Mortality from abortion and childbirth. Are the statistics biased?

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Abstract
Critics have challenged previous comparisons of mortality from legal abortion and childbirth for containing biases in the crude data that spuriously favor the safety of abortion. To evaluate this concern, the sources of mortality data on which these comparisons are based were reviewed and the completeness of abortion mortality statistics, the completeness of childbirth mortality statistics, and the accuracy of the denominators for both these events were examined. The evidence was consisitent in 2 directions: abortion deaths appear to be more completely ascertained than childbirth deaths; use of different denominator estimates has relatively little impact on the comparison. The crude data are biased in a direction that overestimates the abortion risks for the women relative to the risks of childbearing.