There are quite a few extreme pro-lifers at my school. I noticed a few weeks ago that one girl was wearing a shirt saying something to the effect that “one in three babies are aborted”.
Now, that seems like a crock of shit to me. One in three? That seems entirely too high. What are the actual statistics on abortion?
Would you believe One in Four? The line Abortion ratio is number of reported, legal abortions per 1000 live births. So 333 is a 3:1 ratio, or 1 in 4. Now, this is not the same as 1 in 4 pregnancies ending in abortion, because it doesn’t include miscarriages.
I’ve seen a number of differing figures - the one I’m most familiar with is that 1 American pregnancy in 4 ends in induced abortion.
According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute there are approximately 1.3 million abortions in the US annually. I understand that this institute is ‘pro-choice’ in affiliation. The linked information sheet also says:
49% of pregnancies among American women are unintended; 1/2 of these are terminated by abortion
This would be consistent with a 1 in 4 figure.
Now, one could argue about the rate of recognised and unrecognised miscarriage, so it mightn’t be entirely accurate to talk in terms of the number of pregnancies ending in abortion.
The CDC reports that there were just over 4 million live births in the USA in 2002.
So, the ratio of live births to abortions in the US is roughly 3:1 - a figure which is, perhaps, much higher that most might expect.
According to *Choices, A Pro-Choice Benefit Comic Anthology for the National Organization for Women [NOW] *, in colonial New York City, aborted babies actually outnumbered live-born. This isn’t some decadent new addition to the culture. According to the same source, the oldest known medical text, Chinese, was a description of an abortion procedure. And the Vatican expressed no strong opinions about abortion prior to the 1860s.
I was hit up with this figure and decided to look into it, back in 1993 or so. The general figure I recall was 1 abortion for every three live births. The point I made then, and one echoed by Achernarabove, is that this cannot support the idea of one out of three babies are aborted (which was the original assertion). Elective abortion is only one of several other factors that terminate pregnancy early, and arguably the only truly elective one.
Vlad/Igor
The phraseology is definitely dicey. Confusing “live births” vs. “pregnancies” bothers me.
One standard stat is that half of all pregnancies end before the woman is even aware she is pregnant. Just throwing that in with the previous data drops the number to 1/8th of all pregnancies end in abortion max. And then there’s once the woman is aware she is pregnant…