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PBA330H: Maternal Mortality
This is based heavily on Section 9.5 of Christopher Kaczor's The Ethics of Abortion
Abortion advocates sometimes claim that “abortion is safer than childbirth.” How can we respond?
Illegal Abortions
A related argument is that abortion should be legal or ethically permitted in order to defend the health of women who might die from illegal abortions.
Dr. Bernard Nathanson1):
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 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?
- Prior to the legalization of abortion, deaths from abortion decreased dramatically throughout the 20th century
Tracking Abortion Deaths
- Although we do have reliable statistics on maternal death from pregnancy, we do not have reliable statistics on maternal deaths from abortion2)
- There is simply no uniform, mandatory, and consistent way of tracking deaths from abortion in the US, which relies on voluntary reporting methods when it comes both to the numbers of abortions and the numbers of maternal fatalities from abortion3)
Ireland
- When abortion was illegal in Ireland, Ireland still had lower maternal morbidity rates than Scotland and England, where abortion was legal4)