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Abortion still dangerous, Finnish study shows women who abort more likely to die in next year

Edmonton Journal - August 27, 2000

By Lorne Gunter

Like most of life's best coincidences, it possessed more than it's share of irony and wasn't glaringly obvious.

The week after some demented individual stabbed Vancouver abortionist Garson Romalis in an insane attempt to prove the sanctity of life by taking a life (D'oh), and the week after the Canadian Abortion Rights Action League tried to pin blame for the attack on the newly elected Canadian Alliance Leader Stockwell Day, and National Post columnist Mordecai Richler insisted Day's "absurd" opposition to abortion would force poor women to "once again become the victims of back-alley butchers," Dr. Richard Neale was stripped of his medical license in Britain.

As I said, the coincidence isn't immediately obvious.

Neale was known in Britain as "The Butcher." He had been stripped of his medical license in Canada 10 years earlier, and was, the Post reported, responsible for the deaths of three women in his care when he practiced in this country.

However, what makes the irony and the coincidence is what the Post (and every other major Canadian paper and network) failed to report: Neale was an abortionist.

Doing abortions wasn't the core of Neale's practice. Still it appears to have been more than a sideline. At least one of the three Canadian women believed to have died from Neale's incompetence was allegedly the victim of a botched abortion. And pro-life groups in Britain insist abortions gone wrong brought on some of the 36 charges Neale was found guilty of there.

That these two incidents should happen within a week of each other is the coincidence. That one should be so aggressively reported, and the other not, is the irony.

It's ironic that abortionists working before the legalization of abortion are now universally portrayed by the pro-abortion movement as "back-alley butchers." A coat hanger, with a circle and line through is even a prominent symbol at most pro-abortion rallies; a reference to the supposed hazards of pre-legalization abortions.

At the time before legalization (the 1950s and early 1960s), though, abortion supporters most often portrayed abortion providers as heroes. Planned Parenthood, the world's lead promoter of abortion, used to reassure women who were seeking the procedure despite its illegality that nine of 10 providers were licensed doctors working on the side, outside office hours, for the good of their female patients.

But now that abortion-on-demand is legal in Canada, now that the goal has changed from making abortion legal to keeping it entirely unrestricted and publicly funded, the campaigners seek to paint the before-time as all bad, all brutality, danger and death. While the now, the time of easy access to legal abortion, is projected as entirely safe and benign.

What the coincidence of the rhetoric surrounding the unjustifiable Romalis stabbing and the silence around the Neale convictions reminds us is that the rhetoric is more important than the reality for supporters of abortion.

A major recent study funded by the Finnish government, for instance, determined that women who abort are nearly four times as likely to die in the year following their abortions as women who give birth are in the year following the arrival of their babies, including a 60 percent greater chance of death from natural causes and a risk of suicide seven times higher.

A prominent, pro-choice American doctor reviewed the Finnish study before its U.S. publication, and concluded "It proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that abortion in not safer than childbirth," a common myth perpetuated by pro-choice groups.

We hear often about post-partum complications. So why do we almost never hear about post-abortion ones?

Independent Canadian health researcher Isabelle Begin has waded through the maze of misleading, badly delayed and incomplete official abortion statistics in this country and determined that nearly eight percent of Canadian women who have legal abortions - legal abortions - "are hospitalized in a life-and-death situation" following the procedure.

This figure may be high. Candace Crandall, a research associate with the Science and Environmental Policy Project in Virginia, calculates the rate of hospitalization for "serious infection and other potentially life-threatening complications" from legal abortions in the U.S. at about one percent; still over 250,000 women since legalization.

Yet Crandall also insists, "the estimate of deaths from illegal abortions was always wildly off the mark," and that "legalization has had virtually no impact" on making abortion safer.

If any other legal surgical procedure resulted in the emergency hospitalization of so many otherwise healthy women, we'd certainly hear about the "crisis," though.

Lorne Gunter, Columnist
The Edmonton Journal
P.O. Box 2421
Edmonton AB CANADA
T5J 2S6
off tele: (780) 429-5267
fax: (780) 429-5500 (requires a cover page)
cell: (780) 916-0719

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