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The Guttmacher Institute reported that the American abortion rate fell to a 30-year low, through a survey of known abortion providers in the country. Between 2008 and 2011, the number of abortions fell to 1.1 million a year, a drop of 13 percent. Overall, abortion was in a long-term decline for most of the time it’s been legal. In 1981, 29 women per 1,000 ages 15-44 had an abortion. In 2011, it was only 17 per 1,000. Anti-choicers should avoid congratulating themselves for the decline, however. As the Guttmacher press release indicates, this descent happened before the most recent wave of abortion restrictions began closing clinics. Instead, it seems that women are just getting pregnant less often. Over the same period, the birth rate was also in decline, hitting a record low in 2012.
Sorry, Mike Huckabee, it’s probably not because women decided that they find sexual intercourse debasing. Instead, pro-choice activists and groups like Planned Parenthood, with their tireless work at making contraception socially acceptable and affordable, should take the credit. Contraception use, especially highly effective long-term forms like the IUD, is up. Indeed, contraception has become universal, with 99 percent of sexually active women having used contraception before and 62 percent of women reproductive age using contraception now. In fact, it isn’t urbane single ladies haunting conservative nightmares… the Sandra Flukes of the world who delay getting married… who love birth control pills. Married women are more likely to use contraception than never-married women are. More women are also getting very early abortions with medication; the abortion pill figuring in 1 in 4 non-hospital abortions, up from 17 percent in 2008. Unfortunately, some states passed medically unnecessary laws, serving no other purpose but to turn what should be an easy way to get an abortion into a major hassle, stymieing efforts to increase access to medication abortion.
Since 2011, which is where this research ends, much changed in the USA. In the past year, the ability to prevent unintended pregnancy improved under the Affordable Care Act through the contraception mandate and Medicaid expansion, which will help reach low-income women who experience the highest levels of unintended pregnancy. Medically unnecessary but draconian state-level regulations in places such as Texas shut down many clinics… so many that the remaining ones can’t handle the overflow of demand. (This almost certainly reduces the number of abortions counted, if only because the number of people counting them is going down.)
However, that brings us to illegal abortion, which is notoriously hard to document yet seems to be rising in response to the shutdown of abortion clinics in red states. As Lindsay Beyerstein reported in the New Republic, one doctor in the relatively small town of Harlingen TX reports having worked with about 100 patients since November who needed help with incomplete miscarriages, most of whom almost surely self-aborted with an ulcer medication available over the counter in México. Since the medication is effective at aborting a pregnancy entirely without a doctor’s help, the number of women in the area who resorted to this is likely many times that. An unintended consequence of shutting down abortion clinics is that it’s going to be harder to assess what the real abortion rate is in the USA. Of course, “out of sight, out of mind” is probably good enough for the anti-choice politicians who created this problem in the first place.
3 February 2014
Amanda Marcotte
Slate
Editor’s Note:
Do you want to cut induced abortions, both surgical and medicated? Then, you’d favour increased access to contraception… you’d favour keeping the social safety net strong and repeal the Clinton “welfare reform”… you’d favour increased education on sexual matters… you’d favour single-payer healthcare reform and the coverage of birth control services. Do note well that the so-called “Pro-Life” movement favours NONE of these things. The Pro-Life movement is a bunch of anti-abortion hypocrites who block sidewalks and wave placards to feel good about themselves as they advocate the warmongering and heartless GOP agenda.
I do NOT advocate abortion. I believe it to be a tragedy… indeed, many of my pro-choice friends have used the same words. I do NOT defend abortion… but I won’t demean that opposition by linking it to ruthless greedster politicians who have no other real aim but global hegemony and raking in the gelt. It’s NOT a black n’ white cartoon… although people like Trenham (a ranting konvertsy priest) try to make it so. Here’s the real-world choice… you can stand with Fr Vsevolod Chaplin and HH, who say that the use of contraception is licit via oikonomia, or, you can stand with loudmouths like Trenham (and that whole shake n’ bake Ancient Faith Radio crowd) who scream that it’s sinful. I seem to find that HH and Fr Vsevolod have MUCH more stature than Trenham and his pals do… and I’m not alone in thinking that.
Let’s do REAL Pro-Life… let’s end the wars in foreign parts… let’s end the bloodbath in Texas and other Southern states (with their promiscuous use of the death penalty)… let’s end the Clinton “welfare reform”… let’s end the Bush tax cuts for the rich and abolish the cap on FICA taxes (that’ll make Rush, Wet Willy, and Sarah pay their fair share for a change… watch ‘em howl!)… let’s see to it that there’s universal and untrammelled access to the best healthcare (and no doctor could “opt out” of the system to treat only rich patients)… THEN, and only then, could we call ourselves “Pro-Life”… everything else is a disgusting figleaf…
BMD
Voices from Russia 
6 May 2017. Ajamu Baraka: Healthcare is a Human Right, But You Have to Fight For It!
Tags: ACA, Affordable Care Act, Ajamu Baraka, ethic, ethical orientation, ethics, Green Party, green politics, Health care in the United States, Health care reform, health care/social issues, healthcare, Medicare, moral, moral stance, morality, morals, Obamacare, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, political commentary, politics, Single-payer health care, United States, USA
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