“More education and more contraception” has long been the rally cry of abortion advocates. In turn, they blame pro-lifers for increasing abortion numbers, as most pro-lifers disagree with contraception as a solution to ending abortion. Turns out that’s for good reason.
More than a thousand girls a year aged under 15 have an abortion [in the UK], figures revealed.
Terminations are being carried out on youngsters aged just 12 or 13 who have only just started secondary school. […]
Norman Wells, director of the Family Education Trust charity, said: ‘Every abortion involves a personal tragedy for a mother and a child, and none more so than where the mother herself is a child.
‘But these figures are just the tip of the iceberg. For every child who has had an abortion under the age of 16, there will be many more who are engaging in illegal sexual activity and suffering physical and emotional harm as a result.’
Mr Wells pointed to research showing it was not ignorance of contraception that leads to high rates of teenage abortions, and said instead the ‘contraceptive culture’ was to blame.
‘Those who imagine the answer lies in more sex education and more contraceptive schemes are sadly mistaken,’ he said. ‘As a result of the contraceptive culture we have tended to separate sexual activity from childbearing in our minds. There is always the possibility intimacy will result in the creation of a new life – that is not something to be done lightly.’
The Rev Joanna Jepson, who campaigned against terminations for minor deformities, warned abortions were being offered without any concern for the gravity of the procedure. She said: ‘The figures for underage girls suggests we have to have a debate about the kind of society we’re creating that leads to so many abortions on demand.
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Spain liberalized its contraception, sex ed, and abortion regulations last year. This year, fewer abortions.
More education, more contraception = fewer unwanted pregnancies.
Fern,
Maybe in the very short term there are fewer abortions, but your conclusion is wrong in the long term. Widespread use of contraception fuels the demand for abortion because it dramatically increases the number of fertile couples having sex in situations in which they cannot possibly accept a child. Let’s call that number N, and let’s say f is the weighted average failure rate of all methods of contraception being used, then the number of abortions per year is N x f, really simple math. In Canada, for example, N could be 5 million, and using a very conservative 2% for f, we see that N x f = 100,000 easily accounting for all the abortions in Canada.
You can do the simple math, Dan. I’ll look at sciencey-facty studies that take in more complicated factors and come to the mega-obvious conclusion: contraception + education = fewer unwanted pregnancies and fewer abortions.
You anti-choice people would do your cause a great deal of good if you would embrace contraception as a way to significantly reduce abortion. You’d be more believable that reduction/abolition of abortion and not control of sexuality, particularly female sexuality, is your main goal.
Just sayin’.
Fern,
The study you linked is from the Guttmacher Institute, which has a pro-abortion agenda and therefore not much credibilty on this issue.
I used simple math to show that the connection between contraception and abortion is straightforward. If you do a more thorough analysis, you will get numbers that are somewhat different, but the connection is still there, and with the same order of magnitude. Since U.S. numbers are easier to find, I will use those in what follows.
First of all, CDC data (see http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/ad/ad350.pdf) indicates that:
“Contraceptive use in the United States is virtually universal among women of reproductive age: 98 percent of all women who had ever had intercourse had used at least one contraceptive method.”
We will need the distribution of contraceptive usage by method in the United States:
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5925a6.htm?s_cid=mm5925a6_e
We will also need data on the failure rates of various methods of contraception:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_birth_control_methods
(these numbers mostly agree with the numbers listed by the CDC, but the CDC web site gives wider ranges, and they seem to err on the side of higher failure rates).
Combining the data from the above sources to obtain a weighted average failure rate, I obtain 5.9% for “typical use”. Available demographic data indicate that the U.S. population includes roughly 50 million women between the ages of 20 and 44. If all of them were using contraception, this would imply close to 3 million unwanted pregnancies per year resulting from contraceptive failure.
Interestingly, even the data published by the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute (see http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/psrh/full/3809006.pdf) says that:
“In 2001, 49% of pregnancies in the United States were unintended. The unintended pregnancy rate was 51 per 1,000 women aged 15–44, meaning that 5% of this group had an unintended pregnancy.”
This lines up pretty well with my quick estimate above.
The same paper lists the number of unintended pregnancies in the U.S. as 3.1 million in 2001, which again lines up pretty well with my estimate above.
Not sure if my second comment has been published yet, and the above comment (my third) won’t make sense until you see the previous one…
Dan,
Hard to argue facts but Fern will just ignore the truth. See also,
http://www.lifenews.com/2011/01/03/study-abortions-double-in-spain-despite-increased-contrapcetion/
http://www.lifenews.com/2011/07/06/report-shows-abortions-in-spain-dropping-as-teens-choose-life/
Amazing how you can reach a different conclusion. Looks like Ferns math, More education, more contraception = fewer unwanted pregnancies is flawed.