THEY FIRED BARNICLE:

Before Roe v. Wade, did 10,000 women a year die from illegal abortions? (The Straight Dope, 28-May-2004, Chicago Reader)

Dear Cecil:

Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman recently wrote, "After all, those of us who remember when birth control was illegal and when 10,000 American women a year died from illegal abortions don't have to imagine a world without choices. We were there." I write a blog about life after abortion, and one of my co-bloggers says that the claim of 10,000 deaths is well known to be an urban legend. However, Ellen Goodman is a famous journalist, and she clearly believes that it is the truth. Is it? —Emily of After Abortion, via e-mail

Cecil replies:

No. Establishing exactly how many women died due to botched illegal abortions is obviously impossible, since many of these deaths likely weren't reported as such. However, even a generous reading of the statistics we do have indicates that Goodman is off by a factor of ten; a stickler might say she blew it by a ratio of 250 to 1. It's not like this is a news flash, either. A reasonable approximation of the annual total in the 60s has been public knowledge for 35 years.

To be fair, the number Goodman uses is consistent with estimates that were widely cited prior to the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. But some say those numbers were knowingly inflated by proponents of abortion rights. The star witness for this claim is Bernard Nathanson, a former abortion clinic doctor who in 1969 cofounded the group now called NARAL Pro-Choice America (the letters originally stood for National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws). Since Roe, though, he's turned against his former comrades--he made the highly controversial 1984 antiabortion film The Silent Scream and has authored several books describing his conversion on this issue and critiquing the abortion-rights movement. In Aborting America (1979) Nathanson writes: "In NARAL we generally emphasized the drama of the individual case, not the mass statistics, but when we spoke of the latter it was always '5,000 to 10,000 deaths a year.' I confess that I knew the figures were totally false, and I suppose the others did too if they stopped to think of it. But in the 'morality' of our revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics?"

Better late than never. For 1972, the last full year before Roe, the federal Centers for Disease Control reported that 39 women died due to illegal abortion.

MORE (via David Cohen):
Just the schmacks, ma'am (Ellen Goodman, May 13, 2004, Boston Globe)

I referred to the bad old days when 10,000 women a year died of illegal abortions. Ka-boom. The number -- 10,000 deaths -- produced a mother lode of e-mails insisting that it was either a lie or propaganda or an "urban legend." Many said that this figure came from Dr. Bernard Nathanson, formerly prochoice and now prolife, who has claimed responsibility for the bunk which he now debunks.

Well, as someone who is both prochoice and pro-facts, I went back into the deep, dark numeric archives with guide Stanley Henshaw, who, poor soul, is actually writing a paper on all this for the Guttmacher Institute.

I will spare you the details, but the 10,000 figure did not come from Dr. Nathanson, it came from Dr. Frederick Taussig, circa 1936. In 1930 abortion was the official cause of death for almost 2,700 women. But "official" wasn't the whole story. Though data were admittedly skimpy by today's standards, Taussig's research estimated 8,000 to 10,000 deaths.

Over the decades, the numbers shrank to hundreds and then dozens because of penicillin, because doctors began performing abortions, and because abortion became legal in critical states such as New York. By 1972, the year before the Roe v. Wade decision, the Centers for Disease Control reported that 39 women died from illegal or self-induced abortions.

So, facts and schmacks. How many women actually died, dear readers? In the bad, bad, bad old days of the 1920s and '30s, we can estimate 5,000, 7,000, 10,000 or wait for Henshaw's paper to be published. In the merely bad old days of 1972, at least 39 died.

Just about anybody that's paid attention has heard the claim that "thousands" -- or, more specifically, "5,000 to 10,000" maternal deaths a year in the United States from criminal abortions back in the bad old pre-Roe days. In fact, Planned Parenthood's amicus brief filed with PP v. Casey still cited this bogus "fact." [...]

In the case of the 5,000 - 10,000 claims, the original source was a book -- Abortion, Spontaneous and Induced -- published in 1936 by Dr. Frederick Taussig, a leading proponent of legalization of abortion. Taussig calculated an urban abortion rate based on records of a New York City birth control clinic, and a rural abortion rate based on some numbers given to him by some doctors in Iowa. He took a guess at a mortality rate, multiplied by his strangely generated estimate of how many criminal abortions were taking place, and presto! A myth is born!

Even if Taussig's calculations, by some mathematical miracle, had been correct, they still would have been out of date by the end of WWII. Antibiotics and blood transfusions changed the face of medicine. And you will notice that abortion proponents are all too aware of how dated Taussig's numbers are -- why else would they play Musical Cites instead of simply citing Taussig in the first place? But not only are the Taussig numbers dated, they were never accurate to begin with. At a conference in 1942, Taussig himself appologized for using "the wildest estimates" to generate a bogus number.