Rewriting History: The FOCA Findings, HR 1964:1

HR 1964, the Freedom for Partial Birth Abortionists Act… I mean the Freedom of Choice Act is a classic example of rewriting history.  For instance, finding 5 says:

(5) These decisions (Roe v. Wade, Griswold, Doe v. Bolton and etc)have protected the health and lives of women in the United States. Prior to the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, an estimated 1,200,000 women each year were forced to resort to illegal abortions, despite the risk of unsanitary conditions, incompetent treatment, infection, hemorrhage, disfiguration, and death. Before Roe, it is estimated that thousands of women died annually in the United States as a result of illegal abortions.

Give me a break.  If there were 1.2 million illegal abortions in unsanitary conditions per year before Roe, why did abortion go down to 750,000 abortions the year after Roe when those same doctors who let women in through the back alley were now legal?  There weren’t 1.2 million abortions per year until 1977.  There were probably 100-200,000 abortion a year, legal and illegal, in the years before Roe. 

Were those doctors incompetent back alley butchers?  That depends on when you ask abortion advocates.  That’s the mantra now, but in 1960 Planned Parenthood’s Mary Calderone noted that almost all illegal abortions were performed by licensed physicians in good standing.

What about the 5-10,000 women who were dying every year?  Didn't happen.  Bernard Nathanson one of the founders of NARAL writes,  "How many deaths were we talking about when abortion was illegal? In NARAL, we generally emphasized the frame of the individual case, not the mass statistics, but when we spoke of the latter it 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? The overriding concern was to get the laws eliminated, and anything within reason that had to be done was permissible." B. Nathanson, Aborting America, Doubleday, 1979, p. 193”

A thousand women a year died from abortion in the 40’s, but with the availability of antibiotics and improving trauma care, this was reduced to 39 deaths in 1972, the year before Roe. The findings are nonsense.