Abortion, miscarriage, and risk to later babies

I’m afraid that the report I blogged about a couple of days ago is being misinterpreted by at least one Pro-life source.

The numbers are impressive enough from a public health and pro-life view point, without ignoring the fact that the original data is 40 to 50 years old (without the advantage of our current Neonatal Intensive Care Units and the wonderful advances in our medical abilities) and that there’s no way to know whether the mothers in the study had a miscarriage or an intentional, induced abortion. The authors do report on more recent, reliable data showing an increase after abortion, compared to miscarriage, not the 300% to 900% increase seen in the earlier (and less relevant to today’s medical realities) report.

As I said before, we can’t really control the numbers of miscarriages, but we can control and decrease elective abortion. That would decrease the numbers of premature births and low birth weight babies who are at such risk for early death and chronic problems like cerebral palsy and lung disease.