What We Did Not Know: The Aftermath of Thirty Years of Legal Abortion

by Carrie Gordon Earll

Who could have predicted the bitter fruit and tragedy that would come from legalized abortion? After thirty years, the aftermath demands examination.

When the movement to repeal laws banning abortion began to take shape in the late 1960’s, abortion proponents were on the verge of propelling the U.S. into uncharted territory. Never before in the nation’s history had abortion been available on demand and for practically any reason during the entire term of pregnancy. Few prognosticators could predict what widespread and unrestrained abortion would mean in terms of social policy, let alone women’s health. Two landmark U.S. Supreme Court rulings, Roe vs. Wade and Doe vs. Bolton, opened the floodgates and now, thirty-plus years later, Americans taste the bitter fruit of Roe and Doe legacy.

What do we know now about the impact of abortion that we did not know when it was legalized in 1973?

We did not know that the number of abortions performed nationally would skyrocket.


The number of reported abortions in the U.S. more than doubled in the first two decades after legalization, reaching more than one million each year.1
We did not know that promises of less child abuse and fewer out-of-wedlock births were false.

After legalization, the reported number of child abuse cases more than quintupled, reaching more than 870,000 in 2004. The number of births to unmarried women more than tripled, with more than 1.4 million births reported in 2004.2
We did not know about the prevalence of repeat abortions.

In 2003, 43 percent of women who had abortions in the U.S. had at least one previous abortion.3
We did not know that the vast majority of abortions would be for reasons other than rape, incest and the life of the mother, or that most would be among single women.

These “hard case” categories represent approximately 1 percent of all U.S. abortions.

More than three-quarters (80%) of all abortions are among unmarried women.4
We did not know that abortion advocates would knowingly exaggerate the number of illegal abortion deaths prior to 1973 in order to boost their political case for repealing abortion prohibitions.

You’ve probably heard that tens of thousand of American women died in illegal abortions before 1973, the year that abortion was legalized in all 50 states. Bernard Nathanson, an early leader in the abortion rights movement and an abortionist for many years, tells a different story in this excerpt from his book, Aborting America: “How many deaths were we talking about when abortion was illegal? In N.A.R.A.L. (The National Abortion Rights Action League) we generally emphasized the drama of the individual case, not the mass statistics, but when we spoke of the latter is was always ‘5,000 to 10,000 deaths a year.’ I confess that I knew the figures were totally false, and I suppose the others did too if they stopped to think of it. But in the ‘morality’ of our revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics.” 5

Nathanson’s admission of purposefully padding the abortion death numbers is confirmed by fellow early abortion advocate Lucinda Cisler, writing before legalization in 1973: “Another statistic that is bandied about for all the right reasons – but with much unwarranted confidence – is the figure of 10,000 U.S. abortion deaths per year. A study made in the 1930’s, before the development of antibiotics made even illegal abortion less deadly than it used to be, came up with this number of 10,000 deaths; but it is no longer anywhere near the truth and has no place in any serious discussion about abortion. The most accurate estimates are that 500-1,000 deaths occur each year because of septic abortions, and this range takes false reporting strongly into account.”6
We did not know the physical and mental health risks associated with abortion.

Women face a number of possible physical complications including hemorrhage requiring transfusion, perforation of the uterus, cardiac arrest, major unintended surgery, infection resulting in hospitalization, convulsions, undiagnosed ectopic (tubal) pregnancy, cervical laceration, uterine rupture, and death. 7

All women, especially young teenagers, are at risk for damage to their cervix during an abortion, which can lead to complications with later pregnancies. 8

A Finnish study of suicide after pregnancy found that “the suicide rate after an abortion was three times the general suicide rate and six times that associated with birth.” 9

Women who ended their first pregnancy by abortion are five times more likely to report subsequent substance abuse than women who carried the pregnancy to term, and four times more likely to report substance abuse compared to those whose first pregnancy ended naturally. 10

We did not know that abortionists would develop barbaric late-term abortion methods, such as “partial-birth abortion.”


Partial-birth abortion involves the partial delivery of a living child in order to puncture and crush the baby’s skull. 11
We did not know that medical advances would allow physicians to perform surgery on preborn children in the womb.

For an example, see story and photograph of “Baby Samuel”
www.tennessean.com/sii/99/09/...

We did not know that developments in obstetric imaging resulting in 4D-ultrasound technology would allow us to come face to face with preborn children before birth.

For an example of this imaging, see www.gemedicalsystems.com/rad/...

We did not know that the two women listed as plaintiffs in the U.S. Supreme Court cases that resulted in legalized abortion, Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, would later regret their involvement and ask that these landmark cases be reversed.

For details on their legal request to overturn these decisions, see www.roenomore.org/press/txjf....
Now — three decades and more than 44 million abortions later — we know!



Carrie Gordon Earll is the Senior Policy Analyst for Bioethics at Focus on the Family and a fellow with the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity.











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1Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Abortion Surveillance Report - 1998, June 7, 2002, Table 1, accessed at on June 4, 2003.
2U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, Vital Statistics of the United States, Statistical Abstracts from 1978 and 2007; U.S. Office of Human Development Services and U.S. Office of Youth Development, Juvenile Court Statistics 1960-1973, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Statistics and research, Child Maltreatment 2004 annual report.

3Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Abortion Surveillance Report for 2003, accessed at on December 20, 2006.
4“Facts in Brief: Induced Abortion,” Alan Guttmacher Institute, 2002, accessed at on June 4, 2003.
5Bernard Nathanson, Aborting America, (Toronto: Life Cycle Books, 1979), p.193.
6Lucinda Cisler, “Birth Control” in Robin Morgan, ed., Sisterhood is Powerful (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 260.
7Warren Hern, Abortion Practices, (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1990), p. 175-193.
8Kenneth Schultz, et al., “Measures to Prevent Cervical Injury during Suction Curettage Abortion,” The Lancet, (May 28, 1983): 1182-1184.
9Mika Gissler, et al., “Suicides After Pregnancy in Finland, 1987-94: Register Linkage Study,” British Medical Journal 313 (1996): 1431-1434.
10David Reardon, et al., “Abortion and Subsequent Substance Abuse,” American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse Vol. 26, No. 1 (2000): 61-75.
11“Partial-Birth Abortion (D&X;) Procedure,” Focus on the Family.





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