‘Childbirth is fourteen times more dangerous than abortion!” This assertion has been repeated, in person and in the media, by highly credentialed physicians and scientists, by lawyers appearing before the Supreme Court and at least one Supreme Court Justice herself, by a galaxy of popular entertainers, and by a horde of media reporters and pundits. Despite its continuous, widespread dissemination for more than a decade, this conventional wisdom is demonstrably false.
The delusion of abortion safety compared to childbirth originated in a 2012 paper by E. G. Raymond and D. A. Grimes, who concluded that “the risk of death associated with childbirth is approximately 14 times higher than that with abortion.” They came to this conclusion by dividing the number of pregnancy-related deaths in the United States between 1998 and 2005 (8.8 deaths per 100,000 live births) by the “mortality rate related to legal induced abortion” during the same time period (0.6 deaths per 100,000 abortions). The result of this calculation is 14.66, thus the origin of the notorious 14-to-1 stat.
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