The Forgotten Cost of "Choice"

These deaths are tragic, of course, but have you considered how many women died equally tragically during childbirth in the same period of time? It turns out that legal, post Roe vs. Wade abortion is statistically safer. Not that that is a reason to get one, but it isn't a reason not to.

Once again, Ray, you're the one who isn't completely informed. Statistically, it turns out that legal, post Roe vs. Wade abortion is NOT statistically safer:

In September 2005, my coblogger at After Abortion, Emily, reported on the study that found that women are three times more likely to die after an abortion than after childbirth. The study, published in late 2004 in the international medical journal Paediatric and Perinatal Epidemiology, shows that "just looking at the death certificates turns out to be quite inadequate." Read Emily's article on this (link below), which also shows how the CDC has been partly at fault for "providing what are probably inaccurate figures about abortion-related deaths." [Paediatric and Perinatal Epidemiology, Volume 18 Issue 6 Page 448 - November 2004, p. 448-455; Dr Mika Gissler, Cynthia Berg, Marie-Hélène Bouvier-Colle and Pierre Buekens]

In October 2004, I posted two studies on this:

2) A 2002 Southern Medical Journal study revealed that women who abort versus those who give birth are almost twice as likely to die in the two years following the pregnancy outcome. [Reardon DC, Ney PG, Scheuren F, Cougle J, Coleman PK, Strahan TW, "Deaths associated with pregnancy outcome: a record linkage study of low income women," Southern Medical Journal (Aug. 2002), [95(8):834-841]

3) A 1997 Acta Obsetricia et Gynecolgica Scandinavica Finland study found that "...the risk of dying within a year after an abortion is several times higher than the risk of dying after miscarriage or childbirth." Three and a half times more likely, to be exact. [Gissler M, Kauppila R, Merilainen J, Toukomaa H, Hemminki E. "Pregnancy-associated deaths in Finland 1987-1994--definition problems and benefits of record linkage." Acta Obstet Gynecol Scand. 1997;76:651-657]

This Ob/Gyn/M.D. ( http://www.thecbc.org/redesigned/research_display.php?id=53 ) at The Center for Bioethics and Culture (CBC) says "This is the first study to demonstrate a causal link between abortion and increased maternal death in the year following the abortion."

The main article in which all the sources are linked to is here, http://afterabortion.blogspot.com/2007/02/for-those-who-say-fox-news-is-too-right.html

Other pertinent analyses were also linked to in that article.

If you think I'm just driving traffic to our blog, then go to the original sources (two of which are the NIH itself and the first is from the online-copy of the journal itself:

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-3016.2004.00591.x

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12190217&dopt=Abstract

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Retrieve&list_uids=9292639

Why aren't you folks holding Planned Parenthood's and the abortion industry's and the mass media's feet to the fire for lying to you about all this? They're the ones you should be outraged against.

Annie, I am sure your Finnish numbers are accurate in reporting childbirths and abortions in Finland, but I think that numbers on American women are more relevant to our debate. Guttmacher sites a 2006 American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology article when stating, "The risk of death associated with childbirth is about 12 times as high as that associated with abortion."

http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fb_induced_abortion.html

PS Once again I am misinformed? You are the one who had to update your article after I pointed out that it was wrongly premised on incomplete data.

Sorry; meant "the first NIH link (the second link in the list of 3 together)"

I'm sad that the prochoicers who come here, all guns blazing and erroneous facts flying, don't learn from those mistakes, and don't have the strength to admit they made mistakes and shouldn't have rushed to condemnation of us here on this blog or to conclusions based on falsehoods and disinformation campaigns on the part of the abortion industry and its supporters. I wish that, as our friend Achromic did, they'd realize they didn't have all the facts and that there really are legitimate complaints about PP and abortion itself, because they were MISLED, by PP and the abortion advocates in general.

It takes a strong person to admit they were wrong, both about what they had come to believe and about attacking us personally (as others have done here, not Ray), and to learn from that. Ray, Suricou Raven, cassie, meg, any lurkers, you are still welcome to join in intelligent, supported debate here and on my AfterAbortion blog, no matter what you've said or done before. Hopefully you all have learned that you have been in fact misled by the abortion industry.

Planned Parenthood's Guttmacher Institute is proven to you, above, to have lied in how it reported the results of the study you used to support your case, yet you call me "willfully misinformed??"

Ray, did you even read the quotes from PP's founder herself "about the nature and mission of Planned Parenthood", posted by Christina in the other thread? http://www.prolifeblogs.com/articles/archives/2007/09/what_percentage.php

If you have read them, then you've really got the blinders on.

Go read the website www.blackgenocide.org , in particular http://www.blackgenocide.org/planned.html

Sanger was a racist and she founded a racist, eugenicist organization in Planned Parenthood.

Go read about PP's "Negro Project."

That site is put together by African-Americans, not white prolifers.

If I sound "frantic" to you, it's because I'm aghast that you align yourself with and defend a racist organization.

Of course, you "don't really see the point of "debate." You can't possibly admit that what you've been supporting all this time could be so exceedingly bad.

"does your study take into consideration that the abortions in question may have been late term ones performed because the mother's life was already at risk?"

Are you referring to the American study? Yes, Ray, it does and the vast majority of them weren't late term abs. But then you could have found that out yourself. Maybe you even did, and just wanted to send me on another fishing expedition. I'm game.

While the abstract doesn't give the information about whether or how many of the abs were late term or not, you could easily have found out the answer: the greatest number of abortions in the timeframe (1989 to 1997) of those records reviewed were not late term:

"From 1992 (when these data were first collected) through 1999, increases have occurred in the percentage of abortions performed at 21 weeks."
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5109a1.htm

"In 1991... More than half (52%) of all abortions were performed at or before the 8th week of gestation, and 88% were before the 13th week."
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00038049.htm

"In 1990...As in previous years, more than half of legal abortions were performed during the first 8 weeks of gestation, and approximately 88% during the first 12 weeks."
http://www.cdc.gov/epo/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00018141.htm

So for 3 of the years studied, 12% of the abortions were after 12 weeks but not determined how much after. For the remaining 6 years of that study, 1.5% were after 21 weeks, and again, none were broken out by how much later than 21 weeks.

"I think that a study on properly performed, low-risk, first trimester abortions, would inevitably show that they are safer than the risks of carrying a pregnancy to term."

That American study WAS properly performed, and did in fact cover exactly all that, and it didn't find that abs are safer than childbirth. Of course, if you want to cover only first trimesters, of course they're safer than later. But then, you'd be skewing the "conclusions" to support your favorite cause, PP and abortion in general.

I could go at these refutations of your defenses all day and all night, Ray.

The fact is, you've got your allegiances to women in the wrong place.

No amount of cold, hard, scientific proof is going to be accepted by you. And that's just too damn bad, especially for any of the women in your life who you think you're supporting.

This is really bizarre, it did it again, even though I cut and pasted it exactly from that CDC website. I'm going to try this until it shows correctly, bear with me. I'll change the less than/greater than sign to words and see if that works:

"From 1992 (when these data were first collected) through 1999, increases have occurred in the percentage of abortions performed

at less than 6 weeks of gestation. Few abortions were provided after 15 weeks of gestation; 4.3% were obtained at 16--20 weeks and 1.5% were obtained at more than 21 weeks."