This is kind of a silly story about a tragic topic.
The number of Wisconsin women seeking abortions at Planned Parenthood of Illinois has gone up 10-fold since June 24, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned federal abortion rights and Wisconsin halted abortions, the head of the organization said Thursday.
[…]
Planned Parenthood declined to say how many Wisconsin patients have had abortions at its centers in Illinois since the ruling last month that overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion.
They won’t give numbers, so there really isn’t a way to validate their claims. But the claim itself is misleading.
“number of Wisconsin women seeking abortions at Planned Parenthood of Illinois has gone up 10-fold”
Okay. Until a few weeks ago, abortions were legal in Wisconsin, so it stands to reason that Illinois saw very few Wisconsinites getting abortions in their clinics. Why would a Wisconsinite travel to Illinois when they could get in Wisconsin? So the starting number for that alleged “10-fold” increase may be as few as 1 resulting in 10 additional abortions. Is that significant? It is for the children, but not for much else. If, for some strange reason, IL clinics have a history of 100 or more Wisconsinites getting abortions every month, then an increase to 1,000 is very significant.
What I would like to know is if the aggregate number of abortions has increased or decreased since the ruling? Wisconsin averaged about 500 abortions a month. Since the ruling, have IL and MN seen a net increase of about 300 abortions? If so, then abortions have not been reduced. If it’s substantially less, then the ruling may have already saved a couple hundred babies. We will need several months of data before we can really start to draw some conclusions, but the evidence from when other states increased regulations on abortions, the net number of abortions for the region decreased. We can hope.
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