News

OTTAWA, Nov 9 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Independent health researcher Isabelle Begin reported at a news conference Friday that official Canadian government statistics show that 7.7 percent of Canadian women who undergo induced abortions require hospitalization following the procedure. 

Begin’s analysis is a never-before-published code-by-code breakdown of hospitalizations from Statistics Canada’s Hospital Morbidity file. Begin informed LifeSite that “one out of thirteen women are hospitalized in a life-and-death situation after legally induced abortion in Canada.” 

She noted that Dr. Henry Morgentaler, the father of abortion in Canada, claimed publicly that abortion was the “safest medical procedure there was.”

“To this day, women are indeed reassured in pre-abortion counselling, in hospitals and clinics in Canada, that legally induced abortion is safer than a tonsillectomy,” said Begin. 

But according to Dr. Henry Morgentaler, in his book Abortion and Contraception, the abortion complication that most often leads to hospitalization is hemorrhaging due to infection or retained placenta/products of conception, with a blood transfusion required immediately to avoid shock, coma and death. In 1992-93, under the primary diagnoses recorded in Statistics Canada’s Hospital Morbidity file related to legally induced abortion, there were a total of 7,894 such hospitalizations. With 103,244 abortions performed in Canada that year, this yields a hospitalization rate of 7.7%, or 1 out of 13 women. 

These statistics of course do not include other admissions related to abortions that were not recorded as such to avoid complications for patients, physicians or institutions. Pro-life researchers have often found government statistics to be incomplete when it comes to the contentious abortion issue.