Americans United for Life board member Dr. Donna Harrison, diplomat for the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology and president of the American Association of Pro Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, writes in a new article about the difficulties in getting global data from the World Health Organization (WHO) on how many mothers die from abortion.
One of the main obstacles to getting good abortion data, Harrison writes, is “the use of the terms ’safe’ and ‘unsafe,’ which are not scientific terms but more legal and political, because they are directed to changing the law.”
In a 2007 article co-sponsored by WHO, for example, unsafe abortion is defined as “abortions in countries with restrictive abortion laws”. That means that any abortion in such a country, no matter how medically superior the conditions, would be counted as “unsafe”.
This can produce some unintended and even amusing consequences. In 2007 I attended the UN-sponsored Women Deliver conference in London, which was dedicated to advancing maternal health. During the presentation of a paper estimating the worldwide number of “unsafe” abortions, a Marie Stopes International representative from a clinic performing abortions in a country where it is illegal rose in indignation and said, “By your definitions, are you saying that all the abortions performed in my clinic are unsafe?” The presenters did not answer her question. [Read the full article.]
Under WHO’s vague reporting rules, maternal deaths from abortion are typically listed within a wide category that can include deaths from “spontaneous abortion” — miscarriages — as well as induced abortion. One result is that researchers are unable to ascertain the number of deaths from abortions involving the abortion drug misoprostol, or RU-486, as Harrison explains:
Mifepristone and misoprostol abortions in the United States have been linked with severe adverse events, and women could easily die from infections and haemorrhage in areas where they do not have immediate access to transfusion and surgical facilities. Thus, introducing chemical abortions, whether with mifepristone and misoprostol, or with misoprostol alone, in medically underserved areas will mean that these severe adverse events will become maternal deaths.
AUL has long worked to educate the American public and lawmakers about the dangers of RU-486. As Staff Counsel Mailee Smith noted in Defending Life 2009,
RU-486 was actually approved through the FDA’s “Accelerated Approval Regulations.” These regulations were designed for drugs “that have been studied for their safety and effectiveness in treating serious or life-threatening illnesses and that provide meaningful therapeutic benefit to patients over existing treatments.” Yet, as demonstrated above, RU-486 was not adequately tested for its safety and effectiveness and it does not provide meaningful therapeutic benefit over the surgical abortions already available. In addition, pregnancy is not a serious or life-threatening illness. RU-486 should not have been approved under this accelerated procedure. [Read the full article.]
Although Dr. Harrison focuses on the lack of adequate global data on maternal deaths from abortion, similar problems exist in the United States. An article in AUL’s Defending Life 2009 outlines the many obstacles to getting the numbers:
[U.S. Centers for Disease Control] abortion statistics are inaccurate, in part, because of non-reporting. For example, the District of Columbia, Maryland, New Hampshire, and New Jersey do not have abortion reporting laws, and the abortion reporting law in California is permanently enjoined from enforcement by court order. Thus, there is no real way for the CDC or any other health agency to accurately track the number of abortions performed in these states, or record the types, severity, and frequency of complications that result from those abortions. As a result, all nationwide abortion data and statistics are not truly representative of the nation as a whole. [Read the full article.]
This fall, AUL plans to introduce model legislation on reporting abortion complications. To stay abreast of AUL’s work to promote pro-life legislation on the state level, sign up for AUL Action Alerts.
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