If you can believe it, Planned Parenthood has been caught lying big time about the number of women who died from illegal back-alley abortions prior to Roe v. Wade in 1973.

This is one of the most common attacks from liberals who want to keep abortion legal. Their argument is that we’ll start seeing a large number of back-alley abortions and women dying from them.

According to The Blaze,

A [Washington] Post reader requested that the organization check up on that claim, and the resulting research led The Washington Post to assign Wen’s claim a grade of “Four Pinocchios” which is defined on their rating scale simply as a “whopper.” For reference, a “Three Pinocchio” rating is for a claim with a “significant factual error and/or obvious contradiction.”

“Wen is a doctor, and the ACOG is made up of doctors,” the Post’s Glenn Kessler wrote. “They should know better than to peddle statistics based on data that predates the advent of antibiotics. Even given the fuzzy nature of the data and estimates, there is no evidence that in the years immediately preceding the Supreme Court’s decision, thousands of women died every year in the United States from illegal abortions.”

Dr. Mary Steichen Calderone wrote about this in 1959 – 14 years before Roe v. Wade and said that “Abortion is no longer a dangerous procedure” because of antibiotics. Then she went on to say,

“… about 90 percent of all illegal abortions are presently being done by physicians…Whatever trouble arises usually arises from self-induced abortions, which comprise approximately 8 percent,or with the very small percentage that go to some kind of non-medical abortionist…So remember…abortion, whether therapeutic or illegal, is in the main no longer dangerous, because it is being done well by physicians.”

Another researcher from the Guttmacher Institute said, “In my opinion, if Roe v. Wade were overturned, women would turn to relatively safe medications that can be purchased over the internet. There would be some deaths but probably not as many as there were in the 1960s.”

Also from The Blaze, “Abortion is no longer a dangerous procedure,” one researcher wrote in 1959. “This applies not just to therapeutic abortions as performed in hospitals but also to so-called illegal abortions as done by physicians. In 1957, there were only 260 deaths in the whole country attributed to abortions of any kind. In New York City in 1921, there were 144 abortion deaths, in 1951 there were only 15.”