The number of births dropped by about half, as women who refused to bring children into a depressed economy resorted to illegal abortion to end their pregnancies. As a result, about 2500 women died each year from abortion complications, accounting for nearly one in four maternal deaths. From 1950 to 1965 in the US, the National Center for Health Statistics stated that there were 200 to 250 abortion-related deaths reported each year, a number that is acknowledged to be lower than the true death count.2 But even using these statistics, and assuming that illegal abortion was two or three times as dangerous as legal abortion at that time, a simple calculation shows that there were at least 500,000 illegal abortions each year. It's not worth the death of one woman if that's what it would take to cut the number of abortions by 60%, let alone fifty or a hundred women. Thanks to changes in the law, today the mortality rate from legal abortion is almost zero, and abortion accounts for only 3% of maternal deaths.The publication Lancet said that "It is impossible to achieve a low maternal mortality without access to safe abortion." 2. Legal abortions protect women's health. Legal abortion not only protects women's lives, it also protects their health. For tens of thousands of women with heart disease, kidney disease, severe hypertension, sickle-cell anem...
