Ramesh Ponnuru, senior editor of The National Review just emailed me this interesting fact that neither I, nor FactCheck.org, nor The Straight Dope, nor (of course) Ellen Goodman nor Sen. Barbara Boxer's "factcheckers" found:

I’m way late to this party—but as I work on a related project, I came across your posts and the Straight Dope column on Goodman. Nice work, but there’s one additional point to be made. In Goodman’s correction, which [Cecil] Adams [of The Straight Dope] says closes the books on the question, she allows that Taussig’s 1936 research was based on "admittedly skimpy" data. But she doesn’t note (and probably doesn’t realize) that Taussig "apologize[d]" for the 1936 estimate in 1942, saying that 5,000 was an upper bound. See Clarke Forsythe, "The Effective Enforcement of Abortion Law Before Roe v. Wade," in Brad Stetson, ed., The Silent Subject: Reflections on the Unborn in American Culture, (Praeger, 1996), pp. 198-99.

Factcheck.org’s thing on Boxer misses this point, too.

Ramesh

Thanks much, Ramesh. We'll be sure to contact Cecil, Ellen, Barbara, FactCheck.org, AP and The San Francisco Chronicle with the update.

Imagine what we could do if we got paid for this stuff...?