Abortion leading killer of grown women?

Max Blumenthal has a video up of people at the Value Voters Summit, October 20-21, basically showing what flaming assholes they are. For instance, Star Parker told Blumenthal, around 4 minutes into the video, "Abortion now the number one killer of black women between 25 and 34. We wanted sodomites quarantined."

I'm pretty sure that you can't actually abort people at that age, Ms. Parker.

And I'm pretty sure that your facts are wrong--in fact, since you're a writer for WorldNetDaily, I'm almost guaranteed that they will be. But let's check. The NCHS has a list up of the causes of death in the United States, listing them by 5-year age groups, sex, race (well, black and white), and Hispanic origin, for the years 2002-2004. You can find the PDFs here.

They tell you, completely unsurprisingly, that Ms. Parker is full of shit. I did a search for the word "abortion", which provides the following causes of death:

• Missed abortion (I'm not really sure what that is--they planned an abortion and didn't go through with it?)


• Spontaneous abortion


• Medical abortion


• Unspecified abortion


• Failed attempted abortion


• Failed medical abortion, with other and unspecified complications


• Other and unspecified failed attempted abortion, complicated by genital tract and pelvic infection


• Other and unspecified failed attempted abortion, with other and unspecified complications

Not every year has a page on these, I think because in some years no women at all died from a particular cause. At any rate, after some of these categories they have other pages that include causes of death such as "Complete or unspecified, complicated by delayed or excessive hemorrhage", "Complete or unspecified, with other and unspecified complications", and "Complete or unspecified, without complication." These are, I assume, continuations of each abortion category. So I counted all the deaths of African-American women for the years 2002-2004 by abortion, including every single category above, even the spontaneous abortions. Here are the results:

Deaths of African-American women due to abortion, by age and year

	2002	2003	2004
Ages 25-34	0	2	6
All ages	5	13	18

Huh. If abortion is the leading killer of black women ages 25-34, they must be the healthiest group in all of America.

I also checked for how many deaths among African-American women were caused by pregnancies in the year 2004. Basically I searched the PDF for the word "pregnancy" and included every hit with the following exceptions: the last six, which list the deaths and abortions of newborns and fetuses, and not of the pregnant women; and complications of anesthesia during pregnancy. I also wouldn't have included "retained intrauterine contraceptive device in pregnancy" had it actually killed any black women that year. The other categories are mostly of pre-existing conditions that complicated the pregnancies, which led to the deaths of the women; or else gestational conditions. In total, those killed 181 black women during 2004.

So ten times as many black women died in 2004 as a result of complications during pregnancy as died because of abortions that year. I wonder how many would have lived if they had been able to get an abortion. Furthermore, as people often point out, outlawing abortion would only lead to the deaths of more women, since they would be getting dangerous back-alley abortions. If you're interested in saving lives, abortion should remain legal. On the other hand, if the only interest you have is in preventing people from making the same decisions you did (Ms. Parker herself has had "several" abortions, she says), then moving to criminalize abortion might make sense.