{"id":174167,"date":"2017-11-04T14:29:53","date_gmt":"2017-11-04T19:29:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liveaction.org\/news\/?p=174167"},"modified":"2024-09-20T16:05:09","modified_gmt":"2024-09-20T21:05:09","slug":"pro-abortion-professor-testifies-against-heartbeat-bill-using-bogus-debunked-abortion-statistics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/pro-abortion-professor-testifies-against-heartbeat-bill-using-bogus-debunked-abortion-statistics\/","title":{"rendered":"Pro-abortion professor testifies against Heartbeat Bill using bogus, debunked abortion statistics"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Prior to the legalization of abortion, those who sought to legally end the lives of preborn children falsely marketed their position by claiming that women were dying by the thousands (and even millions) from illegal abortions.\u00a0However, there is absolutely no evidence to back up those figures.<\/p>\n

Despite this, those figures continue to be repeated by abortion advocates any time they sense that the so-called “right” to abortion is potentially in jeopardy.<\/p>\n

A pro-abortion professor, testifying under oath before Congress, unfortunately used these disputed and highly suspect statistics regarding the number of women who died from illegal abortions in an effort to oppose the federal pro-life Heartbeat bill,\u00a0HR490<\/a>, which proposes to stop abortions at a point when it can be documented<\/a> that the preborn child’s heartbeat can be detected:<\/p>\n

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Prof Priscilla Smith testifies HR490 Heartbeat abortion bill<\/p><\/div>\n

In her\u00a0testimony<\/a>,\u00a0Professor Priscilla Smith<\/a>\u00a0claimed that 5,000 women died annually from illegal abortions prior to Roe v. Wade<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Women have been obtaining abortions since the beginning of time, before Roe when abortions were illegal\u2026 An estimated 1.2 million women each year still resorted to illegal abortion in the US. As many as 5000 of these women — already born \u2013 living, breathing, lungs working, hearts beating, women, many with children at home who depended on them — 5,000 of them died each year as a result of illegal abortions and many more were severely injured. This is the world we would return to if HR490 went into effect….<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But the facts don’t agree with Smith’s claims. A 1975 report by National Academy of Sciences, Institute of Medicine, entitled, “<\/span>Legalized Abortion and the Public Health: Report of a Study,<\/a>” disputes these statistics (emphasis added):<\/p>\n

It is difficult to find credible estimates of the number of deaths associated with illegal abortion. One estimate, which has been frequently quoted, is between 5,000 and 10,000 deaths per year. That is hardly plausible<\/strong><\/em>, considering that the total number of deaths of women aged 15-44 from all causes in the United States is approximately 50,000 annually, and the total number of deaths due to abortion reported by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) has been below 500 since 1958 and below 100 since 1971<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The 5,000 figure originates from a piecemeal of several sources based largely on assumptions, and\u00a0comes straight from the largest abortion lobby group in the nation: National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL<\/a>.) \u00a0NARAL’s footnote quotes from a source that allegedly “discussed Dr. Christopher Tietze\u2019s estimate of nearly 8,000 deaths from illegal abortion annually in the United States.” The truth is that Tietze disputed the 5,000 to 10,000 number, as did records of maternal deaths reviewed by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in the years just prior to national legalization.<\/p>\n

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NARAL Footnotes on illegal abortion deaths<\/p><\/div>\n

In fact, in Lawrence Lader’s book “Abortion,” also sourced, he clearly states, “Tietze places the figure nearer 1,000.” But, as Dr. John C. Willke explains in the video below, that trend decreased over time:<\/p>\n