What where the mortality rates for women from illegal abortions prior to its legalization?

Question

What where the mortality rates for women from illegal abortions prior to its legalization?

Answer 1

There's no way to estimate the number of abortions woman do on themselves or that were the so-called "back-alley" abortions.  Even today, girls use a common household chemical that would kill half of them if they didn't have 911 and ER back-ups.  And even the use of that chemical and subsequent crisis cannot technically be attributed to an abortion attempt because that poisoning could have been caused by mere exposure to the chemical in cleaning activities and the girls don't "fess up", of course.  

What helped to reduce the mortality of pre-medically safe abortions were antibiotics beginning in the 50's.  Puerperal sepsis, not hemorrhage, was what killed most women after home abortions.  When a girl became severely ill with infection, either she or someone else obtained other people's ATB's or, as was common, a physician would quickly prescribe one without asking questions, knowing full well the indication, but recording the indication under a symptom, such as simply fever.  All abortion statistics originate in physician records and those records have seldom accurately descibed the scope of this problem.  It was RARE for a physician to record an abortion death as caused by abortion, shockingly rare, in order to save the reputation of the girl's family or to spare them any further suffering.

Abortion morbidity and mortality statistics were impossible to accurately formulate at the time due to the illegal nature of home abortion and the horrible secrecy of it all. And, there was an entrenched pre-patients' rights fidicuary concept of patient care back then in which the family physician maintained MANY secrets and kept many illegal behaviors to himself to protect his patients, including how many unwanted pregnancies ending in "missing" newborns who were frequently simply suffocated, wrapped and stored in attics in shoeboxes and such.  

Prior to ATB's, women died all the time from puerperal sepsis with or without proper medical care.  Today, only about 2 or 3 die in 10,000, or something like that.  Physicians weren't into washing their hands too much until the 40's, which was the leading cause of postpartum infections. Nation wide or large population based statistics were simply not done much prior to the 40's-50's, so there's no way to know the pre-ATB death toll from pre-medically safe abortions.

Answer 2

This is a good question.

Here is a link that might help.

http://www.abortionfacts.com/online_book...

Answer 3

Mary Calderone, who was then Medical Director of Planned Parenthood, reported on a conference studying abortion in America. She indicated that in 1957, there were 260 abortion deaths nationwide. That number included all abortions: legal, illegal, and spontaneous.

In the case of the 5,000 - 10,000 claims, the original source was a book -- Abortion, Spontaneous and Induced -- published in 1936 by Dr. Frederick Taussig, a leading proponent of legalization of abortion.  At a conference in 1942, Taussig himself appologized for using "the wildest estimates" to generate a bogus number.

Bernard Nathanson, co-founder of NARAL, admitted that he and his associates knew that the claims of 5,000 to 10,000 criminal abortion deaths were false. They bandied them about anyway, Nathanson confessed, because they were useful. This, too, is old news -- Nathanson came clean over twenty years.

A timeline.....

*1936, Frederick Taussig announced that there were 5,000 to 10,000 maternal deaths from criminal abortion annually in the United States.

*In 1942, Taussig admitted that his calculations had been wrong, and that there was no way as many as 5,000 women were dying, much less 10,000.

*From 1940 through 1970, abortion mortality fell from nearly 1,500 to a little over 100.

*In 1972, according to the Centers for Disease Control, 39 women died from criminal abortions.

Answer 4

http://www.scribd.com/doc/2304877/Deaths...

This may help...I haven't read it myself, but it turned up in a search engine... I suggest you run a few searches to find the data you are asking about.  I don't come onto answers to spend an hour researching a single question.

Answer 5

No one will know since women didn't admit they'd survived an illegal abortion and no one volunteered that their patient had died of an illegal abortion. Today, I know that plenty of women die from illegal abortions and pregnancy complications because abortion is illegal in their countries: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/12/world/...

Answer 6

One study estimates that 5k-10k women died annually pre-Roe due to complications with illegal abortions.

Interesting question... I would just be careful of politicized info though. You will surely encounter some with this question.