The Top Ten Reasons Women List for Having an Abortion
The following is taken from Planned Parenthood's Family Planning Perspectives (July/August 1988) and shows that even pro-abortion advocates concede that 93% of all abortions have nothing to do with the so called "hard cases." 1 The article by Aida Torres and Jacqueline Forrest is entitled, "Why Do Women Have Abortions?"
Table 1
Percentage of abortion patients (N=1773) reporting that a specific reason contributed to their decision to have an abortion, by age, and percentage saying that each reason was the most important.
In order of Percent (Highest to Lowest) |
Reason | |
26% |
Woman is concerned about how having a baby could change her life | |
21% |
Woman can't afford baby now | |
12% |
Woman has problems with relationship or wants to avoid single parenthood | |
12% |
Woman is unready for responsibility | |
11% |
Woman is not mature enough or is too young to have a child | |
8% |
Woman has all the children she wanted or hass all grown-up children | |
3% |
Fetus has possible health problem | |
3% |
Woman has health problem | |
3% |
Other | |
1% |
Woman was victim or rape or incest | |
1% |
Woman doesn't want others to know she has had sex or is pregnant | |
1% |
Husband or partner wants woman to have abortion | |
<0.5% |
Woman's parents want her to have abortion |
Note: 1% due to rape or incest; 6% "potential" health problems; 93% for social reasons (not hard cases).
1 Medicalizing Abortion Decisions by Thomas Murphy Goodwin, MD; First Things (3/96).
"Certain conditions that can be diagnoxed in advance are associated with risk of maternal mortality
>20%...taken altogether, abortions performed for these conditions make up a barely calculable fraction of the total abortions performed in the U.S., but they are extremely important because they have been used to validate the idea of abortion as a whole.
It should be emphasized how rare these conditions are. Our obstetric service in the Los Angeles area has been the largest in the U.S. for most of the last fifteen years, averaging 15,000-16,000 births per year. Our institution serves a catchment for all high-risk deliveries in an area with 30,000 deliveries per year. Excluding cases that have been diagnosed late in pregnancy, we do not see more than one or two cases per year that pose this degree of risk of maternal mortality; these are exceedingly rare conditions ."
Dr. Goodwin is Assistant Professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Southern California's Women's Hospital and is Director of Maternal-Fetal Medicine at the Hospital of the Good Samaritan in Los Angeles.