Incorrect.
Have you actually looked up the statistics for abortions before it became legal? You’ll find that the phrase “back alley abortions” was actually used to describe the way a woman would enter the clinic (through the back alley). The abortions weren’t done in back alleys. They were performed by physicians who were actually MORE careful so as to avoid getting caught. Once abortion became legal, the number of abortions skyrocketed, and with abortion activists vehemently voting against any sort of regulation, they’ve placed politics over actually protecting women’s health. There are abortion facilities today that get inspected less often than tanning salons.
Here’s a quote from Dr. Bernard Nathanson (co-founder of the National Abortion Rights Action League and past abortionist) that gives some interesting insight:
“How many deaths were we talking about when abortion was illegal? 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 ‘5,000-10,000 deaths a year.’ I confess that I knew the figures were totally false, and I suppose that 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? The overriding concern was to get the laws eliminated, and anything within reason that had to be done was permissible.”
And as for my claim that they were being performed by physicians, here’s a quote from Dr. Mary Calderon, the medical director of Planned Parenthood in 1960: ”90% of illegal abortions are being done by physicians. Call them what you will, abortionists, or anything else, they are still physicians, trained as such.”
The National Center for Health Statistics says that before 1941 there were around 1,400 abortion-related deaths. This number decreased dramatically once Penicillin became mass-produced in 1945, and by 1966, only 120 deaths were reported. The year before Roe v. Wade (1972), only 24 deaths due to illegal abortion were reported. If legality were the issue, you’d think this number would decrease even more once it became legal, yet 25 abortion-related deaths were reported in 1973, 26 were reported in 1974, and 29 were reported in 1975.
And lastly, here is the New York Post article about NYC tanning salons being inspected more often than NYC abortion clinics.
When you criminalize abortion, it doesn\'t decrease the amount of times this procedure is done. It simply causes women to seek unsafe methods of getting it done.
