I can’t get a working link to it, but the Times’ “Week in Review” section ran a series of graphs about abortion yesterday. Bill Marsh wrote above them: “In the 1950’s and 60’s, before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion, there were between 200,000 and 1.2 million illegal abortions performed each year (more precise estimates were impossible to make).” Clarke Forsythe informs us in The Silent Subject that this estimated range came from a 1955 Planned Parenthood conference and “was based on meager data and was substantially contradicted by the conference participants themselves.” He points out that California, in its first year of legal abortions (1968), reported only 5,000–and it was thought for various reasons to have a higher than average rate. To accept the 1.2 million figure, you’d have to believe that Roe caused the number of abortions nationally to drop significantly–which is highly implausible.