"After all, those of us who remember when birth control was illegal and when 10,000 American women a year died from illegal abortions don't have to imagine a world without choices," columnist Ellen Goodman recently wrote. "We were there." No, actually, you weren't.

Cecil Adams is the author of The Straight Dope, one of the best weekly columns in America, and in a recent piece he gave us the straight dope on Goodman's abortion statistics. Adams notes, "even a generous reading of the statistics we do have indicates that Goodman is off by a factor of ten; a stickler might say she blew it by a ratio of 250 to 1." In the year prior to 1973's Roe v. Wade decision, for instance, 39 women died from illegal abortions (ten less than died from legal abortions). Seventy or so years ago, official counts claim that more than a thousand women died annually from botched abortions. Some estimate that the true number must have been higher (which it most certainly was), and they arbitrarily place the number at 10,000. But with the advent of penicillin, thousands of women dying in back alleys from coat-hanger abortions existed only in the minds of imaginative propagandists.

Adams concludes: "the claim that legalization has prevented the deaths of thousands upon thousands of women doesn't hold up."