Abortion Safer Than Childbirth: Fact Check — Propagandist since the fall of Roe vs Wade have dusted off the myth that abortion is safer than childbirth and are spreading it far and wide in the establishment media.
Dr. Grazie Pozo Christie writing in The Federalist says the claim is phrased “an American woman is 14 times more likely to die” from childbirth than abortion and is based on a document accessed via the government’s PubMed search engine.
Dr. Christie points out that maternal mortality death rate permanently spiked in 2003 when state health departments added a checkbox to death certificates to indicate whether a woman had been pregnant within the last year.
Most of the deaths with boxes checked, however, did not involve complications from childbirth or pregnancy but homicide, suicide, and overdose.
And then there were the recording errors. In 2013, of the 679 recorded maternal deaths, 187 were women 85 or older.
So that is from where the the dangerous childbirth myth comes.
How about abortions being safe?
Abortion reporting is not a federal requirement. Many states, including the largest, California, do not do it. Further, 23 states do not require any type of abortion complication reporting, including deaths.
If we leave it here, the entire childbirth vs abortion safety debate becomes unsustainable.
But there’s more.
“A Finnish study, for example, found that women are four times more likely to die in the year following abortion than women who give births,” Dr. Christie writes. “In fact, women who had given birth had a lower death rate than women who had not been pregnant at all. Closer to home, a study using a complete data set recovered from California state insurance records showed twice as many women died in the two years after an abortion than after a birth (see table 1 of page 2). Causes of death in these post-abortive women included complications from the procedure — sepsis and hemorrhage, for example — though the most common causes were ‘indirect’: suicide, homicide, overdose, and other risk-taking behaviors.”
Is is abortion safer than childbirth? We fact check it as false.