The heavily redacted 911 records shared by Operation Rescue from a Planned Parenthood in Flossmoor, Illinois, create questions about the repeated claim that abortion is safer than childbirth.
The woman in the abortion organization’s care suffered a hemorrhage after undergoing an abortion. Instead of immediately phoning emergency medical services through a landline or cellphone, Planned Parenthood placed the call through a Voice Over Internet Protocol. This means multiple call relays had to occur before Planned Parenthood was connected to a 911 operator, with the injured woman still being in need of treatment during this unnecessarily long process.
The neglect that Planned Parenthood has displayed toward its patients’ life-threatening emergencies has proven fatal in the past. Tonya Reaves, Roselle Owens, and Cree Erwin Sheppard are just a few women who were fatally injured by the botched abortions they received at Planned Parenthood clinics. In Reaves’s case, Planned Parenthood left her severely bleeding for five hours before calling emergency medical services. The only consequence the abortionist responsible for Reaves’s death faced was a reassignment to another facility.
Abortion-choice advocates are unlikely to look at this and disagree the lives of these women were endangered due to reckless and negligent care. But the frequently repeated claim that “abortion is seven times safer than childbirth” is their defense for a procedure they opine to be a vital healthcare service for women. Legal abortion is necessary because childbirth is dangerous, they often argue.
But this statement does not take into consideration what causes of death are included in maternal mortality rates, a lack of clear reporting on abortion data, and what circumstances would constitute an abortion-related death.
For example, would a woman dying from peritonitis after developing pelvic inflammatory disease from her abortion count as an abortion-related death? Far too many potential outcomes exist, making these variations difficult to properly identify and document.
In addition, the figures cited within maternal mortality reports in the United States are not always specifically measuring deaths associated with delivery. Often included are deaths from induced abortion, tubal pregnancies, and molar pregnancies, or even factors peripherally related to delivery, such as heart disease or high blood pressure. These comparisons between abortion-related deaths and maternal mortality rates are thus misleading.
We also cannot rely on states to submit an organized report of annual abortion statistics, as there is no federal law requiring it. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has even acknowledged the shortcomings of its own data, given that states such as California and Maryland do not comply with requests for reporting inquiries. These states are absent in the CDC’s numbers, even though estimates from the Guttmacher Institute have previously indicated they have the fifth- and sixth-highest abortion rates in the country, respectively.
Aside from the CDC, the former Planned Parenthood research arm is the only other source for abortion data. Though Guttmacher’s reporting tends to be more complete than the CDC’s, information is submitted voluntarily, and only 27 states document complications for any type of abortion.
Abortion advocates such as Cecile Richards have insisted “the science” supports abortion being safe and that reporting requirements would not only be unnecessary but burdensome for abortionists. But the issue of flawed abortion reporting processes in our country runs very deep.
Journalist Kevin Sherlock uncovered evidence in the 1980s of an attempt to obscure documents pertaining to abortion complications. Though the CDC tried to obstruct his efforts, Sherlock was able to document 30% to 40% more abortion-related deaths than what the organization had published in its national statistics. Due to his limited resources, Sherlock was confident he had only uncovered a fraction of deaths that had been a direct result of an abortion.
From 1981-84, the CDC’s report indicated there had only been 42 abortion-related deaths throughout the nation during this period. Not only did a New York top health official identify 30 such deaths occurring in New York City alone, but, apparently, the city’s commissioner of health was aware of another 146 abortion-related deaths having taken place outside the state. All this happened within the same time period, meaning there had been at least 176 deaths tied to abortions, a number significantly higher than what the CDC reported.
The lack of transparency in abortion reporting continues to be a public concern. With the absence of a federal law to record the outcomes of each abortion, there are no reliable statistics as to its safety relative to childbirth. A thorough system for gathering abortion statistics would enable us to gather relevant health data for a procedure affecting millions of women’s lives. With women’s safety on the line, shouldn’t both sides of the debate agree that we need accurate abortion data?
Samantha Kamman covers abortion for Lone Conservative.com.
