{"id":1669438,"date":"2022-10-03T07:39:10","date_gmt":"2022-10-03T11:39:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1669438"},"modified":"2022-10-03T07:39:33","modified_gmt":"2022-10-03T11:39:33","slug":"abortion-is-not-safer-than-childbirth-heres-the-data-the-left-wants-to-hide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/abortion-is-not-safer-than-childbirth-heres-the-data-the-left-wants-to-hide\/","title":{"rendered":"Abortion Is Not Safer Than Childbirth \u2014 Here\u2019s The Data The Left Wants To Hide"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">30<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fabortion-is-not-safer-than-childbirth-heres-the-data-the-left-wants-to-hide%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1669438&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><\/div>\n<p>Who can forget Mark Twain\u2019s famous maxim: \u201cThere are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics\u201d?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve been brooding over this line while watching the pro-abortion left hard at work promoting the startling (and erroneous) claim that \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/22270271\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">an American woman is 14 times more likely to die<\/a>\u201d from childbirth than from abortion. They want to move this false claim into the popular imagination, to make the conversation solely about pregnant women\u2019s safety and ignite an unreasonable fear of carrying a child to term. Because what they want \u2014 radical abortion license to the day of birth, for any reason or no reason, and paid for by you-the-taxpayer in every state of the nation \u2014 is way out of line with\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/harvardharrispoll.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/HHP_June2022_KeyResults.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">average Americans\u2019 sentiments<\/a>. They\u2019d rather gin up panic over labor and delivery, which has never, in the history of mankind, been safer. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>It behooves physicians like me to examine the studies critically and then to put the \u201clie\u201d to that statistic \u2014 in the interests of truth and expectant mothers\u2019 peace of mind. \u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The left, including the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.supremecourt.gov\/opinions\/21pdf\/19-1392_6j37.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">dissenting<\/a>\u00a0Supreme Court justices in<em> Dobbs v. Jackson Women\u2019s Health Organization, <\/em>relies on a faulty 2012\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/22270271\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">study<\/a>\u00a0that used numbers that are dead wrong, the result of our country\u2019s seriously flawed maternal mortality data collection methods \u2014 and equally flawed abortion data-gathering. Very basically, the researchers overcounted deaths from childbearing and undercounted deaths from abortion.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<h2>Undercounting and Overcounting<\/h2>\n<p>The American maternal mortality death rate used by these and other similar studies started to rise sharply in 2003, coinciding with a change in surveillance methods: the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pmc\/articles\/PMC3056032\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">pregnancy checkbox<\/a>\u00a0introduced that year. State health departments added this checkbox to death certificates to indicate whether a woman had been pregnant within the last year. As more and more states implemented the checkbox, maternal death rates rose to stratospheric levels. <\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s easy to see why.\u00a0The checkbox gathered data not only on women who had died of complications from pregnancy or birth, but also on women who died of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.liebertpub.com\/doi\/10.1089\/jwh.2020.8875\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">homicide, suicide, and overdose<\/a>.\u00a0(In fact, these are the most common causes of death in pregnant and recently pregnant women in the United States.) It also happens to be the case that the checkbox is often checked erroneously for women who have\u00a0<em>not\u00a0<\/em>recently been pregnant.\u00a0For instance, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pmc\/articles\/PMC8055191\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">187<\/a> deceased women aged 85 and older were identified as \u201cmaternal deaths\u201d in the year 2013. That was a year in which a total of 679 women were counted. Almost a third (28 percent), then, we now know had not been pregnant in decades, if ever. Ah, statistics.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<h2>Inaccurate Reporting<\/h2>\n<p>The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to its credit,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.cdc.gov\/nchs\/data\/hestat\/maternal-mortality-2021\/maternal-mortality-2021.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">admits<\/a>\u00a0that coming up with accurate numbers is difficult. They refer to \u201cissues associated with the reporting of maternal deaths on death certificates,\u201d perhaps referring to the bizarre inclusion of elderly deceased women as \u201cmaternal deaths.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>However, even if the maternal death rate were accurate, comparing that statistic to that of abortion mortality remains a case of \u201cgarbage in, garbage out.\u201d (A phrase we used in medical school to point out the importance of accurate data-gathering.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>To understand why, it is crucial to understand that\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.guttmacher.org\/state-policy\/explore\/abortion-reporting-requirements\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">abortion reporting<\/a>\u00a0is not required by federal law. It is done on a state-by-state basis. For one, California \u2014 where almost 1 in 8 Americans live \u2014 does not report abortions. In addition, 23 states do not require any type of abortion complication reporting, including deaths. <\/p>\n<p>Even in states that do require reporting, most women leave abortion facilities within hours of the procedure and go to hospital emergency rooms when they experience complications. Those events are not reliably linked back to the induced abortion that caused them. Indirect abortion deaths, caused by the psychological disturbances that increase the likelihood of dying after abortion, are not\u00a0captured\u00a0at all.\u00a0Therefore, neither the denominator (the number of abortions), nor the numerator (the number of resultant deaths) is accurate in the famously quoted 2012 study.\u00a0<\/p>\n<h2>Better Data<\/h2>\n<p>You get a starkly different picture when using complete surveillance methods, with retrospective linking to medical records in countries with a single health care system. A Finnish\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.afterabortion.org\/pdf\/DeathsAssocWithAbortionJCHLP.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">study<\/a>,\u00a0for example, found that women are four times more likely to die in the year following abortion than women who give birth. 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\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.afterabortion.org\/pdf\/DeathsAssocWithAbortionJCHLP.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">study<\/a>\u00a0using 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 \u2014 sepsis and hemorrhage, for example \u2014 though the most common causes were \u201cindirect\u201d: suicide, homicide, overdose, and other risk-taking behaviors.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>So, when pro-abortion activists say, \u201cchildbirth is vastly more dangerous than abortion,\u201d they don\u2019t have the data to support it. This misuse of statistics serves many political purposes: to gin up opposition to health and safety regulations on abortion, to increase funding for abortion businesses such as Planned Parenthood, and even to discredit pregnancy resource centers that support women who choose birth for their children. But these fake claims also have real-life negative consequences for the very women about whom pro-abortion activists claim to care. They scare women away from the delight of motherhood. At the same time, their disingenuous talking point minimizes the serious medical risks that women experience in having an abortion.<\/p>\n<p>Beyond all this, their claims distract from what should be our society\u2019s\u00a0<em>un<\/em>politicized public health focus: initiatives that address the real sources of pregnancy-related mortality, whether that pregnancy ended in abortion or in the birth of a child. Only then can we arm ourselves properly to fight\u00a0<em>every\u00a0<\/em>avoidable maternal death. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\" \/>\n<p>\n  Dr. Grazie Pozo Christie specializes in radiology in the Miami area and serves on the advisory board for The Catholic Association.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Who can forget Mark Twain\u2019s famous maxim: \u201cThere are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics\u201d?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I\u2019ve been brooding over this line while watching the pro-abortion left hard<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1409,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1669438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1669438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1409"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1669438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1669438\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1669438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1669438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1669438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}