By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
After a review of 43 years of data, a major pro-life group has found that the total number of surgical and medical abortions in the U.S. as of October 31, 2010 is 53,495,167.
In a statement released today, Dennis Howard, president of the American Life League Associate group Movement for a Better America (MBA) said he made the review because “I get little chills up my spine when I hear otherwise well-informed people underestimate what has hit us. If every human life is precious, it’s urgent that we get the numbers as right as we can.”
He said, “Some make the mistake of counting only abortions since Roe v. Wade. That leaves out some 1.8 million aborted earlier in states like Colorado, California and New York, where abortion was decriminalized in 1967, 1968 and 1970.” He added, “California and New York were doing a land-office business in abortions from other states before Roe v. Wade.”
MBA updates its data monthly based on the latest edition of the Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract of the United States, projected forward based on the current rate of change. The Abstract bases its data on surveys taken by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a subsidiary of Planned Parenthood.
Howard emphasized that the data is “very conservative” because it covers only abortions that are “legal” and reported. “The actual numbers, if one were to include all the abortions caused by preventing implantation, are many times higher, ” he explained.
Howard pointed out that the data is based on surveys taken by Guttmacher every 3 or 4 years, and interpolated for intervening years. He said that abortionists have many reasons to underreport: abortions paid for in cash; political reasons; privacy reasons; and Medicaid waste, fraud and abuse. There are also serious discrepancies between data from Guttmacher and the Centers for Disease Control.
He said, “Over the years, the variation between Guttmacher data and data from the Centers for Disease Control has ranged from a low of 10 percent to a high of 35 percent, with a 35-year average of 18.61 percent.”
Howard called release of the numbers extremely important because “the stakes are awesomely high – not just in terms of the lives that will be needlessly lost if we fail, but involving the very future of major institutions like the Church, our economy and the nation. … It’s time we all became fully aware that what’s killing America is what America is killing.”
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