To the Editor:

I wonder how do the numbers of people murdered or maimed due to anti abortion laws and advocacy compare to the number of women who may have developed breast cancer following an abortion?

The prohibition of legal abortion from the 1880s until 1973 came under the same anti-obscenity or Comstock laws that prohibited the dissemination of birth control information and services.

Criminalization of abortion did not reduce the numbers of women who sought abortions. In the years before Roe v. Wade, the estimates of illegal abortions ranged as high as 1.2 million per year (Tietze C, Henshaw SK. Induced Abortion: A World Review, 1986. New York: The Guttmacher Institute, 1986).

Although accurate records could not be kept, it is known that between the 1880s and 1973, many thousands of women were harmed as a result of illegal abortion.

Many women died or suffered serious medical problems after attempting to self-induce their abortions or going to untrained practitioners who performed abortions with primitive methods or in unsanitary conditions. During this time, hospital emergency room staff treated thousands of women who either died or were suffering terrible effects of abortions provided without adequate skill and care.

Some women were able to obtain relatively safer, although still illegal, abortions from private doctors. This practice remained prevalent for the first half of the twentieth century. The rate of reported abortions then began to decline, partly because doctors faced increased scrutiny from their peers and hospital administrators concerned about the legality.

Since the Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion in 1973, reproductive health clinics and health care providers across the United States and Canada have become the targets of violence by anti-abortion extremists. Physicians and clinic workers have been murdered; clinics have been bombed, burned down, invaded, and blockaded; and patients have been harassed and intimidated.

As a result, reproductive health care providers have had to undertake comprehensive security measures including employing security guards; installing security cameras, bullet-proof glass, and access control hardware; wearing bullet-proof vests; and implementing security protocols designed to increase the safety of doctors and clinic staff.

For more than 30 years anti-abortion extremists have attempted to use violence against abortion providers to advance their own personal and political agendas. They have injured and murdered health care workers across the country and intimidated and harassed patients who need reproductive health care.

Many of the key anti-abortion extremists who advocate and perpetrate violence against reproductive health care centers and abortion providers frequently travel across city, county, state, and international boundaries to participate in these activities. They are often in contact and work to assist each other by offering resources such as housing and funding (see: Army of God; Eric Robert Rudolph; James Kopp; Clayton Waagner).

Leland Farnsworth

Massena