In an article published by The Federalist, TCA’s Dr. Grazie Pozo Christie wrote an article titled “Abortion Is Not Safer Than Childbirth — Here’s The Data The Left Wants To Hide.” (He/she) writes:
Who can forget Mark Twain’s famous maxim: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics”?
I’ve been brooding over this line while watching the pro-abortion left hard at work promoting the startling (and erroneous) claim that “an American woman is 14 times more likely to die” from childbirth than from abortion. They want to move this false claim into the popular imagination, to make the conversation solely about pregnant women’s safety and ignite an unreasonable fear of carrying a child to term. Because what they want — radical abortion license to the day of birth, for any reason or no reason, and paid for by you-the-taxpayer in every state of the nation — is way out of line with average Americans’ sentiments. They’d rather gin up panic over labor and delivery, which has never, in the history of mankind, been safer.
It behooves physicians like me to examine the studies critically and then to put the “lie” to that statistic — in the interests of truth and expectant mothers’ peace of mind.
The left, including the dissenting Supreme Court justices in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, relies on a faulty 2012 study that used numbers that are dead wrong, the result of our country’s seriously flawed maternal mortality data collection methods — and equally flawed abortion data-gathering. Very basically, the researchers overcounted deaths from childbearing and undercounted deaths from abortion.
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This misuse of statistics serves many political purposes: to gin up opposition to health and safety regulations on abortion, to increase funding for abortion businesses such as Planned Parenthood, and even to discredit pregnancy resource centers that support women who choose birth for their children. But these fake claims also have real-life negative consequences for the very women about whom pro-abortion activists claim to care. They scare women away from the delight of motherhood. At the same time, their disingenuous talking point minimizes the serious medical risks that women experience in having an abortion.
Beyond all this, their claims distract from what should be our society’s unpoliticized public health focus: initiatives that address the real sources of pregnancy-related mortality, whether that pregnancy ended in abortion or in the birth of a child. Only then can we arm ourselves properly to fight every avoidable maternal death.
Dr. Grazie Pozo Christie specializes in radiology in the Miami area and serves on the advisory board for The Catholic Association.
