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January 22, 2007
Young woman
Despite the President’s declaration, opposing the right to safe and legal abortion does little to place value on the lives of women and girls.
Photo courtesy of Sven Torfinn, Panos Pictures

On January 22, 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed a woman’s right to an abortion in the landmark 1973 decision Roe v. Wade. More than thirty years after this milestone in women’s health and rights, opponents continue their efforts to undermine the decision—even as doctors recall women whose lives were lost to unsafe abortion.

As women’s advocates everywhere celebrate Roe, President Bush and his administration continue to push his anti-choice agenda by proclaiming Jan. 21 as National Sanctity of Human Life Day.

Despite the President’s declaration, opposing the right to safe and legal abortion does little to place value on the lives of women and girls. According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, it is estimated that before Roe between 200,000 and 1.2 million illegally induced abortions occurred annually in the U.S. Every year, hundreds of women died and thousands more were injured following illegal abortions.

"Many of the doctors of conscience who have provided abortions through the years were moved to do so by the horrors of botched illegal abortions,” said Dr. Curtis Boyd in Voices of Choice: Physicians Who Provided Abortions Before Roe v. Wade. “I saw those ill and sometimes dying women in my medical training too. I was moved by their plight. But that was not what drove me to risk my career and sometimes my life. I was moved by the certain knowledge that women's lives could be ruined when they could not abort a pregnancy."

In a brief issued by the White House on Jan. 19, President Bush states, “National Sanctity of Human Life Day serves as a reminder that we must value human life in all forms, not just those considered healthy, wanted, or convenient.”

With the advent of Roe v. Wade and the legalization of abortion in the U.S., there has been a dramatic decrease in death and injuries from clandestine abortion, which is responsible for the deaths of approximately 70,000 women globally each year. According to the Guttmacher Institute, in the U.S. today, complications from abortion occur in less than 1 percent of patients, and a woman is statistically less likely to experience complications from an abortion than a penicillin shot.

For more information, contact:
Kirsten Sherk
Senior Associate, Media Relations
e-mail: sherkk@ipas.org
phone: 919.960.5612
fax: 919.929.0258