John McCarthy at The National Catholic Reporter states that abortion rates went down in 2008 and 2009 so therefore condoms and The Pill clearly brought abortion rates down because…well… because the Washington Post says that birth control might be the reason for the abortion downturn so Catholics should now turn Catholic teaching upside down and say that birth control is awesome. Or something.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently released numbers that said abortion rates have dropped 5 percent between 2008 and 2009 — an all-time low. For so many of us in the faith community, we have to ask: Why the decrease?
I’d love to say that the answer was because of our swift economic recovery and that women finally have the resources they need to bring children into the world. Unfortunately, this isn’t yet the reality. The Washington Post finds an important correlation: “At the same time the abortion rate took a big drop, use of more effective contraceptives had recently increased.”
The bishops aren’t going to be moving anytime soon on the relationship between abortions and birth control — probably because they’re still fighting for religious freedom or something — but the laity needs to start thinking more seriously about the issue.
Is it more moral for a woman to use birth control than have an abortion? I certainly think most members of the laity (about 97 percent of who use birth control) would resoundingly agree. If it lowers the rate of abortions, should the church more actively advocate for prayerful use of birth control in family planning?
The research McCarthy reports on is from The Guttmacher Institute, you know the propaganda arm of Planned Parenthood.
Well well. Planned Parenthood says it so Catholics should definitely believe it even if the same Washington Post article clearly states “No research has found a causal relationship yet.”
But The National Catholic Reporter has!!! Kinda’ weird that the National Catholic Reporter and Planned Parenthood are saying the same thing, huh? Or not.
Interestingly, a new Marquette University study shows that fewer American couples got divorced during the Great Recession. Dr. Abdur Chowdhury, chair and professor of economics in Marquette’s College of Business Administration, has found that divorce rates in the United States actually decreased starting in early spring of 2008 with the deepening of the economic crisis. Interesting that the NCR didn’t think that increased stability of marriages had anything to do with the abortion decrease.
