Natural Abortion and Miscarriage Data, and Elective Abortions and Adoptions.
The subject of abortions has many philosophical, religious, physiological, health care, equity, life planning, and family economical aspects, apart from the judicial rules created by the Federalist Society choices for Supreme Court Justices.
I just want to discuss the maternity and physiological data, which I am of course also not an expert on.
The data come from a study by Prof. William R. Rice of UC Berkeley from 2018. The extreme anti-abortion legislatures are claiming that life begins at fertilization. Rice’s study shows that only half of fertilized eggs will become a live birth for even 20 year old mothers. The probability decreases with increased age. For those who believe that fertilized eggs are already children, Rice points out that with the number of fertilized eggs which perish will be reduced sixfold with contraception and elective abortions, than without either.
For those women far enough along to know that they are pregnant, about 10%-20% will have miscarriages according to the Mayo Clinic. About half of those will occur due to chromosomal abnormalities, and half from underlying causes.
Arguments against abortion as well as punishing those who need them do not sound that convincing, especially when we know that they also occur naturally. We now know that as people age, genetic copying errors can result in cancers. The natural abortion data may be evidence that it also happens in the creation of an entire human from stem cells before the start of the fetus. This just may be variations inherent in quantum mechanics of the chemistry of genetic DNA copying in the creation of the several trillion cells in a baby.
In demographics, 25% of women will have an abortion, and 60% of those women are already mothers. One-half are below the poverty line, and another quarter are close to it. About half of abortions are now occurring in states which will rule it out if the Supreme Court rules that Roe V. Wade was wrongly decided almost 50 years ago, and that women have no right to an abortion, perhaps even under any abusive circumstances..
From the Guttmacher Institute, there were 862,320 abortions in the United States in 2017. This was 13.5 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44 years, and 18.4 abortions per 100 pregnancies ending in abortion or live birth. The abortion rate per women in the age group is now about a half of what it was in the peak of 1980.
If abolishing Roe v. Wade is the ruling, it is estimated that 75,000 women who want an abortion couldn’t get one, and would give birth instead. If allowed to travel to other states, the other women who want one will be terribly inconvenienced including financially to take time off and travel to another state for their abortion.
To Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s argument that unwanted births will all be adopted, we point out that there are only about 125,000 adoptions a year in the United States. Another 75,000 yearly would increase that by 60%.
To the right and ACB who handmaiden women to carry fetuses to birth, we also have to repeat the data cited by Prof. Michele Goodwin of the UC Irvine School of Law, that women in the US are 14 times as likely to die in childlbirth than in an abortion. In Mississippi, which passed the anti-abortion law being considered by SCOTUS, woman are 118 times more likely to die in childbirth than in an abortion. In Louisiana, it is 57 more dangerous.
From Goodwin’s Twitter and articles, we learn that abortion is a crucial option, since 49% of the pregnancies in the US are unintended. This is 54% in Texas, and 62% in Mississippi.
The US only ranks 55th in the world in preventing maternity deaths. That is largely due to the lack of health care or of adopting Obamacare in the same states that will block abortions. This is the worst ranking among developed countries, and Texas ranks worst. In the US, for Black women, the maternal death rate is 4 time that of white women. In some states, it is 10 to 17 times higher.
From the CDC, for 2020, the yearly US maternal mortality rate was 24 per 100,000 live births. For non-Hispanic Black women, this was 55 per 100,000 live births, 2.9 times the rate for non-Hispanic white women. For Hispanic women the rate was 18 per 100,000. The rate for women aged 40 and older was 7.8 times that for women under age 25, where it was 13.8 per 100,000 live births. In 2020, there were 3.61 million live births in the US, with 861 maternal deaths.
From the Guttmacher.org, their preliminary data for 2020 shows that medication abortions have passed 50%. They are approved by the FDA for abortions before 10 weeks, but further research shows that they work safely past that. Twenty six states are attempting to put restrictions of all sorts on these medicated abortions.
A quote from Guttmacher: “Currently, 40 million US women aged 13-44 (58% of the total number in the country) live in states that have demonstrated hostility to abortion rights” which is 29 states. Twenty six million women of this age group (38%) live in 16 states that support abortion rights. 2.5 million of these women (4%) live in middle-ground states.
In 2014, the racial breakdown of abortions was: Black, 28%; Hispanic, 25%; White, 39%; and Other, 9%.
Guttmacher references a Turnaway Study by UCSF that women who are not able to get the abortions that they want are three times as likely to become unemployed, and four times as likely to be living in poverty as those who could obtain abortions.
We can only hope that the Supreme Court Justices and other judges become aware of the effects of their judgements, and that the overwhelmingly male and white state legislatures passing these restrictive laws on women and families become informed as well.
