Can we end the myth now that abortion is due to a lack of contraception?
New York City is the contraception capital of the world. If you can’t get a condom there you can’t get it anywhere. Yet, NYC has a 41% abortion rate per pregnancy while the national rate is about 24%.
Patrick McIlheran of JS Online writes:
Four in every 10 new humans who begin life in New York do not survive to birth because of the deliberate violence of abortion. We’re customarily told that if one wants to reduce that, contraception’s the answer – prevent unwanted pregnancy and you won’t have unwanted humans diced up in utero.
How is it, then, that New York should have a 41% abortion rate – when New York may well be the American city where contraceptive help is most readily at hand? Planned Parenthood boasts of its clinics and free services. The state provides free comprehensive family planning for the needy. The public schools offer clinics with a range of “reproductive health services,” including contraceptives.
And yet four of 10 children do not survive pregnancy as they are, apparently, “unwanted.” It’s as if New York were a vast, gruesome experiment, and the idea that lots of free rubbers reduce abortion has failed miserably.
And the goal of the pro-abortion left is to make the world like New York City.
It’s become clear to anyone interested in truth that increased availability of contraception leads to an increase in the number of unwanted pregnancies and abortions because guess what…sex leads to babies. I know. Who’d a thunk it, right?
January 10, 2011 at 10:24 pm
Who ever said the other side was interested in truth?
January 11, 2011 at 12:18 am
Oh, but the social policies of the left will reduce the need for abortion and therefore reduce the number of abortions. That's why it's morally justifiable for a Catholic to vote for pro-abortion politicians who want to increase spending on contraceptive handout programs… or so Notre Shame and fools like Kmiec would have Catholics believe.
January 11, 2011 at 12:29 am
All children are wanted. The conscious act of participating in reproductive activities is an eternal contract. All these murderers have freely chosen to go to hell for eternity.
They damn themselves freely.
January 11, 2011 at 1:57 am
@ section 1736: and where might hell be? LOL!
January 11, 2011 at 2:28 am
And the Catholic Church, as she stands virtually alone once again against the popular culture, is proven right, yet again for anyone with eyes open.
It brings to mind the stories about the worldwide outrage that erupted, even from inside the church, when His Holiness Pope Paul VI published Humanae Vitae.
January 11, 2011 at 3:07 am
There is really no pattern to the availability of contraception and the abortion rate. Finland, Germany, Czechia, and Belgium have abortion rates just above half of ours, yet contraception is virtually free as it's covered by their socialized medicine, while Sweden, Slovakia, and Hungary have abortion rates somewhat higher than ours, so there appears to be no pattern there.
Nor does the legal status seem to be a factor. The Philippines, despite prohibiting abortion, has an abortion rate about twice as high as Belgium, a country with very liberal abortion laws.
Rates of promiscuity went up following the introduction of "comprehensive sex education" in the sixties and seventies, yet when "abstinence only" programs are put in place they only delay the onset of sexual activity and then result in higher rates of teenage pregnancy thereafter.
Women with higher levels of education have fewer "unplanned pregnancies," yet they abort more of them. Minority groups routinely express higher rates of opposition to abortion, yet their abortion rates are higher than whites. Married women have drastically lower rates than sexually active single women, yet the rate of out-of-wedlock births keeps going up.
There are no simple correlations about this issue and it is really rather simplistic to take one example (and from a rather unique place at that) and try to extrapolate a generalization from there.
January 11, 2011 at 11:40 am
The legal status of abortion is actually very closely correlated to the abortion rate, at least here in the United States. Prof. Michael New has studied this and has shows that abortion rates can be reduced by the enactment of laws like parental involvement and restrictions on public funding. (http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2007/02/analyzing-the-effect-of-state-legislation-on-the-incidence-of-abortion-among-minors). New York, of course, has neither law.
January 11, 2011 at 3:10 pm
There is really no pattern to the availability of contraception and the abortion rate.
Which disproves the hypothesis that availability of contraception decreases the rate of abortion. That was your point, right? Certainly, legality had an effect in the US, where the rate rose dramatically (even using the admittedly falsely inflated numbers of pre-RvW)after legalization, and tapered off somewhere ca. 1,000,000 pa.
January 11, 2011 at 6:49 pm
I would suggest to the Dutchman that he order a copy of Blood Money, the trailer of which can be found here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYaTywSDmls
A former planned parenthood abortion mill owner states the goal was to have all girls have 3-5 abortions and so promote'sex ed' or 'safe sex' and give out lo-dose pills and defective condoms to further their aim. Planned parenthood recently received $363 million taxfunded dollars to kill a million and a half unborn Americans yearly and have had profits (excess revenue) of up to 100 million dollars.
Get informed of the evil in our midst. Immorality (sin) leads to death. Period.
January 11, 2011 at 7:26 pm
Dutchman, you are wrong. Contraception use goes up… Abortion use goes up.
The January issue of the journal Contraception contains results of a 10-yr study "to acquire information about the use of contraceptive methods in order to reduce the number of elective abortions,"
1997 to 2007, the overall use of contraceptive methods increased from 49.1% to 79.9%. The most commonly used method was the condom (an increase from 21% to 38.8%), followed by the pill (an increase from 14.2% to 20.3%). Female sterilization and IUDs decreased slightly and were used by less than 5% of women in 2007. The elective abortion rate increased from 5.52 to 11.49 per 1000 women.
January 11, 2011 at 7:46 pm
Ed:
No society anywhere has ever succeeded in banning abortions (not even Stalin's Soviet Union, where botched abortions were a public heath problem). The rich will always find doctors willing to do a "menstrual extraction", people in Ireland used to take the ferry to Cardiff, and both Peru and the Philipines have high rates of illegal abortion.
But you are right in pointing up that there are things that can be done to keep the numbers down. Parental consent laws, when enforced, are hugely effective. Unfortunately, in my state (Illinois) the attorney general refuses to enforce the law. And yes, cutting off public funds for the procedure would reduce the rate as well. There is also overwhelming public support for restricting second and third trimester abortion and a ban on these, more difficult to hide procedures would probably be quite effective.
Anonymous #1:
It's hard to say what the effect of greater access to contraception is in this day and age. Plainly, the introduction of the Pill in 1960 played a big part in breaking down traditional moral barriers to pre-marital sex but, now that this centuries old moral code has been eradicated, I doubt that withdrawing contraceptives from the equation would bring it back. I think this would be like pushing on a string.
Anonymous #2:
I don't buy it. There is no conspiracy. Nobody out there wants girls to have "three to five abortions." There are no aliens. Obama was born in Hawaii. Walt Disney is not cryonically frozen. KFC does not mix heavily battered rat carcasses in with the chicken. Jewish bankers did not finance the Bolshevik Revolution. Gerry Mathers ("the Beaver") did not die in Vietnam.
January 12, 2011 at 11:04 pm
Anonymous #3
I was wondering where you got your figures and so I did search after search, only to find out that these rates are from SPAIN! Abortion and contraception rates in Spain, Italy, and Ireland are all skewed because these are the last places in Western Europe where contraception and abortion became available. Rates of abortion have been falling in the United States and are now at a thirty year low. I can't find data on contraceptive use, but I can only imagine that it has gone up in that time frame, especially among younger women who are typically becoming sexually active at ever younger ages.
Ultimately, what I think we can agree on, is that the abortion rate rises when women who don't want children become sexually active. Before we had a contraceptive society, the fear of pregnancy kept most women from sexual activity before marriage, but now that women think they can "get away with it" they use contraceptives, counting on using abortion as a back-up.
Now, sex is a very popular thing, and as long as people can vote, they are going to vote for things they like. I can assure you that the day is long past when the American people are going to vote away their access to birth control and abortion.
So, if you want to reduce the abortion rate you have to ask yourself what works. Parental consent laws, sidewalk counseling, and removing government funding probably all work. Contraception works in the sense of reducing unwanted pregnancies, but it also doesn't work in that it probably increases sexual activity, so it's hard to say what the net effect is.
One thing is for sure however, voting Republican seems to have no effect on the abortion rate.