Choice war | Without truth, Roe v. Wade stands on bedrock of lies

By: David Morris

Posted: 1/23/08

"We'll never go back," "Never again" and "Rolling back the clock," are mainstays of abortion rights supporters, chanted like cries of, "Remember the Alamo!" These bumper sticker slogans all harken back to the bad old days of abortion - pre-Roe v. Wade - reminding us of the holocaust against women that resulted in more than 1 million illegal abortions a year and more than 10,000 deaths. The only difference is, the Alamo actually happened.

In 1940, Dr. Frederick Joseph Taussig estimated that 681,600 illegal abortions were performed in that year - this number was adjusted to account for population growth to reach the seven figure number used today. The major problem is that Dr. Taussig's numbers were based on a sample of 10,000 patients of the Margaret Sanger Birth Control Clinic in New York and assumed to be representative of the general population - an assumption with no basis in reality. Many anti-abortion activists cite a number around 100,000 as more likely. The problem is, there's no way to know how many illegal abortions were performed - they were never reported.

The "10,000 women dying every year from illegal abortions" figure was widely circulated in the lead up to Roe by organizations such as NARAL, The National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws - but it wasn't true. Bernard Nathanson, a former abortionist and co-founder and first president of NARAL, admitted in his book, "Aborting America," that, "When we spoke of [mass statistics] 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?"

In fact, the only time when the 10,000 figure could have been considered remotely close to the truth was in 1930 - more than 40 years before Roe v. Wade - when illegal abortion was listed as the official cause of death for nearly 2,700 women, with the real number estimated at 8,000-10,000. Just 10 years later, after the advent of penicillin, the official number of abortion-related deaths was less than 1,400 and in 1972, the year before Roe v. Wade, that number was down to 39. In 1974, abortion-related deaths were reduced to 5 - a difference of 34. From 1930 to 1972, death due to illegal abortion declined by 99 percent while population increased by 39 percent. In short, legalized abortion did not save the lives of thousands and thousands of women, as proponents suggest.

These, shall we say inaccurate, statistics are not the only problems with Roe v. Wade and the pro-choice movement. The standard of viability established in Roe is an evolving standard - with every passing decade, the window of viability expands thanks to medical advances. In 1973, the standard of viability was 28 weeks. That standard was changed in 1979 when the Supreme Court ruled in Planned Parenthood of Central Missouri v. Danforth that viability is different for each pregnancy and is to be determined by an attending physician. The youngest surviving premature child on record was born in February 2007 at 22 weeks of age - six weeks younger than originally considered viable. Unborn children who may be protected today due to viability would not have been a decade ago, and those not protected today may be protected in a few years' time.

Roe ought to be overturned and the responsibility of regulating abortion returned to the states. We will not, as these appeals to fear suggest, experience the reproductive rights version of Armageddon, and we will not have an onslaught of women committing sepuku-by-clotheshanger in the streets - it didn't happen then, it won't happen now. Ultimately, Roe v. Wade is little more than shoddy case law built on a bedrock of lies. The ultimate irony of the pro-choice movement is that without the truth, there is no choice.

David Morris, a senior psychology major, is opinion editor.