During a fervent storm of figures related to the maternal health initiative, the Lancet study brings good news.
With the best methods possible, the Lancet study shows that maternal deaths have declined since 1980 from more than a half-million annually to 342,900. That’s without abortion being declared an international right and without $30 billion additional funding for family-planning groups.
Abortion activists have been storming Capitol Hill, citing the discredited figures and reciting the mantra that abortion rights will lower global maternal deaths. At one briefing, speakers demanded U.S. funding of international abortions because “public funding of abortion is a human right.”
A right abortion activists declare, for the sake of funding, is necessary to further reduce the claimed 13 percent of women who die annually from unsafe abortions. So while we’re talking about numbers, here’s a follow-up to the Margaret Somerville article stating she’s exaggerating the numbers for the other side.
She deduces that there are at least 800 late-term abortions carried out in Canada each year, which amounts to less than 0.3 per cent of live births, a miniscule [sic] figure she nonetheless seems to think puts paid to the myth that they are “not rare.”
She then claims that pregnancy complications that threaten the mother’s health and well being are, in fact, “rare.” Canada’s maternal death rate is eight out of 1,000 births. Our late-term abortion rate, by the most generous extrapolation of Somerville’s numbers, is about half that, yet somehow “not rare.”
When I hear a number like 0.3 percent, I think to myself, that’s not as significant as the 13 percent of maternal deaths we’re told are from unsafe abortions. When does a percentage become significant then? Is 0.3 percent indeed “a miniscule figure”?
There are 19 million unsafe abortions each year according to the World Health Organization statistics, which they sum up like this.
about 20 million of them (women with unplanned pregnancies) resort to unsafe abortion…
Rounding up a million? Okay, let’s keep reading.
Unsafe abortion – defined as a procedure for terminating an unwanted pregnancy either by persons lacking the necessary skills or in an environment lacking minimal medical standards or both – results in the deaths of 67 000 women every year…
Even if we conceded that 13 percent of all maternal mortalities are in fact from unsafe abortions, the percentage of women who die from them, according the the WHO’s own statistics, is 67,000/19,000,000 or 0.35 percent. Canada’s own maternal mortality rate is over double this, at 0.8 percent.
To put it plainly, less than half of a tenth of a percent of unsafe abortions result in maternal death.
For me, 19,000,000 is the most striking number in this mix, and it’s the number of abortions that I want to tackle, along with the other 87 percent of maternal deaths that seem to have been lost in the storm.
by 
Canada’s maternal mortality rate is no where near 8/1000. It is 8 per 100,000. Quite a difference.
Further to Melissa’s comment – with about 1 million people and Canada’s 10.28/1000 birth rate, that would work out to over 10000 babies born in Calgary alone last year. At 8/1000, we’d have over 80 women dying last year from maternity-related causes. I can’t imagine that this would have happened without public commentary of some type – in fact, I haven’t heard of any (not that they don’t exist, but maternal death is as rare now as when abortion was illegal).
I will admit, you have to be careful when quoting statistics. The WHO site had a table showing 19,000 unsafe abortions worldwide, but under the category it noted ‘in 1,000s’ making that 19 million.
Mark Reynolds, the author of the Somerville followup, seems to be from LA, so might not have his finger on the pulse of these numbers and the situation locally. You’d think The Gazette would’ve caught that. Thanks for your close reading skills!