Carol Soelberg
Government Agencies Intentionally Under-Report Abortion Deaths
Dear Friend of the Family,
Our government agencies and a complicit media have not been straight with us when it comes to reporting on abortion deaths. Due to government reporting policies bearing conflict of interest implications, it is virtually impossible to determine the number of abortion deaths in the United States and worldwide. Existing evidence points toward a significant and intentional under-count of abortion deaths by official reporting agencies. Inaccurate reporting leads government and pro-choice organizations to conclude incorrectly that abortion is safer than childbirth.
A group of international health experts published a study in 2005 disclosing that 94 percent of maternal deaths associated with abortion are not identifiable from death certificates alone. Proper identification of pregnancy history, the researchers found, reveals that the death rate associated with abortion is actually three times higher than that of childbirth. Other sources have put that number at four times the number of childbirth-related deaths.
Reporting procedures and codes vary from nation to nation and from state to state, rendering universal reporting an inconsistent proposition. The World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases coding rule No. 12 makes it nearly impossible to report abortion as a cause of death. This rule requires that deaths due to medical and surgical treatment must be reported under the complication of the procedure (e.g., embolism) and not under the condition for treatment, such as elective abortion.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), which for years collected abortion death statistics, missed or ignored many abortion deaths. In its annual abortion surveillance reports, the CDC reported its “calculations were likely low” and that it could not account for all abortion deaths in the U.S. Not surprisingly, independent researchers have found considerably more abortion deaths than the CDC has reported.
In the late 1980s, investigative reporter Kevin Sherlock found a total of 29 abortion deaths in one California county (Los Angeles) alone between the years 1970 and 1987. Yet the Centers for Disease Control reported only 12 deaths nationwide for that entire period. Sherlock documented 30 to 40 percent more abortion-related deaths throughout the country than were reported in the CDC's official reports. The CDC obstructed his research efforts because the top two physicians overseeing its Abortion Surveillance Branch, Dr. David Grimes and Dr. Willard Cates, were abortion doctors and one was a member of the National Abortion Foundation. A large number of employees of the Centers for Disease Control had ties to the abortion industry, and statistics on abortion-related problems have been manipulated.
At the 1992 National Abortion Federation Risk Management Seminar in Dallas, Dr. Robert Crist spoke openly of the recent death of one of his abortion patients. Present at that risk management seminar were two high-ranking staff members from the Centers for Disease Control's abortion surveillance activities area: Stanley Henshaw and Lisa Koonin. The abortion death mentioned by Dr. Crist never made the CDC's annual surveillance report.
The lesson to be learned is that we cannot believe everything reported by the government or the media, which does little to expose the truth about abortion. Pro-life and government watchdog organizations are doing the job that the government won't do; we will keep reporting the truth about the abortion industry and the tragic history it continues to create.
Warmly,
Carol Soelberg, President
United Families International
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