Before Abortion Was Legal - NYTimes.com

Before Abortion Was Legal - NYTimes.com:

"Anti-abortionists, wanting to reverse Roe v. Wade, often use the argument that taxpayers should not pay for abortion. But taxpayers have always paid for abortion; in fact they paid much more for it when it was illegal.

If one worked in city hospitals in New York or Boston in the 1960s, as I did, not a week went by without the emergency admission of a young woman bleeding to death from an attempted abortion. Either she had gone to some self-appointed unskilled practitioner, or she had tried to produce the desired effect with a coat hanger, some other foreign body or one of the poisons Ms. Manning describes. Most often, the actual results were severe infection and death.

No one is “pro abortion”; it is the desperate act of a desperate person. When it was illegal and unfinanced, we paid for it through expensive hospitalization and frequent loss of life. Now that it is legal, we pay for it another way. But at least young women seeking to terminate pregnancy are not paying for it with their lives."