"1 in 5 Pregnancies Worldwide Ends in Abortion, Study Says
90 percent of women worldwide will have an abortion before the age of 45"
Well, which is it?
1 in 5
or
9 in 10?
It's really confusing, because those are two completely different statistics.
Presume for the moment that both are true (just for the sake of argument). That would mean 9 in 10 women are responsible for 1 in 5 births, which means the remaining 1 in 10 women have a lot of children.
Don't know if I believe that, but it's possible. The women most likely to have abortions are also the least likely to have large families - does it therefore follow that the women least likely to have an abortion are the most likely to have large families?
You are assuming that women who have abortions never have children.
What they mean is that 90% of all women will have at least one abortion. A woman who has an abortion can follow with only more abortions or only live births or a combination of the two.
I suspect the 1 in 5 number abortion/live birth is skewed because China - with the world’s largest population - limits women (at least they used to) to one child. The majority of women in China are poor and hence abortion could be the preferred method of preventing births because it’s probably provided free and birth control is costly or non-existent. I wouldn’t be surprised if the average Chinese woman has 10 to 15 abortions versus 1 live birth over her lifetime.
If I had to guess on the abortion number in the US I’d put it at 50% of all women will have an abortion over a lifetime. This is reasonable considering the 2 million babies killed in the US each year. I’d also guess that the vast majority of US women who do kill an unborn child do it once and regret it forever.