Sherry Chandler

I’m going to play around with an article, entitled Unwanted Pregnancies Rise for Poor Women, I read this morning in the Washington Post. I’m going to give you some paragraphs out of order. Here are the last two paragraphs:

In 1994, the study found, 87 women of every 1,000 living below the poverty line had unintended pregnancies. In 2001, that number had risen to 112 of 1,000 women.

For women earning between $16,000 and $32,000 a year, the number of unintended pregnancies increased from 65 per 1,000 in 1994 to 81 per 1,000 in 2001. But for women in families earning more than $32,000, the number of unplanned pregnancies declined from 37 to 29 per 1,000 women.

Here are paragraphs 6, 7, 8 & 9:

Asked what was driving the trends, the authors noted that some state and federal reproductive health programs have been cut or made more restrictive in recent years. State and federal programs have increasingly focused on abstinence rather than contraception, and some analysts have argued that the shift is leading to less use of contraceptives and more unintended pregnancies.

Many social conservatives say, however, that contraceptives have limitations and that the only way a woman can ensure she will not have an unintended pregnancy is to refrain from sexual intercourse until she is ready to have a child.

Leslee Unruh, president and founder of the Abstinence Clearinghouse, a South Dakota-based nonprofit that seeks to educate about abstinence programs, said the growing number of unintended pregnancies among poorer women shows that traditional sex education programs are failing.

“Programs for poor women are often so condescending, even degrading,” she said. “They teach how to put on a condom rather than how to take control of their lives.”

Here are paragraphs 14 & 15:

Finer’s study found there were 6.4 million pregnancies in the United States in 2001, resulting in about 4 million births. There were 1.3 million abortions and 1.1 million miscarriages. The pregnancies were almost evenly divided between intended and unintended, and the unintended ones led to almost even numbers of births and abortions.

The authors said the growing disparities between richer and poorer women appeared to be the result of greater contraceptive use by the more affluent. The health statistics center, which is part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reported in 2004 that after decades of increasing contraceptive use, the trend stalled in the late 1990s and began to decline after that. The decline occurred almost entirely in poorer women.

So – contraceptives don’t seem to be ineffective for affluent women. Only for poor ones?

Here’s one other interesting paragraph from the middle of this article:

Among the poor, the proportion of unintended pregnancies that resulted in live births increased by almost 50 percent between 1994 and 2001, while it declined for women in families whose income was at least twice the poverty level. Poor women who had abortions did so on average six days later in their pregnancies than women of greater means.

So – if you’re affluent you use more birth control and get more abortions. If you’re poor, you use less birth control and carry more unwanted babies to term.

Meta-message from the right: if you’re poor and a woman, you can’t have sex. If you do have sex, you have to have the baby.

Just as a vivid sketch of a cat by a good draughtsman may contain in a few crisp lines the entire feline experience of everyone who looks at it, so the powerfully constructed pattern of words that we know as Hamlet may contain an amount of meaning which the vast and constantly growing library of criticism on the play cannot begin to exhaust…when a poetic structure attains a certain degree of concentration or social recognition, the amount of commentary it will carry is infinite. The fact is in itself no more incredible than the fact that a scientist can state a law illustrated by more phenomena than he could ever observe or count, and there is no occasion for wondering, like the yokels in Goldsmith, how one small poet’s head can carry the amount of wit, wisdom, instruction, and significance that Shakespeare and Dante have given the world.

— Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton University Press, 1957)