Paul Tully, SPUC's General Secretary stated: "Ten years ago,
wildly exaggerated and contradictory 'guesstimates' of the number of
women dying as a result of 'unsafe abortion' were used to try to push
for abortion on demand. Baroness Chalker, then British Minster for
Overseas Development, claimed that "about 200,000 women die each year
from the complications of unsafe abortions." The UK's Sunday Observer
put the figure at 250,000, a UNFPA report claimed it was around 60,000
in one place and 500,000 in another. Not one of these figures is based
on firm information: even the lowest figure (60,000) has no basis in
published statistics. Today, exaggerated figures continue to be plucked
out of the air by a pro-abortion movement desperate to be seen as the
saviours of women rather than the proponents of a morally bankrupt
ideology."
"If these organisations really cared about women, they would be confronting the reasons why women might be driven to abort their children and condemning those who exploit women for financial gain. Perhaps Ipas could tell us how it reached the 70,000 abortion deaths it is currently reporting? It looks suspiciously as if it has simply taken a percentage of the estimate of worldwide maternal deaths (itself a very uncertain figure) and attributed them to abortion."