LETTERS: ABORTION-RELATED DEATHS UNREPORTED

To the editor:

Kevin Sherlock, an investigative reporter who specializes in public document searches, undertook an extensive review of death certificates for women of reproductive age in Los Angeles County. He pulled the autopsy reports while looking for indications of "therapeutic misadventure." He was able to find 29 abortion related deaths in Los Angeles County between 1970 and 1987, four of which occurred in one year. The Centers for Disease Control at that time reported zero abortion-related deaths for the entire state of California and only 12 deaths nationwide.

Using similar techniques, Sherlock eventually documented 30 to 40 percent more abortion-related deaths throughout the country than had been officially reported to the CDC.

How can there be such an extensive cover-up of abortion-related deaths by public-health authorities, and what are the reasons for such cover-ups? When abortion was illegal, abortion related deaths were carefully and accurately reported because these deaths resulted from an illegal activity.

Today abortion is not only legal, but it is politically protected. In fact, the CDC's abortion surveillance unit is not only run by abortion advocates, it has regularly employed practicing abortionists.

The cover-up of abortion-related deaths is furthered by the World Health Organization's coding rule No. 12 of the International Classification of Diseases. This rule requires that deaths due to medical and surgical treatment be reported under the complication of the procedure (embolism, for example) and not under the condition for treatment (elective abortion).

This makes the "abortion" category a ghost category under which it is simply impossible to code a death due to abortion. Medical coders have relayed that any attempt to code a death due to abortion under "abortion" yields a reject message from the computer programs at the National Center for Health Statistics in Washington D.C., a division of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

CHRISTINE E. STEPHENS

Cape Girardeau