I did a search of past posts, and to my surprise found nothing…
Anyway, the question is this: Are there any reliablly accurate statistics or good estimates on the real number of abortions performed in the United States and/or worldwide since a given date (like say, since Roe v. Wade)?
No, I am not Jack Chick or Pat Buchanan. But I have heard that Jack Chick’s comic strips maintain there are 45,000,000 abortions performed each year. Presumably he meant world-wide… I also had the misfortune to read a brief excerpt from a book which IIRC was by Pat Buchanan, in which he puts out the figure of 20 million in the USA since Roe v. Wade (and BTW followed it by saying the places of these aborted Americans were filled by immigrants, mostly illegal).
So it would seem that opponents of abortion would have it that there is this huge holocaust going on, possibly exagerating the scale of it. Or not?
I suspect, but do not know, that there is no requirement to report such procedures to some central data repository. I doubt similarly that we could know exactly how many appendectomies were performed in the US in a given time frame.We might, however, be able to estimate this number fairly reliably.
I don’t want a debate as to pro or no, just some good data.
That source is about as biased as it gets. They claim to quote figures from pro-choice sources (without being absolutely specific) but I’d rather hear it from the horse’s mouth. No offence meant.
If that’s the case, why did you answer the question?
To be honest, I don’t have a particular axe to grind. That figure may be completely accurate. I’m just inherently suspicious of any figure provided by or unspecifically quoted by any website with a particular viewpoint (whether pro- or anti-). It’s very difficult to find anything approaching unbiased sources, which is why the UN and CDC were my best efforts.
To be fair to WV her site cites the following site for its information, and The Alan Guttmacher Institute seems to be a fairly sound source of information - at least it is not rabidly pro-life or fundamentalist in its outlook (see thier misson statement) and its main focus seems to be the prevention of unplanned pregnancies rather than preventing abortions.
But it did say worldwide there are 46 million/year, and broke that down into 126K per day. In the US, 1.37 million for 1996, to average 3,700 per day. This partially squares with Crusoe’s CDC cite.
So we have some data for a couple of years. This begs the question: Is abortion on the rise (relative to proportion of the population, or in absolute numbers), or is it on the decline? I ask because I would hope increased awareness and the increased availibility of contraception might preclude the necessity for more invasive procedures.
Also, how reliable is the data? Is there a requirement to report abortions? If not, are we looking at X million performed and reported, with another Y million estimated but not reported?
I have no ax to grind either way, I just want the facts.
In the US at least, abortion is on the decline, due to greater avaliablity of contraceptives:
(from my first link above)
Here are thier comments on abortion statistics (within the USA) - they claim to be the only source (along with the CDC) of nationally valid data on abortions.
I just want to point out that you are only going to get biased figures. From one side or the other. It seems like you are willing to disregard one side only because it is biased and go w/ the other (which is biased in the other direction). Also It seems like no one has come up with a cite that will tell us how many abortions there are per year from the pro right to abortion side - hmmm I wonder why.
I am not sure how biased the CDC or UN could be. While I won’t deny that they could potentially be biased, they aren’t promoting a particular agenda (well, not as far as I could tell). I would be suspicious of a pro-choice site’s statistics, although potentially less so given that it is in an anti-abortionist’s interest to make the number of abortions sound shocking where no pro-choicer to my knowledge could use numbers to ‘win’ the debate in the same way. Anyway, in a thread where the OP has asked for genuine data, I would not post anything from any source where there was a remotely obvious bias.
Because, the SDMB is very rigorous when it comes to facts. We want cites, but not just any cites-they must be reputable and unbiased.
That’s the whole point of this place.
It’s not offensive against you, and it’s not about “not wanting to hear”. It’s about being a skeptic, being VERY discriminating and having high standards.