The Centers for Disease Control released new national abortion figures this week and the mainstream media has essentially ignored the fact that the number of women dying from legal abortions has doubled.
Americans United for Life President and CEO Dr. Charmaine Yoest called the news of a historic 5% drop in the abortion rate, released by the Centers for Disease Control on the eve of Thanksgiving, “a real cause for giving thanks.”
Nevertheless, the pro-life leader noted that reporting on the new data has not included a more somber data-point: the number of abortion-related maternal fatalities doubled in 2008, the most recent year data is available.
“The CDC report documents the death of twelve women following their abortion,” said Yoest. “That number is double the deaths reported the previous year and it’s the highest since 1994.”
Those legal abortion deaths continued this year as a young African-American woman, Tonya Reaves, died following a botched legal abortion she obtained at a Planned Parenthood facility in Chicago.
The autopsy report shows the 24-year old woman died from three major complications during a botched second-trimester abortion suffered at a Chicago area Planned Parenthood abortion clinic on July 20, 2012.
It is the official opinion of the Cook County Medical Examiner that Reaves’ cause of death “is due to hemorrhage resulting from cervical dilation and evacuation due to an intrauterine pregnancy.” In plain language, Reaves bled to death as the result of a bungled D&E abortion.
Yoest said the CDC officials compiling the annual abortion report note in their analysis that state laws have contributed to the decline in the number and rate of abortion. As the legal arm of the pro-life movement, Americans United for Life has paved the way for this historic drop in abortion through leading the development of the intellectual architecture of commonsense legislation designed to protect women and children, such as clinic regulations holding abortion providers to acceptable standards of care.
“For more than 40 years, AUL has been working to advance a culture of life that protects women and children from Big Abortion. And today we celebrate this historic drop in the abortion rate. At the same time, we have to ask why the abortion-related deaths of 12 women are buried in the very last table of the report and unremarked on in the news. The news from this report is that abortion harms women, as well as their babies,” Yoest added.
In 2009, close to 60 pro-life laws were enacted across the states, a marked increase from 2008 and that trend has continued as the passage of pro-life legislation at the state level has been steadily increasing.
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Yoest said AUL’s legal strategy laid the groundwork through the launch of the annual publication of Defending Life, a compendium of model prolife legislation, which is now in its 7th year of publication and includes nearly 50 pieces of model state legislation.
“The news of the drop in abortion demonstrates that our efforts to protect women and children through commonsense regulations on abortion is working,” said Dr. Yoest. “AUL will continue to promote such legislation. In the past two years alone, over 45 pro-life laws across this country were enacted with AUL’s help.”
