(from FactCheck.org)

As President Bush considers exactly whom to nominate to succeed Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court, Senators Barbara Boxer and Rick Santorum both have distorted some facts about the effect of Roe v. Wade.

Boxer, a Democrat, claimed that repeal of Roe “means a minimum of 5,000 women a year will die” from illegal abortions. But that’s a 69-year-old figure dating to a time before penicillin and the birth-control pill. Experts say nowhere near that many women were dying from abortion complications even in the years just before Roe made abortions legal nationwide.

On the other side of the abortion debate, Republican Santorum says that suicides by women, and also crime, “got worse, much worse” after Roe. But in fact, the female suicide rate is one-third lower now than in 1973. And the Justice Department’s annual survey on crime victimization shows a 69 percent drop in property crime and a 53 percent drop in violent crime since Roe.