Sherry Chandler » Abortion Rates
Abortion Rates
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?
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3 Comments
1. Tommy replies at 12th October 2007, 9:38 am :
For those who don’t know, Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon is perhaps the most outspoken blogger dealing with these issues. It has been her argument for a while now that contraception reduces abortion.
I think it’s pretty clear that what is driving the cause against abortion and contraception is Oh noes!!! Darkies!
The argument goes that the Brown Hordes are moving into White Territory and they, the poor savages, don’t practice contraception or abortion and, in their ignorance, they are breeding like rabbits and threatening our White Way of Life. This attitude is also behind the Close the Border movement here at home.
This is the sort of attitude that forbids choice to Our People and mandates birth control to Them.
It’s almost Sysiphean arguing against this point of view; it has scads of inertia.
But Sysiphus found fulfillment in his eternal punishment; and in so doing, he stuck it to the man, didn’t he? It is perhaps enough to keep arguing our position.
Love,
T
2. sherry replies at 12th October 2007, 10:16 am :
But, Tommy, while I do think you’re right about race driving much of the politics of birth control, we are NOT mandating birth control to “Them” because we ARE mandating abstinence, which doesn’t work. We’re actually refusing them birth control so that we can refuse them abortions. So what we’re mandating is also a higher abortion rate, higher infant and mother mortality. We’re willing to let people die so they can’t have any unpunished pleasure.
3. sherry replies at 14th October 2007, 9:20 am :
As an addendum on the racism inherent in our reproductive health policies, read I See Invisible People’s excellent post Welcome to the 19th Century.
And to give that statistic a human face, watch the film Motherland Afghanistan.
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