FactCheck Examines a Politician's Statements About Abortion and Birthrates

Santorum Wrong on Abortion, Birth Facts, States FactCheck.org

Rick Santorum incorrectly stated that "one in three pregnancies end in abortion" in the United States. It’s actually fewer than one in four.

Santorum appeared on a New Hampshire radio talk show, blaming abortions for "causing Social Security and Medicare to be underfunded." But he not only misstated the abortion statistic, he also got it wrong when he said that "our birthrate is now below replacement rate for the first time in our history." The total fertility rate, not the birthrate, is used to determine the stability of a nation’s population, and the US total fertility rate was below its replacement rate from 1972 to 2006. Finally, Santorum also misrepresented France as lagging far behind its replacement rate.

The former senator from Pennsylvania, who is considering running for the Republican nomination for president, appeared March 29 on "The Advocates," a radio talk show on WEZS-AM in Laconia, NH.

(Click image to listen to Rick Santorum’s interview on WEZS-AM.)

Santorum agreed with a caller who claimed "there would be no problem" funding Social Security if not for abortion.

Caller, March 29: The real problem is — and nobody even suggests this, I haven’t heard it anyplace — is the 50 million abortions in this country a year. Say 25 million, half of them, were paying Social Security taxes and the Medicare, there would be no problem. Why hasn’t somebody said that?

Santorum: … This caller is absolutely right. The reason Social Security is in big trouble is we don’t have enough workers to support the retirees. Well, a third of all the young people in America are not in America today because of abortion, because one in three pregnancies end in abortion.

The caller was referring to the 50 million abortions in the United States since the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade legalized abortion. He merely slipped when he said there were 50 million abortions "a year." But Santorum was wrong when he said that a third of pregnancies end in abortion.

In a March 2011 report, the nonpartisan Guttmacher Institute reported that there were 22.4 abortions for every 100 pregnancies in 2008, excluding miscarriages. The 2008 data is the most recent available, according to Guttmacher spokeswoman Rebecca Wind. The institute’s chart goes back to 1973, and the abortion ratio never reached 33 per 100 pregnancies. Its peak was 30.4 in 1983.

Guttmacher favors abortion rights, but the abortion statistics it gathers are the most detailed available and are widely cited by both sides in the debate. And regardless of whether the abortion ratio is 33 or 30 or 22 percent, Santorum cannot assume that those aborted fetuses reduced the US population by an equal number of people — which is what he suggests when linking abortions to Social Security’s financial problems. In an e-mail, Wind said that "most women obtain abortions to postpone childbearing not to prevent it altogether," and noted that some of the aborted pregnancies "would have ended in miscarriage."

Wind, March 31: The group of women most likely to have an abortion are in their early 20s. They may already have one child and don’t want another at that time, or they may be childless but desire to have children in the future. Either way, the abortion postpones the birth of their child, it does not eliminate it — and there is no impact on the overall population. Some abortions actually terminate pregnancies that would have ended in miscarriage, so again you can’t assume that every abortion would have otherwise resulted in a live birth.

Pages: 1 · 2

News and Issues, Health and Science, Issues, Politics, Government, Senior Women Web, Sightings

FactCheck Examines a Politician's Statements About Abortion and Birthrates

More Articles