“The Beauty Of Statistics On Abortion”

By BRIAN CLOWES

Part 2

(Editor’s Note: Brian Clowes has been director of research and training at Human Life International since 1995. For an electronic copy of chapter 19 of The Facts of Life, “United States Abortion Statistics,” e-mail him at bclowes@hli.org.)

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In the previous article, we considered several ways to visualize the more than 55 million abortions that have been performed in the United States since the first states legalized the procedure. Images are excellent tools for describing the sheer magnitude of the abortion disaster, which has killed the equivalent of the population of 18 of the western states or of the six largest metropolitan areas in the nation.
One superb example of the use of imagery is a comparison between the numbers of people killed in all American wars and the number of people killed by abortion in this nation. Life Dynamics uses small beads to represent the relative number of deaths, and you can see it on YouTube by searching for “Millions Dead.”
Other areas in which imagery can be very helpful in reaching people are the frequency of the “hard cases,” the terrible toll that abortion is having on minorities, and the reasons women give for late-term abortions.
The classic hard cases are abortion for rape and incest, birth defects, and to preserve the life and the health of the mother. Pro-abortionists rely heavily upon these rare abortions to make their points, and they do their very best to exaggerate their frequency. Unfortunately, they have done such a good job that most Americans believe that the majority of abortions are performed for the hard cases.
The National Abortion Federation’s “Abortion Facts” web page provides an example of this type of deception. One of the “myths” this page attempts to dispel is: “Women have abortions for selfish or frivolous reasons.” The NAF’s rambling “refutation” of this statement mentions only abortions for serious maternal health problems, fatal birth defects, and rape and incest. This is a deliberate and conscious attempt to give the impression that abortions are done only for serious reasons.
In reality, most abortions are performed for reasons that have nothing to do with either the mother’s or the baby’s health. The pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute interviewed thousands of women in abortion clinic waiting rooms, and these women claimed that only about seven percent of their abortions were being performed for the hard cases. The Guttmacher Institute also found that about 95 percent of women in 26 other nations cited social or economic reasons for having abortions.
Even these numbers are overstated, because women often report that they are aborting for serious reasons when in reality they are not. The most authoritative numbers on why women abort comes from the mandatory abortion reporting required by several of the states. This reporting found that only 0.13 percent of all abortions (one out of 769) are done for cases of rape and incest. And 0.59 percent of abortions are done for fetal birth defects, 1.01 percent for the mother’s physical health, and 1.24 percent for the mother’s mental health. This is a total of 2.97 percent of all abortions done for the hard cases.
How can we represent these frequencies visually? Consider a dollar’s worth of pennies arranged in a 10 X 10 square. Ninety-seven of these pennies are tarnished. Three of the pennies are brand-new and shiny. Two of these bright pennies represent abortions done for the mother’s mental or physical health, and one is for all of the abortions done for rape, incest, and birth defects. No matter where you place the three shiny pennies in the 10 X 10 square, they are going to look insignificant.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, the 97 tarnished pennies represent reasons such as “I’m not ready to be a mother right now”; “I have relationship problems”; “A baby would interfere with my education or career,” and “I don’t feel mature enough to raise a child.” In fact, abortion has become nothing more than a social eraser for embarrassing situations, since 84 percent of all abortions are performed on unmarried women.
If you have the time, you might make a permanent display by gluing 1,000 pennies to a piece of plastic or wood in a 25 X 40 matrix. You could color only one of these pennies red to represent the frequency of abortions for rape and incest, six of the pennies blue to represent abortions for birth defects (eugenics), ten of the pennies yellow to represent abortions done to preserve the mother’s physical health, and twelve for the mother’s mental health.
Do not be afraid to tell and show the truth — that the overwhelming majority of abortions are performed for social or economic reasons. Of course, this assertion will have no effect on truly hard-core pro-abortionists like Jane Hodgson, who said: “A medically necessary abortion is any abortion a woman asks for.”
Even as we focus on accurately presenting data on the reasons women give for abortion, we must be absolutely clear that there are no justifiable reasons to kill either a born or unborn person. When a mother’s life is at risk during a pregnancy, we must do our best to save both lives. Nor should a disability, regardless of how severe, be a death sentence for an unborn child.
An especially sensitive area for pro-abortionists is any publicity regarding their systematic targeting of minority babies. In the United States, there have been 31.1 million abortions performed on minority women since the first states legalized prenatal child killing in 1967. Since that time, about 11 percent of the white race has been wiped out by abortion. But 15 percent of Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, and Hispanics have been killed by abortion, along with an incredible 31 percent of American blacks. A total of 18.2 million black babies have died at the hands of the lethal corps of abortionists, which is almost completely white.
We have seen that our 55 million abortions have wiped out the equivalent population of 18 western states that cover more than one-half of the area of the contiguous United States. Now imagine for a moment that every black person simply vanished from the American South — from El Paso, Texas, to the Outer Banks of North Carolina and from Knoxville, Tenn., to Key West, Fla. That is equal to the number of African-American preborn children who have been killed by legal abortion.
Or we could look at the westernmost 32 states, which occupy 85 percent of the area of the United States west of a line drawn from the western border of Ohio to the Florida Panhandle. The number of black babies killed by abortion is equivalent to every black person living west of this line.
Put another way, it took 83 years for the Ku Klux Klan and other racists to lynch 3,445 African-American adults. It takes only 83 hours for abortionists to kill that many preborn black babies today.

“Dirty Little Secrets”

As far as late-term (second- and third-trimester) abortions are concerned, we have heard a constant drumbeat of propaganda from the pro-abortionists and their media toadies about just how rare they are and how they are only performed for the most serious conditions.
During the battle over the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, Planned Parenthood claimed: “The procedure, dilation and extraction (D&X), is extremely rare and done only in cases when the woman’s life is in danger or in cases of extreme fetal abnormality.”
The Guttmacher Institute performed a survey of a large number of women obtaining late-term abortions and asked them their reasons for doing so. It found that only about one percent of second and third-trimester abortions are performed for fetal anomalies, or eugenics. One-third (31 percent) of the women surveyed said that they misjudged how far along they were; one-fourth (27 percent) said that they found it hard to arrange an earlier abortion; 14 percent said that they were afraid to tell their parents or their “partner”: and the rest gave reasons such as taking their time to decide or “waiting for a change in their relationship.”
Ron Fitzsimmons, executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers (NCAP), said:
“When you’re a doctor who does these [partial-birth] abortions and the leaders of your movement appear before Congress and go on network news and say these procedures are done in only the most tragic of circumstances, how do you think it makes you feel? You know they’re primarily done on healthy women and healthy fetuses, and it makes you feel like a dirty little abortionist with a dirty little secret. I think we should tell them the truth, let them vote, and move on.”
We have allowed the abortion industry and its supporters to keep their “dirty little secrets” for far too long. The only cure for this campaign of lies is for every single pro-life person to learn the issues and then to talk about them with everyone they know — friends, family members, fellow churchgoers, and co-workers. Only a widespread program of education conducted by millions of persistent pro-lifers will remedy the false impressions the public has on abortion. When this happens, pro-life victory will be much nearer.