Tony Gosgnach

The Interim

The February death of a 21-year-old Miami women after an abortion maybe the tip of a massive iceberg of abortion related deaths and injuries. The problem is that for several reasons it is impossible to determine the frequency of the phenomenon.

“Anyone who tells you abortion is either safe or dangerous doesn’t know that they’re talking about, since there’s no way of knowing,” says Mark Crutcher, founder and president of Life Dynamics Inc. of Denton, TX. His organization handles legal cases involving deaths and physical and emotional injuries from abortion.

Crutcher recently wrote the book Lime 5 (referring to the code names used for a patient at one abortion clinic), which put forth the case that women are being raped, sexually assaulted, mutilated, and killed inside U.S. abortion clinics. It also charged that a government agency is covering up abortion-related disasters, pro-choice organizations are sheltering dangerous abortionists and the abortion industry is collapsing because of the emotional toll it takes on its workers.

“The agencies responsible for the creation of statistics are involved in the cover-up of abortion injuries,” says Crutcher. “Numbers have been purposely distorted. We proved it.”

Lime 5 used only independent, public records for its data. Crutcher says abortion deaths and injuries are sometimes under reported because they are listed under different causes, “We saw one case in which a patient died in an abortion, but the cause of death was listed as ‘complication due to maternity.’ If a women goes to an abortion mill and she’s killed by anaesthesia, they don’t report it as an abortion death but rather as a death by anaesthesia.”

The U.S. Centre for Disease Control officially states there have been no more than six abortion-related deaths each year since 1987, based on data derived from death certificates provided by states.

But The Washington Times newspaper has quoted an unnamed U.S. federal heath official as confirming that there has always been a problem identifying abortion-related deaths, especially when they are based on death certificates.

“Death certificates are not the best source of death information and we’ve always had concerns we’re not getting all the deaths thorough the death certificate system,” said the official.

One indication of the extent of the problem is a list kept by the Pro-Life Action League in Chicago Ill., which has names of more than 320 women who have died from abortions. But the League notes that other deaths have not been documented due to non-reporting or concealment.

Judy Madsen Johnson, president and co-founder of the pro-life U.S. women’s group The True Majority, saw part of the problem with determining the scope of abortion deaths and injuries is a lack of interest by the mainstream media. She recalls how she tried to call a press conference after the Miami women has hospitalized before her death.

“Not one television network came out,” she says. “They made the evaluation that the women of central Florida had no compelling interest in the story.”

Johnson says that’s not right. “Women have a right to know that women die from abortion after they’ve been led to believe it’s safe.”

Wanda Franz, of the U.S. National Right to Life Committee, believes that many women injured by abortion don’t want the real cause known for fear of embarrassment, so they go along with concealment.

She pointed to the case of Abu Hayat, a New York abortionist who botched a third-trimester abortion and was criminally charged. Afterwards, two-dozen women came forward to report that they too had been injured from abortions preformed by Hayat.

A similar scenario unfolded after the Miami death—five women came forward to say they had been injured by abortion at the same clinic.