There are no statistics, no numbers anywhere to report. Therefore, if anyone tells you that there were X numbers of illegal abortions somewhere in a certain time, they are guessing. The pro-abortion leader may guess 1,000,000. Your pro-life spokesman may guess 100,000, but both are guessing. There is only one reported figure that can lead us to some degree of accurate estimate of the numbers of illegal abortions and that is the number of women who died from illegal abortions.
Many nations report only one figure for women who die.
Such statistics are no help. The United States, since the 1940s, has reported such deaths separately, so we know the number of deaths from illegal abortions. Now if we knew how many illegal abortions it took to cause one death, we could easily calculate the total number of illegal abortions. The problem is, no one has the slightest idea how many it took, and so we're back to where we started from. The following chart was used on the floor of the US Senate during the tumultuous debate on abortion in 1981.