Abortion kills
From Dominica Roberts Sir: Contrary to Bruce Anderson's state ment (Abortion is a matter of aesthetics', 17 July), there is overwhelming and increasing evidence for the harmful effects, physical as well as mental, of abortion on women. A Californian study. comparing 173,000 Medicare records with death certificates, showed that women who had an abortion were nearly twice as likely to be dead within two years, many by suicide, as those who gave birth (Southern Medical Journal, August 2001). A Finnish study found similarly increased figures for suicides after abortion compared with birth or natural miscarriage (British Medical Journal, December 1996).
A study of every birth during one week in 1995 in the whole of France found an increased risk of prematurity for singletons (single, as opposed to multiple, births) of 30 per cent after one abortion and 90 per cent after two or more (British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, October 2001). A Bavarian study of 106,345 singleton births found an 80 per cent increase in prematurity after abortion (European Journal of Obstetrics, Gynaecology and Reproductive Biology, October 1998). Prematurity is, of course, a major cause of handicap.
There are many similar studies showing increased risks of infertility, ectopic pregnancy, need for psychiatric treatment, and so on. The link with breast cancer is at any rate likely enough to need serious research.
It is well known now that legalising abortion did not save women's lives. The maternity-related death rate was coming down all over the developed world well before 1967 because of better medical treatment — mainly antibiotics and blood transfusions — and continued to do so whether abortion was made easier or, in some countries, harder to obtain,
Roe v. Wade is being appealed in the US on the grounds of new evidence, not available then, that abortion harms women. Those who meant to help women by legalising abortion in 1967 in our own country should now overturn our law on the same grounds.
Dominica Roberts
Pro Life party, London SW3
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