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Remarkable statistics! Planned Parenthood saved a nation!
Thank you, Margaret Sanger for your tireless (and successful) efforts to bring Birth Control to a Nation and thereby preventing millions of unwanted pregnancies and abortions! Unwanted pregnancies are WAY down, and most abortions are now done very early (and safely)--if they are done at all. It shows what compassion, love, and a higher purpose can accomplish--when great hearts and minds go to work!
Despite the claims of those who oppose safe and legal
abortion, many demonstrable health benefits — physical,
emotional, and social — have accrued to Americans since
1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in
its decision, Roe v. Wade.
The most important benefit was the end of an era that
supported the proliferation of “back alley butchers” who
were motivated by money alone and performed unsafe,
medically incompetent abortions that left many women
dead or injured. Also, compassionate mainstream
physicians, who provided clandestine, medically safe
abortions, did not exploit their patients, and were
motivated by principle rather than by financial concerns,
no longer had to fear imprisonment and the loss of their
medical licenses for performing abortions after Roe was
decided (Joffe, 1995). Today, as we celebrate the 42nd
anniversary of this landmark decision, it is important to
remember how far Roe has brought us as a society and
to note some of the many benefits that resulted from the
legalization of abortion.
Roe v. Wade did not “invent” abortion
• Estimates of the annual number of illegal abortions
in the 1950s and 1960s range from 200,000 to 1.2
million (Cates et al., 2003; Rock & Jones, 2003; Tietze
& Henshaw, 1986).
• In 1969, one year before New York State legalized
abortion, complications from illegal abortions
accounted for 23 percent of all pregnancy-related
admissions to municipal hospitals in New York City
(Institute of Medicine, 1975).
• After California liberalized its abortion law in 1967,
the number of admissions for infection resulting from
illegal abortion at Los Angeles County/University of
Southern California Medical Center fell by almost 75
percent (Seward et al., 1973).
Since Roe v. Wade, women have obtained abortions
earlier in pregnancy when health risks are lowest.
• In 1973, only 36 percent of abortions were performed
at or before eight weeks of pregnancy (CDC, 2008).
• Today, 91.4 percent of all legal abortions are
performed within the first 13 weeks of pregnancy, and
64.5 percent take place within the first eight weeks of
pregnancy. Only 1.4 percent occur at or after 21 weeks
(CDC, 2014).
Deaths from abortion declined dramatically during
the past three decades.
• In 1965, when abortion was still illegal nationwide
except in cases of life endangerment, at least 193
women died from illegal abortions, and illegal
abortion accounted for nearly 17 percent of all deaths
due to pregnancy and childbirth in that year (Gold,
1990; NCHS, 1967).
• In 1973, the risk of dying from an abortion was 3.4
deaths per 100,000 legal abortions. This rate fell to
1.3 by 1977 (Gold, 1990). Today, the risk of death
associated with abortion increases with the length
of pregnancy, from one death for every one million
vacuum aspiration abortions at eight or fewer weeks
to 8.9 deaths after 20 weeks’ gestation (Boonstra et al., 2006).
MEDICAL AND SOCIAL HEALTH BENEFITS SINCE ABORTION WAS MADE LEGAL IN THE U.S
The risk of death from medication abortion
through 63 days’ gestation is about one per 100,000
procedures (Grimes, 2005). Comparatively, the risk
of death from miscarriage is about one per 100,000
(Saraiya et al., 1999). And the risk of death associated
with childbirth is about 14 times as high as that
associated with abortion (Raymond & Grimes, 2012).
After 20 weeks’ gestation there is no statistically
significant difference in maternal mortality rates
between ending a pregnancy by abortion and carrying
it to term (Kochanek et al., 2004; Paul et al., 2009).
Medically safe, legal abortion has had a profound
impact on American women and their families.
• Couples at risk of having children affected with severe
and often fatal genetic disorders have been willing to
conceive because of the availability of amniocentesis
and safe, legal abortion (Milunsky, 1989).
• Following the legalization of abortion, the largest
decline in birth rates were seen among women
for whom the health and social consequences of
unintended childbearing are the greatest — women
over 35, teenagers, and unmarried women (Levine et
al., 1999). Today, 26 percent of the abortions in the
U.S. are provided to women over 35 and to teenagers
(CDC, 2014).
• Today, less than 0.3 percent of women undergoing
legal abortion procedures at all gestational
ages sustain a serious complication requiring
hospitalization (Boonstra et al., 2006; Henshaw, 1999;
Upadhyay, et al., 2015). Among women undergoing
legal first-trimester aspiration procedures, the
percentage sustaining serious complications drops,
with recent studies showing major complication rates
ranging from 0.05 percent to 0.16 percent (Upadhyay,
et al., 2015; Weitz et al., 2013).
• About half of all pregnancies in the U.S. each year
are unintended, and four in 10 of these are ended by
medically safe, legal abortions. In 2011, an estimated
1.1 million abortions took place, a 13 percent decline
from 2008. The abortion rate in 2011 was the lowest
rate since 1973 (Jones and Jerman, 2014). From
1973 through 2011, nearly 53 million legal abortions
occurred (Guttmacher Institute, 2014).
• In 1973, the majority of abortions were performed
in hospitals. Today, most abortions are performed in
health centers. This change in locale has also allowed
more women to have access to comprehensive
reproductive health services, including, but not
limited to, contraceptive counseling, family planning
services, and gynecological care (Cates et al., 2003).
The health and well-being of women and children
suffer the most in states that have the most stringent
laws that restrict access to safe and legal abortion.
• Compared to states that support women’s health,
those states that oppose safe and legal abortion
spend far less money per child on a range of services
such as foster care, education, welfare, and the
adoption of children who have physical and mental
disabilities (Schroedel, 2000).
• The states that have the strongest laws against safe
and legal abortion are also the states in which women
suffer from lower levels of education and higher levels
of poverty, as well as from a lower ratio of female-tomale earnings. They also have a lower percentage
of women in the legislature and fewer mandates
requiring insurance providers to cover minimum
hospital stays after childbirth (Schroedel, 2000).
In sum, no amount of controversy over abortion can
negate the evidence that American women, men,
children, and families have reaped great benefits
to their physical, mental, and social health from
the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic decision in Roe v.
Wade. Any erosion of a woman’s right and access to
medically safe, legal abortion jeopardizes the health
of women, their families, and the nation as a whole.
Cited References
Boonstra, Heather D., et al. (2006). Abortion In Women’s Lives.
New York: Guttmacher Institute.
Cates Jr., Williard, et al. (2003). “The Public Health Impact of
Legal Abortion: 30 Years Later.” Perspectives on Sexual and
Reproductive Health, 35(1), 25-8.
CDC — Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2008,
November 28, accessed 2012, January 10). “Abortion
Surveillance — United States, 2005.” Morbidity and Mortality
Weekly Report, 57 (SS-13). [Online]. cdc.gov
preview/mmwrhtml/ss5713a1.htm.
_____. (2014, November 28, accessed 2014, December 23).
“Abortion Surveillance — United States, 2011.” Morbidity
and Mortality Weekly Report, 63 (SS-11). [Online]. http://
www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss6311a1.htm?s_
cid=ss6311a1_w.
Gold, Rachel Benson. (1990). Abortion and Women’s Health:
A Turning Point for America?New York: The Alan Guttmacher
Institute.
Grimes, D.A. (2005). “Risks of Mifepristone Abortion in
Context.” Contraception, 71, 161.
Guttmacher Institute. (2014, February, accessed 2014,
February 3). Facts Sheet: Induced Abortion in the United
States.[Online]. guttmacher.org
abortion.html
Henshaw, Stanley K. (1999). “Unintended Pregnancy and
Abortion: A Public Health Perspective.” Pp. 11-22 in Maureen
Paul, et al., eds., A Clinician’s Guide to Medical and Surgical
Abortion. New York: Churchill Livingstone.
Institute of Medicine. (1975). Legalized Abortion and the Public
Health. Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences.
Joffe, Carole. (1995). Doctors of Conscience: The Struggle
to Provide Abortion Before and After Roe v. Wade. Boston:
Beacon Press.
Jones, Rachel K., and Jenna Jerman. (2014, accessed 2015,
January 7). “Abortion Incidence Service Availability in the
United States, 2011.” Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive
Health, 46(1), 3-14. [Online]. guttmacher.org
journals/psrh.46e0414.pdf.
Kochanek, Kenneth D., et al. (2004, October 12). “Deaths:
Final Data for 2002.” National Vital Statistics Reports, 53(5).
Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics.
Levine, Phillip, et al. (1999). “Roe v Wade and American
Fertility.” American Journal of Public Health, 89(2), 199–203.
Milunsky, Aubrey. (1989). Choices, Not Chances: An Essential
Guide to Your Heredity and Health. Boston: Little, Brown and
Company.
NCHS — National Center for Health Statistics. (1967). Vital
Statistics of the United States, 1965: Vol. 11 — Mortality, Part A.
Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO).
Paul, Maureen, et al. (2009). Management of Unintended
and Abnormal Pregnancy. Chichester, West Sussex: WileyBlackwell.
Raymond, Elizabeth G., and David A. Grimes. (2012). “The
Comparative Safety of Legal Induced Abortion and Childbirth
in the United States.” Obstetrics and Gynecology, 119(2 Part 1),
215-9.
Rock, John A. & Howard W. Jones III. (2003). TeLinde’s
Operative Gynecology— Ninth Edition. Philadelphia, PA:
Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.
Saraiya, M., et al. (1999). “Spontaneous Abortion-Related
Deaths Among Women in the United States, 1981-1991.”
Obstetrics and Gynecology, 94(2), 172-6.
Schroedel, Jean Reith. (2000). Is the Fetus a Person? A
Comparison of Policies across the Fifty States. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
Seward, Paul N., et al. (1973). “The Effect of Legal Abortion
on the Rate of Septic Abortion at a Large County Hospital.”
American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 115(335),
335–8.
Tietze, Christopher & Stanley K. Henshaw. (1986). Induced
Abortion: A World Review, 1986. New York: The Alan
Guttmacher Institute.
Upadhyay, Ushma D., et al. (2015). “Incidence of Emergency
Department Visits and Complications After Abortion.”
Obstetrics & Gynecology, 125(1), 175-83.
Weitz, Tracy A., et al. (2013). “Safety of Aspiration Abortion
Performed by Nurse Practitioners, Certified Nurse Midwives,
and Physician Assistants Under a California Legal Waiver.”
American Journal of Public Health, 103(3), 454-61.
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Last updated January 2015
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