…as the correspondent who sent this along puts it.

Ellen Goodman corrects herself on pre-Roe maternal abortion deaths.

I bring this up because of a recent column I wrote on the March for Women’s Lives. I referred to the bad old days when 10,000 women a year died of illegal abortions. Ka-boom. The number — 10,000 deaths — produced a mother lode of e-mails insisting that it was either a lie or propaganda or an “urban legend.” Many said that this figure came from Dr. Bernard Nathanson, formerly prochoice and now prolife, who has claimed responsibility for the bunk which he now debunks.

Well, as someone who is both prochoice and pro-facts, I went back into the deep, dark numeric archives with guide Stanley Henshaw, who, poor soul, is actually writing a paper on all this for the Guttmacher Institute.

I will spare you the details, but the 10,000 figure did not come from Dr. Nathanson, it came from Dr. Frederick Taussig, circa 1936. In 1930 abortion was the official cause of death for almost 2,700 women. But “official” wasn’t the whole story. Though data were admittedly skimpy by today’s standards, Taussig’s research estimated 8,000 to 10,000 deaths.

Over the decades, the numbers shrank to hundreds and then dozens because of penicillin, because doctors began performing abortions, and because abortion became legal in critical states such as New York. By 1972, the year before the Roe v. Wade decision, the Centers for Disease Control reported that 39 women died from illegal or self-induced abortions.