His Excellency Dr. Alvaro Uribe Velez, President of Colombia
Honorable Magistrates of the Constitutional Court
Honorable Magistrates of the Supreme Court of Justice
Honorable Members of the Senate
Honorable Members of the House of Representatives
Reference: Case before the Columbian Constitutional Court
Expediente D 5764, Corte Constitucional

December, 2005

I have been asked to briefly bring to you certain facts regarding legalization of abortion and the existence of illegal abortions. I am president of the International Right to Life Federation. I have lectured in 75 countries over the last 30 years. My books and recordings are published in over 30 languages. I detail this only to note to you that I have had broad experience in this field.

Illegal abortions are the subject. The claim is made that illegal abortions are unsafe and injure and kill women and if we make them safe and legal, this will solve this problem. The first question to ask is how many illegal abortions are there? There is no record of illegal abortions. They are not recorded. There are no statistics on them, and so no one actually knows. A person who favors abortion, who gives you a figure, will be guessing. A person who favors protecting the lives of the unborn, who gives you a figure, will also be guessing. One fact has been obvious to me in my travels, and that is that the numbers of illegal abortions that are claimed to exist in any particular country tend to be wildly exaggerated.

Since no one has any idea how many illegal abortions there are, we look for the only indication that exists and that is how many women have died from illegal abortions, if the country reports this figure. Our first consideration here is that in a third world or underdeveloped nation, reporting of deaths specifically due to induced abortion is usually inaccurate or non-existent. The only nations that report accurately on this are sophisticated western nations, and of all of them the United States is the only one who does it very accurately, very scientifically. I’m enclosing a brochure that describes the situation in the US. Note that there are now approximately 6,000,000 pregnancies a year in the US. 4,000,000 are delivered, 1.2 million are aborted, the balance are miscarriages. Accurate figures exist for the number of women who died annually from illegal abortions. In the 1950’s in the US, this number was about 250. By the time abortion was legalized by the US Supreme Court, that figure had dropped to 39, the same year when 25 more died from legal abortions. The attached brochure details similar statistics from Portugal, Brazil, Germany and a UN report in Istanbul. So how many illegal abortions existed in the United States? Tracing backwards from the deaths, it seems evident that there were approximately 100,000 per year before legalization. After legalization, that number climbed to 1.6 million annually.

In nations that have had legal abortion for many years, we now have good statistics comparing women who have aborted to women who have carried their baby to term. The results are striking. The latest, a 13 year old study of the entire population of women in Finland, showed that women who have had an abortion compared to those who remained pregnant had a 250 percent higher death rate in the year following the abortion.

Similar studies of entire national populations, for a decade or more, have shown similar results. For example, deaths from homicide for post-abortive women are 7 times higher than women in the general population and 13 times higher than those who deliver their babies. Women who aborted died in accidents 4 times more often than those who carried to term. Earlier studies showed post-abortive women committed suicide 7 times more often than those who delivered. In the overall, women who aborted were 3 ½ times more likely to die soon after the abortion than those who delivered. These merely touch some of the highlights.

A massive problem for women who have abortions is the emotional aftermath, what we call post-abortion syndrome. Space does not require me even touching on this except to say that after abortion a significant percentage of women suffer deep emotional problems and are partially emotionally disabled by the aftermath of induced abortion.

In summary, if you wish to legalize abortion, do not do it because you think it will benefit women, for it will not. Experience, now for over 3 decades worldwide, has shown that there are serious negative effects on women, have shown that abortions increase by many multiples when legalized and that your end result is worse than before. If you are concerned about the women in your country, then cherish them, care for them, offer them all the help they need to carry a troubled pregnancy to term. Offer them medical care, housing, etc. You will not be doing them a favor by killing their developing unborn babies.

Yours truly,