Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) told the Associated Press that if Roe v Wade were overturned by a realigned Supreme Court, “It means a minimum of 5,000 women a year will die. So all options are on the table.”

Assuming she’s talking about women who would die during abortion procedures if the country reverted to the situation pre-1972, could this 5,000 figure be anywhere near correct? Or is Boxer — à la other far left propagandists (Patterico has another example here) — using the most incendiary rhetoric she can — the facts be damned?

Of course she is.

Ellen Goodman of the Boston Globe, who’s fairly far to the left, used the 10,000 figure in a column last year, got besieged by readers questioning the statistic, did some work and recanted:

Though data were admittedly skimpy by today’s standards, Taussig’s (1936) research estimated 8,000 to 10,000 deaths (for 1930, of 2,700 officially reported - ed.).

Over the decades, the numbers shrank to hundreds and then dozens because of penicillin, because doctors began performing abortions, and because abortion became legal in critical states such as New York. By 1972, the year before the Roe v. Wade decision, the Centers for Disease Control reported that 39 women died from illegal or self-induced abortions.

The 10,000 figure from 1930 seems to have been recycled by abortion advocates in the 1960’s and ’70s. Urban myth fact-checking site “The Straight Dope” reports that Dr. Bernard Nathanson, an abortion clinic director and co-founder of NARAL who later turned against abortion rights, wrote in his 1979 book Aborting America:

In NARAL we generally emphasized the drama of the individual case, not the mass statistics, but when we spoke of the latter it was always ‘5,000 to 10,000 deaths a year.’ I confess that I knew the figures were totally false, and I suppose the others did too if they stopped to think of it. But in the ‘morality’ of our revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics?

So too with Boxer — why use honest statistics when dishonest ones get the job done?

[For more on California’s all-show no-go U.S. Senator, go here.]

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 6th, 2005 at 6:02 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Barbara Boxer, California Schemin', Nemesises ... Nemesi?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.