Overview - Abortion

What about the world’s lowest abortion rates? Among countries where quality data is available⁵ they’ve consistently been in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland, all of which have for some time had rates in the single digits. In 1996 for instance the rates in the Netherlands and Belgium were 6.5 and 6.8 per kw15-44 respectively. In these countries not only are abortions legal, they’re free, at state expense and no questions asked. Just swing by the clinic on your way home and get one. You don’t even need to bring your purse. It’s far more difficult and costly to get a cavity filled. Yet their abortion rate is barely one fourth of the U.S. figure for that year (22.9), and one-eighth of the 1990 figure for Chile where a woman can be jailed for having an abortion (Henshaw et al., 1999).

How can this be? Well, that brings us to the next point…

Reproductive healthcare and education do work

By far, the best predictors for high birth and abortion rates are poverty, and lack of access to contraception and sex education. This is so well established that outside of the Pro-Life movement no scientist or healthcare professional even questions it. Most countries with liberal abortion laws also have liberal reproductive healthcare policies, effective sex education programs, and correspondingly easy access to quality contraception for everyone. In countries such as Vietnam and former Soviet republics where unrestricted abortion coincides with high abortion rates, access to these services is extremely difficult and mortality rates are very high for mothers and infants. Without exception, wherever contraception has been made available in these regions abortion rates have dropped almost in lock step increased use (Guttmacher, 1999; Henshaw et al., 1999; 1999b; Brown & Eisenberg, 1995; Cohen, 2003).

The bottom line is this: Women will not endure unwanted pregnancies. They never have, and until the end of time they never will. Period.

No amount of moral lectures, Bible-thumping, crackdowns, prison, health risks… even death, will ever change this. All they ever have done, or ever will do is increase suffering and mortality for women and infants. There is one and only one way to reduce abortions,

Reduce the unwanted pregnancy rate.

Only contraception and sex education have ever done this with demonstrated effectiveness. Anyone who opposes general access to these things and/or to easily accessible family planning and reproductive healthcare, is opposed to reducing abortion and abortion related mortality. This includes the Religious Right and the Catholic-based Pro-Life movement.

Abortion activism is often negligent and destructive

The most egregious example of activist ignorance and negligence in decades occurred in 2001 when a Virginia based Pro-Life extremist group called the Population Research Institute managed to convince the Bush administration and several Republican members of Congress that the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) was assisting Chinese Civil Affairs officials with forced abortions and sterilizations. In response, the Bush administration blocked $34 million in U.S. funding for UNFPA. Later investigations revealed that PRI’s entire case amounted to nothing more than guilt-by-association arguments and a handful of uncorroborated anecdotal reports. Despite numerous investigations by NGO’s, the British Parliament, and three investigations by the U.S. State Department, not one of PRI’s accusations was ever independently verified and no UNFPA official was ever implicated in any incident of coercion (including those alleged by PRI’s witnesses).