HOW MANY PARTIAL-BIRTH ABORTIONS ARE THERE?
Figures from abortion-industry groups have ranged from 2,200 for the year 2000 (from The Alan Guttmacher Institute [AGI], which is affiliated with the Planned Parenthood Federation of America [PPFA], a major abortion provider) to 3,000-5,000 (in 1997, by Ron Fitzsimmons, the executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, although each of these figures was based on definitions somewhat different from that contained in the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. The AGI figure is clearly a bare minimum. Responses to AGI’s periodic surveys are purely voluntary. It is hard to understand why any abortionist would report that he was performing such abortions if he was not, but easy to imagine that many would throw the survey in the wastebasket. (An earlier AGI survey, using the same methodology, claimed that only 650 such abortions were performed in 1996 — an absurd claim, but nevertheless was accepted as authoritative by The New York Times and other news media for years. It ap
