The medical director of Planned Parenthood wrote in 1960 that “90% of illegal abortions are presently being done by physicians.”
Likewise, the “coat hanger abortion” is a myth. In his 1979 book, Aborting America, Dr. Bernard Nathanson, co-founder of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL) mentions one coat hanger abortion.
However, Nathanson, who is now committedly pro-life, has publicly confessed to fabricating evidence in order to get abortion legalized.
There is no hard evidence to support the performance of a single coat hanger abortion.
NARAL claimed that 1,000,000 illegal abortions were performed yearly, though they believed the actual number to be about 100,000. They claimed that 10,000 women died each year from illegal abortions, knowing that the actual number was a mere fraction of this.
Sources: Calderone, Mary S., MD 1960. Illegal Abortion as a Public Health Problem. American Journal of Public Health 50, no. 7 ( July). p. 949.
Nathanson, Bernard. Confessions of an Ex-Abortionist. http://www.aboutabortions.com/Confess.html.
I heard Bernard Nathanson speak once. He had treated many women injured by illegal abortion, and that experience drove him to the pro-abortion movement. By the 1960s they were able to save nearly all the women so injured, because of antibiotics and transfusions. He said perhaps 200 women a year were dying in 1960, by the early 70s about 30.
Government statistics show 859 maternal deaths from all causes in 1968, including 133 abortion deaths (induced abortion, legal or illegal, miscarriage and unspecified.)
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsus/mort68_2a.pdf
People will claim that the abortion deaths were hidden, disguised as deaths from other causes. If so, then there would have been a big drop in the number in the deaths of women of child-bearing age once abortion was safe and legal.
There was no such drop.