New Government Figures Actually Show National Decline
for 2001
Hillary Clinton Perpetuates Urban Myth of
Abortion Increase Under Bush
By Randall K. O'Bannon, Ph.D.
Director of Education and Research
In a widely touted speech, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) revived the recently coined myth that abortions decreased while her husband was President and increased under the stewardship of President George W. Bush.
Addressing what the Los Angeles Times (1/25/05) called "about 1,000 fellow abortion rights supporters," Sen. Clinton told the 28th annual conference of Family Planning Advocates of New York State in Albany that during her husband's administration, "we saw the rate of abortion consistently fall."
After claiming that the abortion rate fell by one quarter between 1990 and 1995, and another 11% between 1994 and 2000, she launched a broadside at the Bush administration. "But unfortunately in the last few years, while we are engaged in ideological debate instead of one that uses facts and evidence and common sense, the rate of abortion is on the rise in some states."
Naming neither the states nor her sources, she continued with her diatribe. "In the [first] three years since President Bush took office, eight states have seen an increase in abortion rates and four saw a decrease."
While the Times asked Clinton if she felt Bush's policies were directly responsible for the increase (Clinton told the paper she did not know), the newspaper does not appear to have checked her facts or challenged her assertion. Neither did other papers who printed the story.
The facts are not on Senator Clinton's side. The abortion rate did not decline by 25% from 1990 to 1995. In addition, the only "study" known to have been published claiming since 2000 that abortions are up in more states than down was based on serious statistical flaws and just plain false assertions.
Tall Tales of Declines Under Bill Clinton
Sen. Clinton didn't say where she got her numbers to back up her assertion that the abortion rate dropped significantly under her husband but went up again under Bush. But either by accident or by intent, she appears to have bought into a variation of the urban myth which has been perpetrated by a couple of amateur statisticians: California seminary professor Glen Harold Stassen and University of Notre Dame Dean Mark Roche.
Writing in the October 11, 2004, New York Times, Dean Roche argued that the number of abortions increased during Republican and decreased during Democratic administrations. Roche argued that abortion totals had dropped a whopping 36% during Bill Clinton's eight years in office.
Abortions did decline during Clinton's two terms, but not nearly as much as Roche reported. Moreover, it was a decline that started while the first George Bush was President and petered out to a crawl by the time Clinton left office.
Roche appears to have started with a 1992 figure of 1,359,145 abortions from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and then compared it with the 2000 CDC figure of 857,475. On its face, that represents a gigantic decline in the number of abortions - - 36.9%.
If we grant that Roche is sincere, his error is embarrassingly rudimentary. He ignores that four states - - Alaska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, and California, the nation's most populous state - - stopped sending the CDC abortion numbers for 1998. In 1997, the last year in which all states reported, those four states accounted for 285,868 abortions.1
Roche does not appear to have recognized the loss of those states from the data set and gave Bill Clinton undeserved credit for significant abortion reductions.
Roche mentions the 11% drop in the abortion rate that Hillary Clinton says occurred from 1995 to 2000, but this excludes California and the other missing states from the calculation for both the 1995 and 2000 rates. Whether the decline for the whole United States was greater or less than 11% is unknown.
Clinton's earlier claim about the reduced abortion rate between 1990 and 1995 is seriously exaggerated. According to the CDC, the abortion rate was 24 abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age (15-44) in 1990 and 20 in 1995. That represents a 16.7% decrease, not the 25% decrease Hillary Clinton claimed. Moreover, this fails to acknowledge both that the rate began declining while George H.W. Bush was still in office,2 and that it increased again in 1996 (to 21) at the midway point of Bill Clinton's first term.
The CDC has reported lower rates since then, but these are believed to be artificially lower due to the continued absence of Alaska, New Hampshire, and California from the rate calculations.
Legends of the Rise
The only national report on the number of abortions occurring since George W. Bush took office - - the CDC's report for 2001 - - came out after the election, not before. But this didn't stop partisans from pushing the urban myth that abortions had gone up under Bush.
The claim that abortions had gone up under Bush appeared in an article by Glen Harold Stassen, a seminary professor from California, which appeared in several newspapers and on several web sites about the same time as Roche's piece ran in the New York Times. Stassen had no national data, but claimed that data he gathered from state reports showed abortion increasing in 11 out of 16 states.
Stassen claimed to have some training as a statistician, but made several serious mistakes with the state data.3 In two states where he reported increases (Wisconsin and South Dakota), official state reports showed decreases.
There was a small, short-term increase in Illinois during the period he examined (less than 1%), but he missed a drop of 10% that occurred the next year.
He made much of 26.4% and 67.4% increases reported by Arizona and Colorado, respectively. But he ignored explicit cautions by health departments in those states warning that those figures were likely to have reflected improved reporting rather than actual increases.
Corrected, the data showed decreases, not increases, in 8 out of the 14 states with reliable numbers.
Confronted by NRLC with his errors, Stassen tried to argue that aggregate state numbers still showed an overall increase, but this included the statistically suspicious jumps in Colorado and Arizona that state officials were reluctant to endorse as accurate. Once those figures are removed from the total, and Illinois' decline from 2003 is factored in, the 14 states remaining in Stassen's study show a net decrease in the number of abortions.
Stats vs. Stories
With the release of the CDC's 2001 Abortion Surveillance report, there is finally some hard data, and it shows a decrease in the number of abortions under President Bush. According to the CDC, there were 3,990 fewer abortions in the United States in 2001 than in 2000.
What about the abortion rate, the number of abortions for every 1,000 women of reproductive age (15-44)? It stayed at 16. The abortion ratio, which the CDC identifies as the number of abortions per 1,000 live births, rose slightly, from 246 in 2000 to 247 in 2001, but that represents a lower figure than any other year since 1974.4
Given that figures for California, Alaska, and New Hampshire are missing from the data set, actual abortion rates and totals for the country in 2001 are thought to be higher.5 However, the trends are considered reliable, because those same states were missing from both the 2000 and 2001 totals as well.
The CDC has no figures on maternal deaths for 2001, but does report that there were 11 deaths due to legal induced abortion in 2000.
Bill Clinton's "Legacy" to George W. Bush
In September of 2000, in the waning months of the Clinton Administration, the Food and Drug Administration fulfilled the mandate of that president and approved the sale of RU486, the French abortion pill. It took some months to begin full-scale distribution, but it had reached the market by the time George W. Bush took the oath of office and was being heavily promoted by the media and the abortion industry.
According to the CDC, there were 20,093 "medical" (chemical abortions) for 2001 in the states it tracked, representing about 2.9% of the total abortions from those states. If usage figures given by the U.S. distributor of the drug are correct, that number is expected to explode in subsequent years leading to an overall increase in the number of abortions. That tide could turn, however, as more women hear of deaths and other problems with the abortion pill.
Three deaths have already been associated with the use of RU486 in the United States, and five others are known about from other countries.
No matter how she spins the numbers, the legacy of Sen. Clinton's husband is not a world in which abortion is increasingly rare, but one in which it is increasingly dangerous. Are those the footsteps in which she plans to follow?
NOTES:
1. Oklahoma began reporting again in 2000, but the other states did not.
4. By way of comparison, the CDC says the abortion rate for 1984 was 364 per thousand live births.