Originally posted on Quora November 13, 2020
Rather than repeat the information in the many good, well-researched answers here, I will focus on two [related] damaging myths that many people still believe about making abortion illegal.
Those supporting abortion legalization insist that it "saves lives".
These claims, unfortunately, garnered support for legalizing abortion among those otherwise reluctant to do it, and made those opposed to abortion look like they were indifferent to women dying.
First, one needs to REALLY GRASP that ALL successful abortions--whether legal or illegal, or whether they are "safe" for the mother or not--are fatal to a tiny, defenseless human being who would have had their whole life ahead of them otherwise. This unique human being, at their youngest, did not "ask" to be placed in the temporary state of dependence that he or she us temporarily in.
In fact, ALL of us were once this young and dependent at the beginning of our lives.
As for the aborting mothers, a common claim in pre-Roe times was that "thousands of women died each year in the US from abortions" prior to the Roe v. Wade ruling.
The original source for these figures seems to be a book, written in 1936, authored by Dr. Frederick Taussig. He was an early proponent of making abortion legal.
Excerpt-- "Taussig calculated an urban abortion rate based on records of a New York City birth control clinic, and a rural abortion rate based on some numbers given to him by some doctors in Iowa. He took a guess at a mortality rate, multiplied by his strangely generated estimate of how many criminal abortions were taking place, and presto! A myth is born!
At a conference in 1942, Taussig himself apologized for using "the wildest estimates" to generate a bogus number.
Although it took Taussig six years to reject his own faulty calculations, at least he did admit that he'd been wrong. Other abortion enthusiasts lacked Taussig's compunctions".
The graph below tracks known maternal abortion deaths from legal and illegal abortions from 1940-2003.
It shows the most dramatic drop in maternal abortion deaths from 1940 to 1950. Since abortion was still very much illegal during that period, an excellent guess is that the credit for this goes to improving medical care, particularly the widespread use of antibiotics.
Maternal death rates continued to go down over the years, and, as the graph shows, the Roe v Wade decision that legalized abortion-on-demand nationwide through 28-weeks of pregnancy showed no more decline than what would have been expected anyway.
The evidence that greater access to abortion makes pregnancy "safer" for women is also disputed when international laws are compared.
"The claim that pro-life policies simply lead to an increase in maternal deaths by driving pregnant women to seek unsafe abortions is directly challenged by the empirical record. The lowest maternal mortality rates (MMR) in Europe, for example, occur in Poland, Malta and Ireland—all of which have extremely restrictive policies (Mundial 2010; Hogan et al. 2010). Further, a plethora of systematic analyses examining countries from around the world continuously challenge the idea that legal restrictions on abortion increase MMRs or hospitalizations".
Another abortion myth--related to the above--is the believe that the actual numbers of abortions won't change whether abortions are legal or not.
"Studies have shown that while legal restrictions on abortion do reduce the rate at which it occurs, they do not necessarily result in an increase in the birth rate (Trussel et al. 1980; Matthews et al. 1997)".
Data from the famously pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute has a study showing that when states restrict abortion, the use of the most effective forms of contraception go up.
"Women who lived in a state where abortion access was low were more likely than women living in a state with greater access to use highly effective contraceptives rather than no method". (relative risk ratio, 1.4).
Here is another pro-abortion site confirming that abortion restrictions reduce abortion rates
"Criminalizing abortion or making it less accessible means that some women carry unwanted pregnancies to term".
Pregnancy is temporary, and there ARE humane alternatives to killing when pre-born children are seen as socioeconomic burdens.
Our laws should reflect this reality.