Ideas that some day might grow up to be posts - vol. 1, no. 2

1. Private free standing medical clinics

Here in Canada, the protectors of the Medicare status quo are quick to rail at any suggestion of private medicine (typically referred to as the American system). Why then is much the same group silent about the private free standing abortion clinics such as those run by our newest symbol of everything that is good about Canada, one Henry Morgentaler? Are clinics that exist to end life that much more important, nay sacred, than those that would like to improve life? Is the desire to live a fuller life by having an unborn baby aborted more important than the desire to live a fuller life by having a heart that beats reliably? Or hips that permit mobility? Or backs that allow for sleep?

2. Going back to back alleys and coat hangers.

It's pretty standard argumentation for the pro-abortion activists to say that the alternative to legal abortion on demand is a return to women dying in their tens or hundreds of thousands at the hand of back alley butchers. Having grown up in the pre-Morgenaler and pre-Roe v. Wade era, and never being aware of this epidemic, I did some research recently on whether such wholesale slaughter did in fact occur. The results, which you can easily find for yourself, include the following:

a. Most illegal abortions were performed by doctors. "Back alley" referred to sneaking in the doctor's back door, not to having the abortion in a scene of squalor and filth. See, for instance, this report by the medical director of Planned Parenthood U.S.A. in 1960 (Source: Wikipedia):

Mary Calderone, former medical director of Planned Parenthood, said, in a 1960 printing of the American Journal of Public Health:

"Abortion is no longer a dangerous procedure. This applies not just to therapeutic abortions as performed in hospitals but also to so-called illegal abortions as done by physician. In 1957 there were only 260 deaths in the whole country attributed to abortions of any kind, second, and even more important, the conference [on abortion sponsored by Planned Parenthood] estimated that 90 percent of all illegal abortions are presently being done by physicians. Whatever trouble arises usually arises from self-induced abortions, which comprise approximately 8 percent, or with the very small percentage that go to some kind of non-medical abortionist. Abortion, whether therapeutic or illegal, is in the main no longer dangerous, because it is being done well by physicians."

b. In 1972 "the Centers for Disease Control reported that 39 women died from illegal or self-induced abortions" (Source: Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman).

c. Women die today as a result of a perfectly legal abortion done by a doctor. While the numbers are not large, they are similar to the number of women who died of illegal abortions during those alleged bad old days:

The Centers for Disease Control counted 386 safe and legal abortion deaths during the period 1972 - 2003 (Source: Real Choice.)

In other words, the case for legal abortions can't seriously be made on the basis saving women from back alley butchers. A (regrettable) few died from illegal abortions, and a (regrettable) few die from legal ones. It's a non-issue.