Is Abortion Rare? Analyzing Abortion Statistics. In a Friday post about the Komen foundation and Planned Parenthood, I wrote that abortion is safe, legal and rare. The word "rare" stirred things up in the comments section, with readers from both sides of the debate disagreeing with me and maintaining that abortion is actually fairly common. Those who oppose abortion have a vested interest in arguing that it's commonplace, because that supports the contention that getting an abortion is too easy. (It's not. Deciding whether or not to obtain an abortion is inherently difficult. Having made a life-changing choice, many women must brave extremists who picket family planning centers, or jump over hurdles. In many states, women seeking an abortion must first submit to an ultrasound.) Those who support abortion rights argue that I shouldn't call the procedure "rare" because that makes it seem out of the medical mainstream. Here are the facts. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 1.21 million abortions were performed in the United States in 2008, down from 1.31 million in 2000. Twenty-five percent of these were medical abortions induced by mifepristone in the first nine weeks, as opposed to surgical abortions. Guttmacher also estimates that, at current rates, three in 10 women will have an abortion by age 45, a number that many readers quoted in the comments section of this blog. How should we analyze these numbers? Do they indicate that abortion is rare, or commonplace? It's hard to look at them dispassionately, since abortion is such a politically charged issue. U.S. hospitals perform about 1.9 million blood transfusions, 1.7 million cardiac catheterizations, and 1.2 million upper gastrointestinal endoscopies each year. Are upper gastrointestinal endoscopies common, or rare? Twenty-seven million Americans have heart disease, according to the CDC. Twenty-one million women had mammograms in 2008, and 28.2 million people were diagnosed with some form of cancer. There are 44 million women with osteoporosis or low bone mass. There are more surgeries for cancer, significantly, than abortions. If you consider abortion an elective procedure, consider this: There were 10 million cosmetic plastic surgeries in 2009. But the statistic that caught my eye, and led me to call abortion "rare" was this: In a given year, 2 percent of American women between the ages of 15 and 44 have an abortion. That means 98 percent of them do not. And bear in mind that all of these statistics only mention women, as if they were solely to blame for each abortion. In every case, there is a man involved. What if instead of reporting that three in ten women will have an abortion by age 45, Guttmacher stated that three in ten couples will have one? So was I right to call abortion "rare"? It's relative, but the numbers don't really matter. Here's what does: If the right-wing manages to outlaw abortion, the abortion rate will not go down. It was about the same before the 1973 Roe v Wade decision that recognized a woman's right to privacy, as it was in 2008. But abortions will become more dangerous. According to some estimates, fifty percent of the maternal deaths in the first half of the 20th century were due to illegal abortions. Was that a culture of life?