Abortion numbers: How many were there? How many women died?

“I’m opposed to homicide—but shouldn’t every woman have the right to kill a child sleeping in a bedroom of her house?”

That’s the logic of Kurt Eichenwald’s Newsweek cover story on abortion last month, which begins, “I am opposed to abortion. I believe women have the right to choose. This is not a contradiction.” Sure it is. Eichenwald is logical only if he’s describing a woman’s right to choose what she’s having for lunch, or if he completely disassociates law from morality. (No society has been that schizophrenic.)

I wouldn’t even comment on his opinion, which is conventional among many who justify bad things but don’t want to be considered bad people, except that Eichenwald also dishes out some misleading factoids. Here’s one: “During the 1940s more than 1,000 women were known to have died each year from complications caused by an illegal abortion”

That maternal death figure is probably inaccurate, but even if true it would be irrelevant to current discussions, since the vast majority of such deaths came because until the 1940s we lacked antibiotics to fight post-abortion infection. Forget the “back-alley abortion” propaganda: Even Planned Parenthood head Mary Calderone in 1958 acknowledged that doctors in good standing performed more than 90 percent of illegal abortions.

The one careful study of maternal deaths from abortion during that era took place in Minnesota, where obstetricians and gynecologists deployed medical teams to check carefully all reports of female deaths that might be maternal. The teams found an annual average of 1.2 maternal deaths from abortion. Since the 3 million Minnesotans in 1950 comprised one-fiftieth of the 1950 U.S. population of 150 million (I like throwing around 50s), if the whole nation were like Minnesota about 60 women would have died each year from illegal abortion complications.

The nation was not like Minnesota, where almost everyone is above average, so the overall number in the 1940s was higher, but we don’t know how much higher. We do know that pro-aborts continued into the 1960s to throw around big numbers. But when abortionist Bernard Nathanson became pro-life, he confessed that he and others “knew the figures were totally false, but they were ‘useful.’ … The overriding concern was to get the laws eliminated, and anything within reason that had to be done was permissible.”

Eichenwald also wrote in Newsweek: “Somewhere between 200,000 and 1.2 million illegal—and often unsafe—abortions were performed in the United States each year in the 1950s.” That wide range came from Planned Parenthood researcher Christopher Tietze, but even pro-abortion doctor Harold Rosen, in his 1954 book Therapeutic Abortion, didn’t think that more than 300,000 abortions were taking place then.

In 1973, during the first year of nationwide legalization, abortionists legally slew 744,600 unborn children, and no one thinks legalization produced a drop in the number of abortions. (In reality, during the decade after legalization the number doubled to 1.6 million.)

The real number of abortions per year in the 1950s was probably around 200,000, and that’s tragedy enough. Abortion numbers have been on a roller coaster during the past two centuries. For instance, the numbers were up from 1830 through 1860, despite the practice’s illegality, as a huge surge in prostitution accompanied mid-19th-century urbanization, and prostitutes without any effective means of birth control probably averaged an abortion every half-year. (I crunched some unhappy numbers for a book of mine, Abortion Rites: A Social History of Abortion in America.)

The frequency of abortion probably fell steadily after the Civil War as Christians created compassionate programs to help crisis-beleaguered women, as newspapers investigated abortionists, and as legislatures tightened laws. The numbers increased again from 1920 to 1990 and have gone down since then.

The real story of abortion in America is complicated. Good laws and support for women in crisis help, but neither is sufficient by itself. We should thank God for every baby saved.