be informed of all possible complications associated with elective medical procedures, including abortion. This was found to be true regardless of how common or uncommon the particular complications were.”

“Study Reveals Women Want Information on Abortion Risks”  NRL News September 2006, Volume 33, Issue 9

Dr. Frederick Joseph Taussig explained why the number of deaths from illegal abortions was falling during his times:

“The discovery of asepsis and antisepsis has not proved any unmixed blessing. Criminal abortion can at the present time be done with less danger of blood poisoning than formerly. The result is inevitable. One of the main deterrent factors in the production of abortion is gone when the woman realizes that her own life is not necessarily imperiled.”

Frederick Joseph Taussig The Prevention and Treatment of Abortion (St. Louis: C V Mosby, 1910) 78 – 79

Dr. James B Kahn, national abortion surveillance officer of the US Public Health Service in Atlanta, described in 1971 how, after legalization of abortion in New York and other states, the number of abortions skyrocketed. As recounted by Fr. Paul Marx who heard him speak at a conference about abortion:

“[It has been] documented from the best sources and the latest available statistics the fact that abortions were now “dramatically increasing” despite “gross underreporting” following the “advancing wave of liberal abortion legislation.” The significant rise in the total number of abortions across the United States repeated the unvarying pattern established after similar legislation in other countries.”

Paul Marx The Death Peddlers: War on the Unborn (Collegeville, Minnesota: St. John’s University Press, 1971) 9

There are about  1,800 doctors performing abortions as of 2009

Sarah Kliff “The Abortion Evangelist” Newsweek August 31, 2009