Won’t vulnerable women die in droves in back-alley abortions if Roe v. Wade is overturned?

No. Statistics bandied around by abortion advocates regarding the number of deaths from back-alley abortions before 1973 are wildly inaccurate—by orders of magnitude. Even prior to Roe v. Wade, the majority of abortions were performed illegally in doctor’s offices and hospitals, not in back alleys.

Aside from the inaccurate assumptions on which it is based, this objection begs the question. If an act is unjust and unethical, then the fact that committing the act will be more dangerous if it is outlawed does not mean that it should be legal. To take a trivial illustration, every year some people try to commit armed assault, and every year some of them are injured or fatally shot by law-enforcement officers in the process.¹ Obviously this is not an argument to legalize armed assault. The question is whether armed assault is unjust, not whether people will try to do it anyway.

The same goes for abortion. If Roe v. Wade is overturned and large numbers of women were to start dying in back-alley abortions, this would indicate the need for increased efforts to provide such women with resources and to promote a culture in which casual intercourse and unplanned pregnancies are rare. But it would in no wise indicate a need to legalize an injustice.