By now, many of you have probably seen the update about the abortion case fiasco in Texas. There are already a couple diaries discussing it, so I won't spend much time on the overall story. But one detail really caught my eye:
Some women resort to self-induced medication abortions with the ulcer drug misoprostol, widely used in Latin America to terminate early pregnancies. Though it is available only by prescription in the United States, misoprostol can easily be purchased at pharmacies across the border in Mexico or at flea markets in the Valley. WWHM saw about one failed misoprostol self-induced abortion a day.
Andrea Ferrigno, WWHM's vice president, said that if a woman arrives at the clinic after taking the pills for weeks and is still bleeding, doctors will typically complete the abortion if she's still pregnant or clean out any residual tissue, as they would for a spontaneous miscarriage. Misoprostol is 85 percent effective, if administered properly, which suggests that many more women self-terminate and don’t need further medical attention.
Yet another talking point from the anti-choicers has been falsified--namely, that criminalizing abortions will not result in illegal abortions.
I will crunch some numbers below the fold just to illustrate how dire the situation is.
According to the article, Whole Woman's Health McAllen was the only abortion provider in a city of about 134,000. Extracting the abortion rate from that number alone can be difficult, but we can attempt to place an upper bound on that rate. So if we make very liberal assumptions for the abortion rate, we can safely project that the actual rate is quite a bit lower. This may sound like sacrificing a great deal of accuracy. But that is not going to be a problem, for two reasons:
1. This isn't meant to be some sort of peer-reviewed, scientific study. This is just to get a ballpark estimate to see if the situation merits closer inspection.
2. As you will see, establishing an upper bound will more than suffice to produce startling results.
Back to the number-crunching. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, Texas's abortion rate in 2008 was 15 per 1000 women aged 15-44. Now if we assume that (a) the male/female split is about 50/50, (b) no women outside of that age range are obtaining abortions,* and (c) despite the fact that it is implied that the rest of the metro area has at least one other clinic, this one serves a population three times the size of McAllen, Texas (half the size of the entire metro area),* then we calculate an estimated 8.3 abortions per day. We'll round that up to 9.* This means that, most likely, the abortion rate in McAllen is nine per day or lower.
* - Upper bound assumptions (see earlier).
Now let's look back at the article for an estimation of Misoprostol use: The clinic saw about one botched abortion per day as a result of it, a drug that the article notes is 85% effective. From those two numbers, we conclude that nearly seven McAllen women are using the drug to induce abortion every day. That's at least three-fourths of them, perhaps nearly all of them.
Please understand that this is not a scientific study, and there are some critical assumptions here that prevent us from drawing final conclusions. This merits further investigation to see what the actual rates are. But we can gather right away that a significant number of women are turning to illegal methods to exert their right to choose. If the abortion rate appears to have dropped from at most 9 legal abortions per day to 7 illegal ones, then at the very least, we can conclude that the pro-choicers were absolutely right: Criminalizing abortion does not make it go away. It makes it go underground. And it makes abortions much less safe--exactly the opposite result of what was claimed by anti-choice politicians.