Why the Back-Alley Abortion argument for abortion is false
(1) Roe v. Wade didn’t reduce the maternal death rate from illegal abortion.
Flanagan assumes that making abortion legal made it safer, but doesn’t offer any evidence for that assumption beyond a correlation-is-causation argument; since women are no longer showing up in hospitals after surreptitious Lysol abortions, Roe must have been the answer! That’s a weak case, and the data just don’t back it up.
Whenever I give presentations on college campuses, I share this graph from the National Center for Health Statistics, showing maternal deaths from illegal abortions by year—but with the x-axis, the year, erased.
I then ask a brave audience volunteer to guess where 1973, the year of Roe v. Wade, falls on the graph. Most select a peak, in line with the narrative that Roe v. Wade caused maternal deaths to plummet. Invariably, they guess wrong:
Roe v. Wade isn’t even a blip on the graph. Forget “correlation doesn’t equal causation"—they don’t even have correlation! The real savior of women’s lives? Advances in antibiotics.
(2) A lot has changed since the 1950’s.
And not just antibiotics. Flanagan herself acknowledges that it “was illegal to advertise contraception nationally until 1977,” four years after Roe; today, you can pick up condoms at any corner drugstore, and prescription contraceptives are widely available. Pregnancy discrimination was perfectly legal at the time of Roe; today, it’s prohibited by federal law. Women couldn’t get credit cards in their own name at the time of Roe; today, it’s unquestioned. Marital rape wasn’t criminalized in all 50 states until two decades after Roe. And I haven’t even mentioned that today, pro-life pregnancy centers outnumber abortion businesses. Using the 1950’s to predict a post-Roe future is wildly unrealistic.
(3) Legal abortion is still killing women.
Tonya Reaves. Jennifer Morbelli. Maria Santiago. Lakisha Wilson. Christin Gilbert. The list goes on. The pro-life movement can tell stories just as tragic as the “back-alley” stories Flanagan shares. The fact that their abortions were legal doesn’t make them any less dead.
From Secular Pro-Life Perspectives: [X]
My only disagreement is with point #2. Obviously family planning itself is necessary for safely spacing pregnancies; I used to teach and still advocate for fertility awareness myself for that very reason.
BUT, the way mainstream birth control is used and supported today, and how some methods operate as abortions in themselves, is not conductive to a truly anti-abortion mindset. We should instead support methods that do not support the “pregnancy is a disease” mindset that fuels abortion.* We need methods that respect women’s biology – INCLUDING ovulation and pregnancy – that are also safe, effective, and even healthy to use.**
With that soap box speech aside, I appreciate Secular Pro-Life for showing, once again, how the back alley abortion myth is just that – a myth. I hate that abortion had to be thrust into our culture to get people off their asses and actually fight for parental and women’s rights to make abortion finally unthinkable, but it is what it is. We can no longer ignore the innocent human beings – both the unborn and their mothers and others affected by their deaths – who are harmed by abortion. There is no more excuses we can muster.
*I have information on the problematic nature and subculture of birth control and how it contributes to abortion here: [X][X]
**You can learn more about fertility awareness based methods of family planning here. [X][X]
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