Many pro-choice activists say that abortion has always been with us. They are right. But the numbers of abortions being performed today, in the legal era, are MUCH greater than the number of abortions that were being performed before abortion became legal. Surveys say that over 70% of all women would not even consider abortion if it was illegal.
To combat the pro-choicers who say that abortion was always common in the United State, look at the following statistics:
A well known study estimates the number of illegal abortions prior to 1967 range from 39,000 in 1950 to 210,000 in 1961, with a mean of 98,000.”
Barbara Syska, Thomas Hilgers, and Dennis O’Hare “An Objective Model for Estimating Criminal Abortions and Its Implications for Public Policy” In New Perspectives on Human Abortion edited by Thomas Hilgers, M.D., Dennis J Horan, and David Mall (Frederick, M.D.: University publications of America, 1981) 178
Within seven years of Roe versus Wade, legal abortions jumped to 1.2 million a year. In 2012, there were over a million abortions.
Stanley K Henshaw at al., “Abortion Services in the United States, 1991 and 1992,” Family Planning Perspectives vol. 26, no. 3 (May – June 1994), 101
