In light of the new Supreme Court decision banning partial-birth abortion, I continue to be troubled by a simple question – just how many PBAs were being performed? A commenter on here wrote last week, as I recall, that there were 50,000 per year. This number struck me as wildly excessive and a brief Google search did not remotely corroborate it. Does anybody have an answer to this? Can anyone substantiate the facts here? Much hunch is that partial-birth abortions were a rare thing indeed – even before they were banned. The numbers were closer to 5000 than 50,000. But I have no evidence of this, only my suspicion. I would be interested in the facts, although I doubt they are easy to get. What is easy to get, although less interesting, are the opinions of the various presidential candidates on the subject.
UPDATE: According to Guttmacher, PBAs were a tiny 0.17% of abortions in 2000. (via Jose Guardia)
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