It appears that the numbers used by both sides are all over the place. This Salon article says that many of these abortions are done by women too poor to afford abortions until late in the term.
About Fitzsimmons-he seems to have come out of the blue no one had heard of him before his Nightline appearance and the lies he said he told were never aired. He no longer gives interviews. He seems to have shown up and then disappeared.
http://www.slate.com/id/2086/Abortion Apostate
The media get suckered by Ron Fitzsimmons--again.
By Franklin Foer
Posted Sunday, March 9, 1997, at 12:30 AM ET
But the media are being as credulous about Fitzsimmons' new story as they were about his old one. For starters, why did it take him 16 months to retract lies he claims to have immediately regretted?
Then there's the underplayed fact that Fitzsimmons' mendacity could not possibly have influenced the national debate, because the segments of the Nightline interview in which Fitzsimmons says he lied through his teeth never aired!
You might think, from the attention paid to Ron Fitzsimmons' recantation, that he was a major player in the abortion debate. But most reporters who cover abortion--to say nothing of pro-choice insiders--say they had never heard of him. "This guy came out of the blue," says an official at one major pro-choice group. At best, Fitzsimmons is a B-league lobbyist. His group, a trade association, represents 220 clinics (but not Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the United States). While it aims to protect abortion rights, its agenda is mostly more mundane. Right now, its biggest task is negotiating contracts with pharmaceutical companies.
HERE is the part that is so discouraging.
Abortion practitioners have publicly admitted the same for years. Martin Haskell, the Ohio doctor who developed the procedure, asserted in one paper that
80 percent of his patients choose it because it is safer and more convenient than the alternatives. There was no medical necessity. The other leading late-term abortionist, the now-deceased Dr. James McMahon, presented similar statistics before a congressional committee two years ago. These two doctors together performed 500 late-term abortions in one year, and there are at least eight other doctors who administer it--obviously, this adds up to more than 500 IDEs a year nationwide.