The Safety of Legal Abortion and the Hazards of Illegal Abortion
More: abortion-distorting-science-safety-legal-abortion.pdf
Someone gave me the phone number of a person who did abortions and I made the arrangements. I borrowed about $300 from my roommate and went alone to a dirty, run-down bungalow in a dangerous neighborhood in east Los Angeles. A greasy looking man came to the door and asked for the money as soon as I walked in. He told me to take off all my clothes except my blouse; there was a towel to wrap around myself. I got up on a cold metal kitchen table. He performed a procedure, using something sharp. He didn’t give me anything for the pain — he just did it. He said that he had packed me with some gauze,
that I should expect some cramping, and that I would be fine. I left.1-Polly Bergen, discussing the illegal abortion in the 1940s that
rendered her infertile and nearly proved fatal.
As part of their strategy to make abortion illegal and unavailable, anti-choice forces make
unsubstantiated claims that legal abortion is harmful to women’s health. The fact is that the decriminalization of abortion in the United States in 1973 has led to tremendous gains in protecting women’s health. The Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences declared in its first major study of abortion in 1975 that “legislation and practices that permit women to obtain abortions in proper medical surroundings will lead to fewer deaths and a lower rate of medical complications than [will] restrictive legislation and practices.”2The American Medical Association’s Council on Scientific Affairs reaffirmed this finding in 1992 when it attributed the marked decline in deaths from abortion services to “the shift from illegal to legal abortion,” along with the introduction of antibiotics and the widespread use of effective contraception in the 1960s.3
Furthermore, the experience in the United States is very similar to that in Western Europe, where mortality rates from abortion services were reduced after legal abortion became widely available.4