The Party of Death Fudges Some Figures

Fortunately, Ramesh Ponnuru is there to catch them:

The report claims that there were "200,000 to 1.2 million" abortions a year in the 1950s and 1960s. The upper end of that estimate isn't remotely plausible. The number of reported abortions in 1974, when Roe had made them all legal, was 899,000. The number in 1975 was 1 million. Are we really supposed to believe that the number of abortions fell when abortion became legal? (And then immediately started to climb for a decade and a half?) As the pro-life lawyer Clark Forsythe has pointed out, the relatively low number of legal abortions in California after its 1967 liberalization makes even the low end of the estimate look excessive.

The institute's take on abortion's effect on women's health is also open to question. Look at the graph on page 13 of the report. The title of the graph reads "Deaths from abortion declined dramatically after legalization." (They're referring to maternal deaths.) But the graph itself shows that those deaths were dropping fast before any state had legalized abortion. And if the graph had started in the 1940s, it would have been even clearer that antibiotics, not liberal abortion laws, caused that decline in death rates.

The report's statistics on contraception, unintended pregnancies, and abortion also tend to undercut its insistence on contraception as the only way to bring down the abortion rate. The rate of unintended pregnancies stayed flat from 1994 to 2001, and the use of contraception by those unmarried women thereport deems "at risk" of unintended pregnancies dropped. Yet the number of abortions also fell, which suggests that for one reason or other, an increased percentage of the women with unintended pregnancies were carrying their babies to term. It may very well be that the number of abortions would have dropped faster if the use of contraception had increased. (That must be true, at some level.) But it's also possible that abortions have grown fewer because people have changed their attitude toward abortion, because anti-abortion laws have been enacted, and because teen sexual activity has decreased. The report does not consider these possibilities.

The institute's authors go on to defend American womanhood from the charge (made by whom?) that it uses abortion as the birth control of first resort. That would be a false charge if it were made. But it is telling that in discussing it, the institute can't bring itself to mention that 44 percent of all abortions are repeat abortions, and 18 percent repeat repeats—facts that arerelevant to whether some women have the attitude toward abortion that the report is trying hard to deny exists.

I mean, what's a little lying compared to advocating infanticide anyway?