Ian Haworth: No, Abortion Is NOT “Safer Than Birth”

The Women’s March is no stranger to controversy. Whether it be the donning of “pussy hats” to protest Donald Trump, or accusations of anti-Semitism at the highest level of the organization, the movement is prone to doing and saying pretty silly things.

But now they’ve moved on to murderous lies, with the Women’s March Twitter account posting the following:

“Abortion is safer than giving birth. Just saying.”

This inane comment prompts an obvious question: safer for whom?

Before getting to the obvious fact that abortion is not safer than birth for one human in this equation, we must first presume that the Women’s March means having an abortion is safer for the mother. 

Now, in terms of binary “life or death,” that’s certainly true based on available data, but not by much. 

According to the CDC, there were 0.4 deaths of women per 100,000 legal induced abortions. In both 2017 and 2018, two women died from legal induced abortions. In 2016, six women died from legal induced abortions, while one woman died from an illegal induced abortion.

Conversely, the maternal mortality rate for 2020 was 23.8 deaths per 100,000 live births, based on CDC data, or 0.0238%.

Meanwhile, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, approximately 2% of all abortions in the U.S. involve some form of complication, noting that “most complications are considered minor such as pain, bleeding, infection and post-anesthesia complications.”

But, based on the notion that life or death is the only metric of survival, and that women are almost 60 times more likely to die during childbirth than during an abortion (according to the CDC), the Women’s March would be correct if their tweet had included, “…safer for women,” if we ignore the multitude of post-abortion symptoms which don’t include death, including long-term psychological distress.

But the Women’s March didn’t include the suffix “for women,” which means they ignored the other human being whose life is at stake during abortion and birth: the unborn baby.

And, for this unborn baby, the math is quite different.

In 2020, the infant mortality rate in the United States was 5.4 deaths per 1,000 live births, according to the CDC, meaning that unborn babies had a 0.54% chance of death during birth in 2020. Generally, this means that in 99.46% of cases, a healthy unborn baby will survive birth.

But if an unborn baby is staring down the (suction) barrel of an abortion, what are their odds of survival? Almost 0%.

Birth is almost infinitely safer for babies than abortion, while abortion is just 60 times “safer” for the mother than giving birth. 

Turns out the Women’s March aren’t very good at math. Just saying.

Follow Ian Haworth on Twitter.