On Wednesday Dianne Feinstein set up her question to Brett Kavanaugh regarding his stance on Roe v. Wade by throwing out a staggering statistic. “[In] the two decades before Roe,” she said, “deaths from illegal abortions in this country ran between 200,000 and 1.2 million.”
She was off by hundreds of thousands.
Feinstein was seemingly citing a 2003 report from the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization that was originally founded within the structure of Planned Parenthood. The most deadly year for illegal abortion cited in the report is 1930, when 2,700 women died. In the decades after that, the numbers plummeted.
By 1950, the death toll was “just over 300.” In 1965, almost a full decade before Roe, the number fell to less than 200. By 1972, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that the total count of maternal deaths as a result of illegal abortions was just 39.
The 200,000 to 1.2 million statistic, according to the same Guttmacher article, actually refers to the number of illegal abortions, not the deaths resulting from them. After incorrectly citing the report, Feinstein doubled down on it, stating, “So a lot of women died in that period.”
Chuck Donovan, president of the Charlotte Lozier Institute (the research affiliate of pro-life organization Susan B. Anthony List), was not surprised by Feinstein’s misleading reference. “It’s a pretty common exaggeration that takes place,” he said.
Years before Roe, some pro-choice activists acknowledged that thousands of women were not dying from illegal abortions. In 1960, former Planned Parenthood director Dr. Mary S. Calderone wrote in the American Journal of Public Health, “Abortion is no longer a dangerous procedure. This applies not just to therapeutic abortions as performed in hospitals but also to so-called illegal abortions as done by physician … 90 percent of all illegal abortions are presently being done by physicians … Whatever trouble arises usually arises from self-induced abortions, which comprise approximately 8 percent.”
The Guttmacher report states that the invention of antibiotics had a large impact on the decline of death rates from illegal abortions.
In a twitter thread commenting on Feinstein’s error, columnist Megan McArdle also pointed out the impact of antibiotics: “Those figures [of deaths from abortion complications] date from the era before the invention of antibiotics, when any sort of surgery carried a high risk of dying from concomitant infection.”
Ingrid Skop, an OB/GYN who has been practicing for more than 25 years, says that other medical factors have been at play in the declining death toll. “Antibiotics are only one of the factors that led to decreased mortality from abortion,” Skop wrote in an email. “The development of sharp [dilation and curettage], followed by suction D&C made the procedure infinitely safer.”
As Feinstein’s statement demonstrates, false statistics are a useful scare-tactic to prevent Roe v. Wade from being overturned. Luckily, they can be disproved in seconds.
