The abortion advocates at the Guttmacher Institute want states to stop collecting statistics on abortion. This would be a mistake. Often the abortion surveillance reports the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) compile from these state numbers is the only way we know how many women have died from abortion in a given year.

In my inbox recently was an email from our friends at Operation Rescue, detailing the last hours of a teenager in Colorado who died after an abortion at Planned Parenthood in February. Pro-life activists who pray outside abortion businesses alert the rest of the movement when tragedies like this occur, but this is an imperfect system and sometimes the CDC report contains surprises.

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For instance, the report from 2022 – the most recent available because the CDC publishes at a glacial pace – shows five women died in 2021 “as a result of complications from legal induced abortion.” This is devastating and made worse by the fact that these women’s deaths basically went unnoticed except among family and friends. All we know is five women died, and now Guttmacher doesn’t want us to know even that.

Abortion reporting is a mess to begin with. Nothing compels states to compile and submit these numbers, and some of the most abortion-friendly states don’t. As the CDC report indicates, some states skip reporting for years at a time.

Guttmacher also collects state data, and it has had a reputation for greater accuracy than the CDC statistics. But its new stance is that the risks of collecting abortion data outweigh the benefits because the information might be used “to stigmatize, harass, or even prosecute abortion patients and providers.”

Under the administration of Joe Biden, the FDA loosened laws governing the chemical abortion regimen and stopped keeping track of how many women were injured by “adverse reactions” other than death. According to research from the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, chemical abortion sends far more women to the hospital than surgical abortion.

Just as it shouldn’t be a secret when women die, the public should not be shielded from the truth about the dangers of chemical abortion, which now accounts for more than 60 percent of all preborn deaths.

Women also need to be informed about the dangers of later-term abortions, which are not nearly as rare as the abortion lobby would have us believe. The CDC reported 2,952 abortions beyond 21 weeks in 2021, but 10 states and the District of Columbia did not report numbers and many of those states have few or no laws restricting abortion.

Most of the women whose deaths we do know about in recent years died from later abortions, some in the very states whose reporting of second and third-trimester procedures is sporadic.

The abortion that killed 18-year-old Alexis Arguello in Fort Collins on Feb. 6 was performed when she was 22 weeks pregnant. Her grandparents reportedly did not know about the baby until summoned to the hospital, where doctors tried in vain to save her life after the abortion at Planned Parenthood.

The abortion industry doesn’t want Americans to know when women suffer medical complications from abortion. Guttmacher’s latest suggestion would ensure that Ms. Arguello’s death, and every death caused by legal abortion, remains shrouded in secrecy.

LifeNews Note: Janet Morana is the executive director of Priests for Life and the co-founder of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign.

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