The abortion advocates at the Guttmacher Institute want states to stop collecting statistics on abortion. This would be a mistake. Often the abortion surveillance reports the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) compile from these state numbers is the only way we know how many women have died from abortion in a given year.
In my inbox recently was an email from our friends at Operation Rescue, detailing the last hours of a teenager in Colorado who died after an abortion at Planned Parenthood in February. Pro-life activists who pray outside abortion businesses alert the rest of the movement when tragedies like this occur, but this is an imperfect system and sometimes the CDC report contains surprises.
For instance, the report from 2022 – the most recent available because the CDC publishes at a glacial pace – shows five women died in 2021 “as a result of complications from legal induced abortion.” This is devastating and made worse by the fact that these women’s deaths basically went unnoticed except among family and friends. All we know is five women died, and now Guttmacher doesn’t want us to know even that.
Abortion reporting is a mess to begin with. Nothing compels states to compile and submit these numbers, and some of the most abortion-friendly states don’t. As the CDC report indicates, some states skip reporting for years at a time.
Guttmacher also collects state data, and it has had a reputation for greater accuracy than the CDC statistics. But its new stance is that the risks of collecting abortion data outweigh the benefits because the information might be used “to stigmatize, harass, or even prosecute abortion patients and providers.” […]
— Read More: www.lifenews.com
