section_path: Safety/Safety in the abortion debate
section_name: Safety in the abortion debate
paragraph_text: Safety in the abortion debate
  
  Some purported risks of abortion are promoted primarily by anti-abortion groups, but lack scientific support. For example, the question of a link between induced abortion and breast cancer has been investigated extensively. Major medical and scientific bodies (including the WHO, National Cancer Institute, American Cancer Society, Royal College of OBGYN and American Congress of OBGYN) have concluded that abortion does not cause breast cancer.
  
  In the past even illegality has not automatically meant that the abortions were unsafe. Referring to the U.S., historian Linda Gordon states: "In fact, illegal abortions in this country have an impressive safety record."
  
  According to Rickie Solinger,
  
  A related myth, promulgated by a broad spectrum of people concerned about abortion and public policy, is that before legalization abortionists were dirty and dangerous back-alley butchers.... he historical evidence does not support such claims.
  
  A 1940s American physician spoke of his pride in having performed 13,844 illegal abortions without any fatalities. In 1870s New York City, the abortionist/midwife Madame Restell (Anna Trow Lohman) is said to have lost very few women among her more than 100,000 patients —a lower mortality rate than the childbirth mortality rate at the time. In 1936, obstetrics and gynecology professor Frederick J. Taussig wrote that a cause of increasing mortality during the years of illegality in the U.S. was that
  
  With each decade of the past fifty years the actual and proportionate frequency of this accident has increased, due, first, to the increase in the number of instrumentally induced abortions; second, to the proportionate increase in abortions handled by doctors as against those handled by midwives; and, third, to the prevailing tendency to use instruments instead of the finger in emptying the uterus.