[syriacus]

Without trying to take side in the abortion issue: abortion itself is not CAUSING women dying in ectopic pregnancy.

How about this:

In a good number of cases,
a woman's choice to have an abortion
set up the circumstances that led to her death.

?

[syriacus]

An abortion can "bring about" a failure to recognize the symptoms of an ectopic pregnancy, just as folic acid can "bring about" a failure to recognize the symptoms of B12 deficiency.

[Casio]

Without trying to take side in the abortion issue: abortion itself is not CAUSING women dying in ectopic pregnancy.

How about this:

In a good number of cases, a woman's choice to have an abortion set up the circumstances that led to her death.

Well.......you asked the question, I must answer according to the best scientific evidence and well known statistics:

It will suprise the heck out of everybody, but do you know what is the LEAST risky contraception?

The answer: using barrier type of methods (condom, diaphragm, spermicides, etc.) AND abortion if they fail (the woman gets pregnant).

How come? Because the barrier type of methods are lacking the risk of hormonal contraceptives or IUD, and when they fail, those and the abortion together has a lower overall mortality than a plain average pregnancy.

But this combined method is so controversial that no sane doctor would suggest it to patients. In other words, abortion has lower mortality than pregnancy, that's my answer to your question (fortunately, the mortality of both is pretty low these days).

The maternal mortality of pregnancy (quote from CDC.gov): "During 1991--1999, a total of 4,200 deaths were determined to be pregnancy-related. The overall pregnancy-related mortality ratio was 11.8 deaths per 100,000 live births and ranged from 10.3 in 1991 to 13.2 in 1999."

The maternal mortality of abortion (quote from CDC.gov): "In 2000, as in previous years, deaths related to legal induced abortions occurred rarely (less than one death per 100,000 abortions)."

-------------------------

As you may know already, I am an obstetrician-gynecologist, I am delivering babies for a living, for the last 27 years of my life, so I am quite familiar with the subject. Although no patient of mine died yet, I didn't conduct pregnancies in the 100,000 range, BUT.......quite a few patient of mine were sick enough, that if they were less lucky (or had a lesser quality doctor (:-)) could have died easily.

The closest a patient of mine got: after a totally normal delivery, beautiful baby, she started to bleed, like you can't possibily imagine. None of the standard medications worked. She lost 13 units of blood (while she was getting equal amount of transfusion of course) by the time I could slow down the bleeding with a combination of medications, one quite rare, had to run to another hospital to get it. That case scared the shit out of me.

So, these are the days of our lives..........and reality.

Gabor