The Numbers Don't Lie

One of the things that I do on this blog is critique things that wind up in my facebook feed.  First, I am pro-life. This is why I despise bad pro-life arguments.  I think that when you mislead people to the point that they cannot tell fact from fiction then you wind up with a guy like Donald Trump running for the White House.  This is why I was disappointed when this June 24, 2014 post by the National Pro-Life Alliance showed up in my feed.

"The numbers don't lie. 

Abortion is the leading cause of death in the United States every year."

I dealt with this last December in Do these statistics bother you?.  Someone reminded me then that the post did not say that abortion was the leading cause, but it was one of many leading causes.  Also the numbers were more fuzzy since I could not fact check how many deaths could be attributed to each leading cause since 1973.  This post by NPLA gives easily fact checkable numbers and states that "abortion is the leading cause of death in the United States every year".

First let's check their numbers.  According to the CDC they are correct about heart disease and cancer.  Again citing the CDC, they are also correct about accidents.  However the abortion number is 150% higher than the actual number.  150% is not mere rounding so let's look at the actual numbers.  According to Guttmacher, there were 1.06 million abortions in the United States during the year 2011 which was down 13% from the 1.21 million in year 2008.  1.6 million is even 133% higher than the 2008 number.  In fact, 1.6 million is higher than the annual number for Mexico, Canada, and the United States combined from 1995-2008.

The NPLA is claiming that hundreds of thousands more abortions are occurring in the US than actually are.

As I mentioned last December, the miscarriage rate is higher than the abortion rate, especially if you believe, as I do, that life begins at conception.  Among women that know they are pregnant, the NIH places the rate between 15-20%. However a woman can be pregnant before she knows that she is.  If you monitor a woman's hormone levels, we discover that the rate is actually around 31% , because embryos commonly miscarry before a woman knows that she is pregnant.  

The 2011 abortion rate was 16.9%, the lowest since the 1973 rate of 16.3%.  A miscarriage rate of 31% is 180% higher than the abortion rate.  Even ignoring failed implantation, ectopic pregnancies, and twinning; the miscarriage rate is substantially higher.  If we consider the unborn, abortion is not the leading cause of death in the United States, miscarriage is. The fact that pro-life organizations ignore or minimize miscarriage to get at abortion is not appropriate.

Like last December, let's fix their chart by fixing the inflated abortion numbers and adding miscarriage.  Using the most recent abortion numbers of 1.06 million X 180% = 1.9 million miscarriages.

If life begins at conception and you include the unborn then miscarriage is the leading cause of death in the United States.