Horror of Abortion!

Post Reply New Topic

Nonsense. I checked his sources and each one only presented numbers for legal abortions and some indeed were from pro-life groups (not all). I'm not sure where that graph came from because he did not link the source, but the view source image shows it coming from a blog. If I overlooked some concrete data pertaining specifically to illegal abortions, preferably from a peer-reviewed source, then by all means point it out and I will happily apologize to both of you. Otherwise, you were saying something about hot air and ideologues...

As to the dishonesty, 91 said:


Go ahead and check the link for yourself. This is not a rejection. No such rejection ever took place. This is a plea from pro-life advocates to the UN. I have yet to hear a single objective objection to the methods used in the study I shared. It was peer-reviewed and it is, in fact, widely accepted by the scientific community, the medical community, and the media. Women have had, and will continue to have abortions regardless of legality. This has been observed on a worldwide scale. The U.S. actually has a lower abortion rate than many other countries where is is illegal, and that rate is declining.

Looks like Sarah Palin was right, doesn't it.

Welcome to the Republican Party.

This shows that Government should not be involved in health care. This is something for doctors whom actually see their patient as an individual not some brainless unelected official from Washington.

the general gist here being that if one has the slowest forms of prostate cancer one would suffer less than with treatment and still die of something else.

Please do, read it and you will find that member states of the UN rejected the Lancet definitions of safe and unsafe; legal and illegal. The letter was a complaint that despite this, they were included in definitions anyways; expressly against the wishes of member states.

Let me once again restate the source you clearly have not read: Abortion numbers increased after legalization.

'In the USA, the number of abortions increased during the years immediately following decriminalisation'
-http://eurpub.oxfordjournals.org/content/11/2/190.full.pdf Pg 193

'This phenomenon also applies to Europe in countries such as the UK and France'
Ibid Pg 193



We do not need abortion rate figures for this time to establish the number of women who died from it. The deaths have been recorded by the National Center for Heath.



The numbers of 'deaths' can be easily found by googling this; National Center for Health Statics data on Maternal Abortion Deaths chart 1940-1985.



That contention, though often made, is pretty much not viable. If illegal abortion is as unsafe as claimed, then the numbers must have been lower; otherwise there would have been more deaths. Though we do not have accurate statistics on the numbers of illegal abortions, we can get to reasonable estimates through the numbers of maternal deaths through abortion (a statistic we actually do have from the National Center for Heath).

'Before Roe v. Wade, there were approximately 100,000 illegal abortions per year'
-Cynthia McKnight, Life Without Roe: Making Predictions About Illegal Abortions (Washington, 1992), 10-15

'Findings: Before Roe there were on average 100,000 illegal abortions per year. The largest reasonably possible number of abortions before Roe v Wade was in 1961, at around 210,000; the lowest was 39,000 in 1950.'
-Barbara J. Syska, Thomas W. Hilgers, M.D., and Dennis O'Hare, "An Objective Model for Estimating Criminal Abortions and Its Implications for Public Policy," in New Perspectives on Human Abortion, ed. Thomas Hilgers, M.D., Dennis J. Horan, and David Mall (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1981), 78.

Please keep in mind that after Roe numbers per year were around 700,000 and reached 1,000,000 within a few years.

You could just realize that which is obvious. That removing the legal stigma from abortion lead inexorably to more abortions.

Or better record keeping.
We are putting a guess against a stat

For a difference that large, I would say your explanation is rather faulty.

+1, Well said.

have they done percentage estimates or only raw numbers?
did they account for social phenomena, as is common with other stigmas?
do the writers have a bias?


now since i cant find your second article i havent read it (only references from pro life sites come up, this in itself is suspect, many other abortion papers are directly available to googles knowledgebase,)
but i can say for certain they have not used the 30 or so years of advancement in medical knowledge, neurology, sociology psychology and not to mention the vastly improved methods of data acquisition we have today.(cant even begin to compare to be honest)

here is one that was done a full 4 years after the article and some 20 years after the original paper, all sources referenced of course

link here

now to put this in perspective history wise one needs to look at WHO's report from 2008 as well

"This document, now in its sixth edition, presents global and regional estimates of the incidence of unsafe abortion and associated mortality in 2008. An estimated 21.6 million unsafe abortions took place worldwide in 2008, almost all in developing countries. Numbers of unsafe abortions have increased from 19.7 million in 2003 although the overall unsafe abortion rate remains unchanged at about 14 unsafe abortions per 1000 women aged 15–44 years. This increase in number of unsafe abortions without a corresponding increase in the rate is mainly due to the growing population of women of reproductive age. "
link here

if one looks at 1989 and 84 rates they are so close that methodology could account for it.

Well of course you wouldn't be able to find a source to corroborate this except from a pro-life source, do you really think a pro-abortion site would want the general public to know these stats?

I am certain that there are methodological issues with these sorts of studies. A gap of 600,000 is pretty hard to miss. It requires a bit too much suspension of disbelief for me to accept that this would be the case. Especially since we can see the increase in numbers of abortion occouring from legal sources. For example 1973 it was around 700,000 and a few years later 1,000,000. Even if it could be found that there was an average of 700,000 illegal abortions in the year before roe, you still would not have accounted for the 300,000 increase that occurred in the years afterwards.



Citing large numbers of illegal abortions does not really do anything to disprove that the act of legalizing them does not increase the numbers. Your point is a non-sequitur. There are also some instances, that I have described where the change from illegal to legal does not changes the numbers. For example in Spain where women were able to procure abortions in other countries. In Spain and Greece the social taboo most likely had already been broken down and women had access to legal abortions elsewhere.

The trend is however evident in the United States, UK and France etc. When clear upswings in the numbers of legal abortions and good estimates about the numbers of illegal abortions combined with studies that show proper restrictions can effect change in numbers (see the study of US laws I posted on page 18) gives us cause to think the abortion can be reduced by thoughtfully changing legislation.

no i point out the first article and then i point to numbers that in that context suggests very little change in that time period, they should not be viewed seperately as i pointed out in my post.
it also shows that there is little correlation of legality and incidence rate, if anything the countries where it is legalized show a slight tendency to have less abortions pr woman.
this notion is also supported in pretty much all material i have come across,a high birth rate pr woman seems to have a factor as was also pointed out in both WHO reports (there is one for every 3-6 years)

Last edited by Oodain on 23 Oct 2011, 1:14 am, edited 2 times in total.

Assuming they are giving accurate numbers which is doubtful if you look into what they choose to report.

so in contrast to 4 (despite using 5 names) clearly bbiased doctors you choose not to trust the thousands involved in dozens of highly regarded institutions from around the globe, brilliant.

Highly regarded for whom? Really if they are associated with the UN for instance, that's a reason right there not to trust what they are saying.

Remember Oil for Food?

There has been concerted, intellectually dishonest effort to equate unsafe with illegal. It seems we are still just discussing the findings of that silly lancet article and the group of researches given cash for findings from planned parenthood. I have given you a number of serious studies that look at the quite obvious increase that usually occurs when abortion becomes legal. Comparing countries where abortion is legal to those where it is illegal is NO way to refute this. Since it seems more likely the case that this represents the equilibrium in those individual states. If you actually did want to prove the statement you just made, you ought to offer evidence that abortion rates did not go up or were reduced when legalization occurred. Until such time as you put forward some positive your comparative claims stand in direct conflict with the findings of a good amount of research and studies and we have good grounds for doubting your position.

@Inuyasha

The standard Oodain is citing as being that of the UN was actually rejected by the majority of its members and then pro-choice forces managed to get them included in the WHO report anyway. It is actually blatantly dishonest to claim that these findings represent the position of the UN. Oodain is just wandering in circles in lieu of accepting that which is just blatantly obvious; that abortion numbers generally trend upwards when it becomes legal. I figure he will just keep throwing mud anyway in the hope that it might obscure the main point.