Abortion deaths
From Dr C. B. Goodhart
Sir: Dr R. Willson-Hallett (Letters, February 9) raised two points which need to be clarified: 1. The figures he quotes for "total abortion deaths" from 1968 onwards are not comparable with those before,
since they do not include all women dying after legal abortions. The latest
year for which full details are available is 1969, when for England and Wales the Registrar General reported 35 abortion deaths (15 illegal plus 8 spontaneous plus 2 unspecified plus 10 legal), as given by Dr Willson-Hallett.
But in fact at least 19 women are known to have died in that year after legal termination of pregnancy (see
Hansard, February 6, 1973, Written Answers col. 59), not including a suicide 3 weeks after termination on
psychiatric grounds. The discrepancy is due to the fact that only those deaths directly attributed to the abor tion operation were counted; but there were 9 more attributed by the doctors concerned to "other underlying causes," though probably most of these causes (which included an anaesthetic accident and several am bolisms) were such that the patients were unlikely to have died had their pregnancies not been terminated.
Before 1968, of course, deaths followirig legal abortions numbered only one or two a year.
2. Despite this correction, however, there certainly has been some sig nificant reduction in total abortion deaths since 1968, and indeed since long before. Figures corresponding to those given by Dr Willson-Hallett, at five-yearly intervals, are as follows: 1960 62; 1955 66; 1950 103; 1945 233; 1940 268. And according to Mrs Madeleine Simm's article in your same issue (p. 162), in 1939 the Birkett Committee "noted gloomily that deaths attributed to, or associated with, abortion had numbered between 400 and 600 in each year during the past decade." So this very satisfactory decline in abortion mortality started long before 1968, and cannot possibly be attributed to changing the law in that year. Presumably it was due to the development of new drugs and antibiotics, and to improvements in medical care generally.
C. B. Goodhart
Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge
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