Deaths before Roe

From Live Action:

False Claim #1: 5,000-10,000 women died annual from illegal abortion before Roe.

FACT: These statistics were made up. The real number was a mere fraction of this. Abortionist Bernard Nathanson admitted that he and others fabricated large numbers of deaths from illegal terminations prior to Roe. Nathanson and Larry Lader, a Margaret Sanger biographer, worked to decriminalize abortion laws. Together, they and others founded NARAL (then known as the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws).

Alexandra Desanctis writes in National Review, “Undoubtedly this argument, that the illegality of abortion was leading to the deaths of countless women at the hands of ‘back alley butchers,'” played an essential role in deciding Roe, adding, “Blackmun… cited the papers of [a] NARAL attorney… who falsified the legal history of abortion to make it appear as if abortion restrictions were not imposed until the 19th century and were created then only to protect maternal health rather than the lives of unborn children.”

Nathanson admitted in his book that the 5,000-10,000 illegal death figure was fabricated because it was a “nice, round, shocking figure.” And the media repeated it without proof. “There were perhaps 300 or so deaths from criminal abortions annually in the United States in the sixties,” he said, “but NARAL… claimed to have data that supported a figure of five thousand.”

The 5,000 figure originates from several sources based largely on assumptions. In the image below, NARAL’s footnote quotes from a source that allegedly “discussed Dr. Christopher Tietze’s estimate of nearly 8,000 deaths from illegal abortion annually in the United States.” One problem: Tietze disputed that number, as did records of maternal deaths reviewed by the CDC. Larry Lader admitted, “Tietze places the figure nearer 1,000.” (Read more.)

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