Abortion is more than just an option for ending an unwanted pregnancy. It is, for thousands of pregnant people, a medically necessary and life-saving procedure. Many people who have had abortions never conceive of their treatment as an abortion. That’s because they had no choice. They had a ruptured ectopic pregnancy, or they were carrying a dead fetus and at risk of becoming septic.
That doesn’t change the fact that they terminated a pregnancy.
Pregnancy complications are extraordinarily common. Most people never think about these complications, because treatment for a miscarriage, an ectopic pregnancy, a stillbirth, or a life-threatening pregnancy complication is readily available in every emergency room in the United States.
Pregnant people are taught that talking about their miscarriage or ectopic pregnancy is inconvenient and annoying; better to deal with these things in private rather than put your pain on full display. And that, for the most part, is what they do. Odds are good that you, and everyone you know, have many friends and family who could have died of pregnancy complications without medical treatment—without abortion.
Not so anymore. The high rate of pregnancy complications is about to be painfully visible.
In a discussion on this post, John in Denver suggested it would be helpful to know the natural rate of pregnancy complications. I decided to look up data on pregnancy complications for which the only treatment is abortion, or for which abortion is the most likely treatment. What I found is an extraordinarily high rate of complications.
For every 1,000 pregnancies:
- 100 to 260 (10%-26%) will result in a miscarriage. While miscarriages can pass on their own, many require a D&C, which is a medical procedure identical to an abortion, to remove the embryo or fetus and save the mother’s life.
- 10 to 20 (1 to 2%) will be a non-viable ectopic pregnancy. Ruptured ectopic pregnancies account for 2.7% of pregnancy-related deaths.
- 6.25 (0.625%) will result in a stillbirth, which means the baby dies during or just before birth, and the mother gives birth to a dead baby. In many cases, stillbirth require surgery or the induction of labor after the death of the baby* to save the mother’s life.
- 25.6 (2.56%) will have a serious life-limiting congenital anomaly 5.176 (0.5176%) will have a fatal congenital anomaly that is incompatible with life.
- 45 (4.54%) mothers will have a life-threatening pregnancy complication.
*I am using the term baby here because stillborn babies are fully formed, fully developed babies. Their death is indistinguishable to most parents from the death of a baby after birth. Data show that parents of stillborns routinely have their grief dismissed, and using the correct term baby is a small step we all can take to acknowledge the weight of that grief.
If we treat these numbers as cumulative, this means that 186.85 to 356.85 out of every 1,000 pregnancies (18.6% to 35.7%) could be medically affected by bans on abortion.
Of course, there’s some crossover here; a person who has a life-threatening pregnancy complication may also have a fetus with a serious congenital anomaly. But given that more people will now be forced to carry pregnancies—including people who engage in high-risk behaviors that increase the risk of serious complications—I think it’s likely that this figure actually underestimates the number of people whose pregnancies stand to be affected.
If we look solely at non-viable pregnancies that have no hope of producing a live baby but that require treatment to save the life of the pregnant person, the figure is still high: 116.25 to 276.25 pregnancies per 1,000 pregnancies, or 11.6% to 27.6% of all pregnancies.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate there are roughly 6 million pregnancies in the United States annually. This means that more than 2 million pregnant people stand to be affected by abortion restrictions. And between 696,000 and 1,656,000 could die or be seriously injured if denied an abortion.
It’s easy to dismiss these numbers. Surely no hospital would deny a woman treatment if her fetus was dead or dying! But hospitals have already denied care to people based on religious beliefs about abortion. In states where abortion is now illegal, doctors may face the horrifying question of whether they should save their patient or risk decades in jail (or worse—the death penalty). Even if they can get legal approval for treatment, doing so could delay treatment for hours or days, causing maternal mortality to skyrocket.
Maternal mortality in the U.S. is already stunningly high. It’s going to skyrocket now.