Sherry Chandler » 2007 » October » 12
My support of abortion rights has always been pragmatic. I am impatient of hairsplitting arguments about when life begins. Such arguments can’t be won.
Right and wrong don’t figure into it, except on a personal level. And grow up, people. Sometimes adults have to make a choice between two wrongs.
The fact is that women have abortions. They have always had abortions and they always will have abortions. So you can either value women and make abortion legal and safe. Or you can despise women and make abortion a back-alley, coat-hanger affair. But you are not going to stop it by making it illegal.
Just as you aren’t going to stop prostitution and drug use by making them illegal. You just create a bunch of criminals.
What has brought on this rant? This article in the morning’s NYTimes:
ROME, Oct. 11 — A comprehensive global study of abortion has concluded that abortion rates are similar in countries where it is legal and those where it is not, suggesting that outlawing the procedure does little to deter women seeking it.
Moreover, the researchers found that abortion was safe in countries where it was legal, but dangerous in countries where it was outlawed and performed clandestinely. Globally, abortion accounts for 13 percent of women’s deaths during pregnancy and childbirth, and there are 31 abortions for every 100 live births, the study said.
The results of the study, a collaboration between scientists from the World Health Organization in Geneva and the Guttmacher Institute in New York, a reproductive rights group, are being published Friday in the journal Lancet.
The article confirms what seems to be obvious: in countries where abortion is legal, it is safe; in countries where abortion is outlawed, it is dangerous, “performed under unsafe conditions by poorly trained providers.”
Naturally, the right disputes the findings:
Anti-abortion groups criticized the research, saying that the scientists had jumped to conclusions from imperfect tallies, often estimates of abortion rates in countries where the procedure was illegal. “These numbers are not definitive and very susceptible to interpretation according to the agenda of the people who are organizing the data,” said Randall K. O’Bannon, director of education and research at the National Right to Life Educational Trust Fund in Washington.
And of course a group calling itself the “National Right to Life Educational Trust Fund” does not, itself, have an agenda. No, of course not.
What does lower abortion rates? Big surprise: contraception:
The data also suggested that the best way to reduce abortion rates was not to make abortion illegal but to make contraception more widely available, said Sharon Camp, chief executive of the Guttmacher Institute.
In Eastern Europe, where contraceptive choices have broadened since the fall of Communism, the study found that abortion rates have decreased by 50 percent, although they are still relatively high compared with those in Western Europe. “In the past we didn’t have this kind of data to draw on,” Ms. Camp said. “Contraception is often the missing element” where abortion rates are high, she said.
…
In Uganda, where abortion is illegal and sex education programs focus only on abstinence, the estimated abortion rate was 54 per 1,000 women in 2003, more than twice the rate in the United States, 21 per 1,000 in that year. The lowest rate, 12 per 1,000, was in Western Europe, with legal abortion and widely available contraception.
The Bush administration’s multibillion-dollar campaign against H.I.V./AIDS in Africa has directed money to programs that promote abstinence before marriage, and to condoms only as a last resort. It has prohibited the use of American money to support overseas family planning groups that provide abortions or promote abortion as a method of family planning.
This last is called paternalism, aka the White Man’s Burden with emphasis on the man. You, a mere dark-skinned individual, a mere woman, are incapable of making moral choices so Big Daddy in Washington has to make them for you.
That works out well, doesn’t it?
This post was written by sherry
The verdigris-green eyes of Millie Thale’s cat pinned him to the wall. There was a message in them. The message was No.
Alex slowly relaxed. “Hullo, Sorcerer.”
The cat blinked slowly.
Millie had found him five years ago. Or, rather, the cat had found Millie. He had appeared from nowhere, down by Wast Water; she’d seen him through tearful eyes, sitting there as if he’d been expecting someone. Later, she had looked for (with a lack of thoroughness that had made Alex smile) but could not find the cat’s owner.
His name was Sorcerer. She had told Alex this as if the cat had informed her of it.
…
Two days later they had found her at the bottom of the trod, a poor rutted path leading downward, there near the lake, her hands, her face, that same white apron stained with yellow. Millie had pulled up all the daffodils she could find, pulled them up and apart, torn them to shreds. It had been George who had found her.
With that, he’d said, pointing to the black cat. Feral animal, it must be. The cat had rushed at him (he claimed) and then gone to sit silent as a statue beside Millie, who herself sat on a carpet of crushed daffodils.
— Martha Grimes, The Old Contemptibles (Little, Brown, 1991)
This post was written by sherry
