The claim issued this week by the Guttmacher Institute that abortions should be legalized worldwide because unsafe abortions are killing women as been described as "pure propaganda" by pro-life leaders.

The Guttmacher Institute was an official affiliate of Planned Parenthood, where Alan Guttmacher was a former president, until it disassociated itself with the abortion business to win some badly-needed credibility. The organization, which works to see abortion legalized worldwide, issued a report this week claiming as many as 70,000 women die from illegal abortions every year.

The claim was described as false by Bernie Smith of Precious Life who pointed out that the Guttmacher report could not be described as independent academic research but was “propaganda from the pro-abortion lobby.”

“Guttmacher admits that the abortion numbers they give for the developing world are based on conjecture and are therefore unreliable,” she pointed out. “But they use their own guesstimates to argue that abortion will help women when the opposite is true.”

Anthony Ozimic, the communications director for SPUC, the British pro-life group, said the pro-abortion lobby has a proven track record of exaggerating illegal abortions numbers. “Abortion numbers in Britain today are many times higher than before the 1967 Abortion Act, despite ever-increasing access to birth control drugs and devices," he added.

The Life Institute said that the millions spent by Guttmacher in promoting abortion could be better used in improving health care in the developing nations. “Mothers don’t need abortion, they need to be lifted out of poverty and provided with better health care,” he argued. “That’s modern medicine and the correct solution to the problems faced by women in developing countries. Abortion is medieval medicine, and it’s shocking to see so much money wasted on promoting this failed solution.”