University president misleadingly claims abortion is safer than giving birth

The president of University of California, Irvine appeared on MSNBC claiming that abortion is safer than pregnancy. But this oft-repeated fact is one based purely in junk science.

Michele Goodwin, who previously compared pro-life laws to involuntary government servitude, appeared on Deadline, where she told host Nicole Wallace that abortion needs to be legal, because otherwise, women’s lives will be at risk.

Misleading on abortion and maternal mortality

“The data shows us that a woman is 14 times more likely to die by carrying a pregnancy to term than by having an abortion,” she claimed. “We know this. The Supreme Court recognized that in that decision. We know through data that’s posted online by the C.I.A., the Central Intelligence Agency, that we rank about 55th in the world in terms of maternal mortality. We know that in the state of Mississippi if you’re a black woman you’re 118 times more likely to die by carrying a pregnancy to term than by having an abortion.”

She added, “We know that the U.S. is the most dangerous place in all of the industrialized world to be pregnant and we also know that it doesn’t get better when these happen to be children. So when we see lawmakers imposing these restrictions making no exceptions for cases of rape or incest, that they are committing children essentially to a potential death sentence.”

Massive holes in the lone study claiming abortion is safer than childbirth

The study claiming abortion is 14 times safer than childbirth has never been able to be replicated, and was authored by two pro-abortion researchers. It did not include statistics from Maryland, Washington D.C., New Hampshire, New York City, or California — none of which report their abortion data.

There is no federal requirement for abortions or abortion complications to be reported.

In an analysis for the Equal Rights Institute, Dr. John Ferrer also pointed out that the researchers manipulated the data. “For example, compared to abortion mortality rates, the ‘maternal mortality rate’ in the RG study is inflated,” he wrote. “The CDC maternal mortality rate takes all birth-related deaths (the numerator) and divides them by only live births (the denominator), so all stillbirths and miscarriages are only addressed in the top number and not the bottom. The result is an inflated mortality rate from childbirth but not abortion.”

Researchers also excluded deaths after an abortion that were unrelated — meaning if a woman contracted MRSA at an abortion facility and died, that would not be included in the study. However, they did not do the same for women who gave birth.

“The study is careful to avoid false positives for abortion cases, presumably since those would undermine its argument, but not so careful with childbirth cases,” Ferrer said. “This double-standard is all the more troublesome because if the same measure were used for both childbirth and abortion then abortion would appear two to four times deadlier than childbirth. Abortion correlates with higher rates of murder, drug-related death, and suicide, but the RG study excludes those cases from the data while including those cases in the data on childbirth. It’s a flagrant double-standard that, by itself ruins the credibility of the RG study.” (emphasis added)

The Pro-Life Reply to: "Is Abortion Ever Medically Necessary?"

No, abortion doesn’t lower maternal mortality

It is also a pro-abortion myth that abortion lowers maternal mortality rates. Statistics from across the globe have found that legal abortion has no positive impact on maternal mortality, and may even make it worse. As Dr. Monique Chireau Wubbenhorst, a former U.S. Agency for International Development official and professor at Duke University School of Medicine, testified before lawmakers, this claim is not based in scientific reality.

“It’s not true based on any science,” she said. “There are no studies that show that increasing rates of abortion decrease maternal mortality.”

Though she acknowledged that the United States has an unacceptably high maternal mortality rate, she said abortion is not the answer. “[A]bortion does not address risk factors,” she said. “If you want to control a public health outcome or control a specific public health outcome, you focus on the risk factors. Abortion does not address any of those risk factors.”

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