Planned Parenthood’s false stat: ‘Thousands’ of women died every year before Roe
A reader asked us to investigate this repeated claim by the president of Planned Parenthood — that “thousands of women” died every year from botched abortions before the Supreme Court in 1973 nullified antiabortion laws across the United States in Roe v. Wade.
This turned out to be an interesting inquiry, taking The Fact Checker through a tour of decades of musty academic literature. Statisticians had tried to parse data on what was, for the most part, an illegal act. Unplanned pregnancy and abortions were deeply shameful at the time, so the official statistics were not necessarily reliable indicators of mortality rates from abortion.
Still, by the time Roe was issued, 17 states had liberalized their abortion laws, and the Centers for Disease Control was collecting solid data on abortion mortality. If Roe is overturned, a significant number of states, such as California and New York, are...