By Tom Perille

How did the movement which grew out of a genuine concern for the health and safety of women become the same movement that undermines women’s health and safety today? Despite good intentions, it was a long route marred by misinformation, uncritical commitment to ideology, and lack of transparency.    

In the 1960s, there was a myriad of rationales for the liberalization of abortion policy. Though some feminist leaders viewed abortion primarily as a vehicle to achieve women’s equality and workforce participation, many 1960s activists placed public health as the overriding concern and the principal reason to remove abortion restrictions. 

Alan Guttmacher was an early medical advocate for abortion access for public health reasons. Bernard Nathanson and Lawrence Lader, who co-founded NARAL, perpetrated the idea between 5,000 and 10,000 women were dying every year from illegal abortions. These figures were widely circulated in the media, amongst advocacy groups, and in legislative debates in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Even if you opposed elective abortion on moral grounds, the desire to prevent countless maternal deaths seemed compelling. NARAL positioned themselves as the champion of women’s health and safety. And their successful public campaign assumed the counterintuitive notion the number of abortions was fixed, and legalization made abortion safer and not more numerous.      

The public health argument was always more impactful than accurate. In his book, “Aborting America”, Bernard Nathanson later admitted the 5,000-10,000 figure was entirely manufactured to garner sympathy for the movement. Actual deaths from illegal abortions were a tiny fraction of that number. In 1972, the year before Roe was decided, the CDC reported 39 deaths from illegal abortions and 24 from legal abortions. There is also empiric evidence legal status substantially influences abortion rates. 

After abortion was legalized, public health concerns were eclipsed by the drive to increase abortion access.

In an extensive expose in the New York Times in 2025, it was reported despite a post-COVID fundraising boon, Planned Parenthood spent most of its money on the political and legal promotion of abortion. Consequently, clinics suffered — “many operate with aging equipment and poorly trained staff, as turnover has increased because of rock-bottom salaries.” The Times article reported “scores” of allegations of poor care, including “botched” abortions. Staff concerns were often minimized, and many remained quiet because they were “afraid of damaging the mission.” Protecting and expanding abortion rights became the “mission.” 

Public health concerns only reemerged prominently after the Supreme Court Dobbs decision.

ProPublica won a Pulitzer Prize for framing maternal mortality and the deaths of women following abortions or miscarriages as direct consequences of abortion restrictions. The truth is much more complicated. The reality is all states currently enforcing abortion restrictions allow physicians to intervene when continuation of pregnancy threatens the woman’s life. It is not required a woman’s death be “imminent.” 

On the other hand, when recent legitimate public health issues are identified, the media is often curiously silent. The abortion industry has made unserious public health claims such as “mifepristone is safer than Tylenol”, but there was no media accountability. When OB/GYNs expose the shocking disregard for women’s safety related to the inappropriate use of telehealth drug-induced abortions — nothing. A large, methodologically rigorous study in 2025 showed powerful associations between abortion and serious adverse mental health outcomes. Crickets from mainstream media. 

In Colorado, attempts to understand and mitigate the public health consequences of abortion have been squelched. Colorado’s Maternity Mortality Review Committee doesn’t differentiate abortion-related/associated deaths from other pregnancy-related deaths. Colorado HB21-1183 would have required summary data regarding the reasons women pursued abortion and complications of the procedure in addition to standard CDC demographic/surveillance data to inform reproductive health policies/programs. It was defeated. HB25-1252 and HB26-1243 would have provided CDPHE the oversight authority to ensure high-risk second/third trimester abortion facilities are regulated like other high-risk Colorado medical facilities. Both attempts were defeated despite testimony attesting to an inordinate number of ambulance transfers from a single late-abortion facility in Fort Collins and the death of an 18-year-old woman following her 22-week abortion at the same facility. Public health red-flags are simply ignored.

In contrast to the national attention focused on abortion-related deaths where tenuous correlations to abortion restrictions can be asserted, the death at the Fort Collins facility went unnoticed in Colorado, where there are no abortion restrictions. Even attempts to obtain the coroner’s unredacted autopsy and confirm that the death was a result of a late abortion were frustrated. In court documents, the coroner argued releasing the report “might discourage someone from seeking reproductive health care during their life.” Once again, “mission” over public health. 

A movement that was launched with an eye toward public health now turns a blind eye to the very real public health issues arising from unrestricted, unregulated abortion. In Colorado, we effectively have recreated the “back-alley” abortion scenario that gave rise to the abortion rights movement in the 1960s. 

The nation, and Colorado in particular, needs to reassess whether abortion access is our primary focus or whether the health and safety of women should be our focus. If we continue to choose the former, Coloradans should brace themselves for more harm, preventable injuries and deaths. 

Tom Perille, M.D., is president of Democrats for Life of Colorado.