Healthy Futures for Women Providers & Facts

When we see you, you get the doctor's personal cell phone number and we encourage you to call directly at any time.

Our physicians are extremely skilled and courteous professionals. They have served as consultants on the topic to legislators, medical schools, physician residency programs, and the media.

We are an established referral center to which OB/GYNs in eight surrounding states regularly send patients for elective surgeries and for cases of severely complicated fetal problems and fetal loss.

Our physicians are absolutely non-judgmental: whatever your circumstances we will be very compassionate, sympathetic, and communicative.

They have been caring for women in Colorado for 20 years, offering abortion services and reproductive counseling.

They are very experienced, having done thousands of procedures.

They are active members of the National Abortion Federation.

Many women have met us for abortion services then decided to return to us for routine health care, which we do here also. If you were referred to us by another physician we encourage you to stay with that physician; if you found us on your own, we'd love to have you join us as a regular primary care patient.

Facts About Abortion

The following information comes from leading textbooks in medicine on abortion - see references below.

Abortion is very common

Unintended pregnancy is a universal human experience – worldwide, approximately 50 million abortions occur annually.

In the late 1980’s close to 60% of all pregnancies in the U.S. were unintended; 45% of these, or 1.4 million annually, ended in abortion.

Since then, the numbers have decreased slightly: in the U.S., about 1.2 million to 1.4 million abortions occur annually.

Nearly half of all U.S. women, about 43%, will have at least one abortion some time in their lives.

In the U.S., the single most common surgical procedure is abortion. Abortions are done more often than tonsillectomy, appendectomy, or Cesarean section, for example.

From 1990 to 2015 the U.S. population increased from 249 million to 321 million persons – that’s an increase of 29% - and gives us one of the highest growth rates for industrialized countries.

The frequency of abortion in the U.S. is about twice that of western Europe and one fifth that of former USSR nations.

The techniques we use are very safe; there is an extremely low complication rate, and with low complications, the abortion has no impact on your ability to get pregnant in the future.

Legal abortion is very safe

Nothing in medicine is risk-free, but legal abortion is often the safest choice for the pregnant woman.

In the U.S., the death rate for abortion is far smaller than that for tonsillectomy or appendectomy, or for most women who choose to remain pregnant and deliver.

Where abortion is illegal - and thus occur under shadowy circumstances - 60,000 to 100,000 women die of botched abortions each year: about 1600 women for every 1 million abortions.

Where abortion is legal – and thus occur in the context of thoroughly trained, properly equipped medical offices – the rate is far lower - the overall risk from abortion is 6 in 1 million abortions. For comparison, consider that in the U.S. even with the available healthcare, the overall risk of dying from pregnancy or childbirth (that is, when a woman chooses to stay pregnant) is 65 in 1 million women. (The risk for any particular woman depends on her unique circumstances, especially gestational age; even for abortions over 20 weeks the mortality rate is about 120 in 1 million abortions).

While most abortions occur quite early in pregnancy, each year tens of thousands of U.S. women have abortions in the third trimester.

54% of all abortions occur prior to 8 weeks of pregnancy, another 23% at 9-10 weeks, and the remaining 23% at 11 weeks or greater.

Women of every race, religion, level of education, and socioeconomic status have abortions.

- From Management of Unintended and Abnormal Pregnancy - Comprehensive Abortion Care, Maureen Paul MD MPH, et. al., Wiley-Blackwell, 2009 and A Clinician’s Guide to Medical and Surgical Abortion, Maureen Paul, MD, MPH, et. al., Churchill Livingstone, 1999, and from the Alan Guttmacher Institute.

Learn more at www.agi-usa.org and at www.prochoice.org