United States Sees 53 Million Abortions Since Roe in 1973

[Dok]

United States Sees 53 Million Abortions Since Roe in 1973


Americans saw a political milestone this month as more pro-life lawmakers were elected to the House of Representatives than ever before, but the nation also quietly reached a less joyful mark.

In January, the National Right to Life Committee provided a new analysis of the total number of abortions done in the 37 years since the Roe v. Wade decision.

The Supreme Court handed down its controversial ruling — allowing virtually unlimited abortions at any time throughout pregnancy — in January 1973. The NRLC analysis found that 52 million unborn children had been killed in abortions as of January.

The analysis also found that the best estimate for the current number of annual abortions in the United States — involving both the surgical abortion procedure as well as the dangerous abortion drug RU 486 — is 1.2 million.

As a result, the United States likely passed the 53 million abortion mark on November 1 — the day before Americans went to the polls to vote in a pro-life House majority and target President Barack Obama’s pro-abortion allies for defeat.

Obama has done everything in his power to advance abortion and continue that pro-abortion legacy of the Supreme Court, including naming two more pro-abortion jurists in Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. He has also expanded that 53 million abortions by authorizing abortion funding in various instances and decreasing funds for abstinence education.

In its survey of abortion numbers, NRLC goes to the source by relying on the Guttmacher Institute, the former research arm of Planned Parenthood, which receives numbers directly from abortion centers themselves.

That’s because the Centers for Disease Control has never tabulated accurate numbers of abortions. The CDC relies on figures from state health departments, some of which rely on voluntary reporting — and it hasn’t had data from some states such as California and New Hampshire for more than a decade.

“Because of these different methods of data collection, GI has consistently obtained higher counts than the CDC. CDC researchers have admitted it probably undercounts the total number of abortions because reporting laws vary from state to state and some abortionists probably do not report or under-report the abortions they perform,” NRLC explained in January.

Digging into the numbers, the NRLC analysis from earlier this year showed abortion numbers rising in the 1970s and, in the 1980s, abortion eventually mainstreamed itself to the point that about 1.55 million abortions were done annually until the early 1990s.

At that point, as crisis pregnancy centers began turning the corner with the use of ultrasounds, pro-life state legislation began to take hold and the Internet allowed the pro-life perspective to flourish, abortions began to decline.

“After reaching a high of over 1.6 million in 1990, the number of abortions annually performed in the U.S. has dropped back to levels not seen since the late 1970s,” NRLC says.

The Guttmacher Institutes most recent abortion figures, from 2005, confirm the downward trend from a high of 1.6 million abortions in 1990 to 1.2 million that year. Without any hard figures in the last few years, NRLC estimates the number of abortions from 2006 to today at the same rate of 1.2 million that GI reported.

To calculate the overall number of abortions, NRLC includes the hard figures from 1973-2005, the estimates for the last few years and also includes the Guttmacher Institute’s admission that its own figures are likely about three percent lower than the actual totals because of potential errors in reporting.

National Right to Life estimated that, in January, there have been 52,008,665 abortions using either surgical or the abortion drug (RU 486) method since Roe v. Wade.

NRLC director of research and education Randy O’Bannon talked with LifeNews.com at that time about the figures.


NRLC facthseet on abortion numbers

“Abortion has taken a terrible toll on America. We’ve now lost more than 52 million of our sons, daughters, friends, and neighbors and we are a much poorer nation for it,” he said.

“Over the past twenty years, however, we have seen that pro-life efforts can make a difference, as the number of abortions performed in the U.S. has declined from 1.6 million to 1.2 million a year. We’ve still a long way to go, obviously, but we see that pro-life legislation, education, and outreach can save and has saved hundreds of thousands of lives,” O’Bannon added. “Our task is great, but our cause is just.”

http://www.lifenews.com/2010/11/26/nat-6891/

[Damascus]

Awful lot of freaking accidents? Too many sheeple think abortions=birth control. I'm not totally against all abortions but, WTF people the numbers don't lie, this is being used against you! People would defend their right to drink arsenic if they though it was going to be taken away from them. I'm not for government intervention on this but people need to wake up and take some responsibility.

[Geolibertarian]

The "pro-life" side of the abortion debate is clearly dominated by right-wing ideologues. And the reason why their arguments against abortion have always rang hollow to me is that they refuse to acknowledge that there can be no equal right to "be" if there is not also an equal right to be -- "somewhere."

(A "right" being, as Michael Badnarik put it, "something you can do without asking for permission.")

We can have a world in which each person, by virtue of being a human being, has an equal right to life.

We can have a world in which a mere subset of the population has exclusive, unconditional "ownership" of the land on which all must live yet which none produced.

But we cannot have both!

Anyone who insists otherwise is either deeply delusional or a bald-faced liar attempting to dupe people into embracing a morally and intellectually bankrupt ideology.

[freedom_commonsense]

The "pro-life" side of the abortion debate is clearly dominated by right-wing ideologues. And the reason why their arguments against abortion have always rang hollow to me is that they refuse to acknowledge that there can be no equal right to "be" if there is not also an equal right to be -- "somewhere."

I don't know about others in this debate, but I'm not a right-wing ideologue, I've supported your Geoist proposals ever since I read them, they make perfect sense to me.

The main reason I have a problem with the above isn't the actual choice of abortion itself but the state involvement\encouragement. It does however strike me as worrying that many young people are so irresponsible that abortion appears to be a method of birth control...

[chaoticharmony]

I agree with the above comment.  I also have feelings on the issue of "choice".  Having the "choice" is not a blessing when your husband tells you that you have to do it because everyone else does.  I ended up facing this "choice" after my husband's vasectomy failed.  It was nine months of hell, we didn't speak.  But I couldn't do it.  We made it through, but it was a nightmare.

And on the issue of it being pushed, I have experienced that as well.  When I was a senior in high school I got pregnant.  I was 2 months away from 18.  My mom wanted me to talk to the school counselor, so I did.  She told me I would be lucky if I miscarried, but needed to look into abortion in case I didn't find such luck.  I was horrified that she wouldn't even consider adoption or parenting to be viable alternatives.  My mother was raging mad and went with me to see her after this.  She threatened to have me taken away from my parents if I didn't have an abortion.  She had set an appointment up for me to have an abortion, without my consent, without my mothers, and she was now threatening to have the state put me in foster care if we didn't do as she said.

This was our first experience with any threat like this, as I come from an upper middle class, conservative family.  My parents were and still are great, they had never been anywhere near abusive.  I had a 4.0 GPA.  I had never been in trouble.  It made no sense.  We refused to give in and my mother pulled me out of school immediately.  The school counselor called CPS.  Luckily my neighbor was a cop, he helped us get CPS out of the picture.

What is even more disturbing is that all of the complaints my mother filed with the school district went unanswered.  They did nothing to this woman, and I assume she has done the same thing to many others.  They are taught that they are above you, they are the law, you do as they say, or you pay a price.  They never pay a price.  It's the same problem with every other institution that is filled with state and federal government employees.  Some of them are good, but most of the good ones leave because they refuse to treat people like dirt.  Their job is to make you submit. 

As for abortion, I think much can be done to correct the problem, but only if people actually face the reality of what is actually being done.  Abortion can be warranted in some cases, and I won't tell someone what to do, or preach to them about how evil they are.  Every one makes mistakes.  But our government and physicians have been leading us astray on the issue, completely dehumanizing all of us in an effort to reduce the population.  It has nothing to do with womens rights.  It has everything to do with population reduction.  It is sad though, very sad.