Here’s a nifty fact for you. Nobody *likes* abortions. You don’t have to take my word for that, of course. Go out and survey as many women as you like, and I would be willing to bet that the number of them that say that getting an abortion is on their bucket list would be statistically nonexistent.
Yet events occur beyond people’s control where they deem it necessary to have one. The reasons vary greatly, from economic hardship to medical necessity. Each woman has her own reason for doing something she would not have chosen to otherwise do if she could have avoided the situation altogether, and as each decision is personal, the “why” is not the point of this article. The “how” is.
In 1973, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that women had the right to a legal abortion up until the point where the “viability” or the point where if born the child could survive outside of the womb. This is typically 28 weeks though in rare circumstances could range back to 24 weeks. Since then, opponents of abortions rights have worked to roll back or, where possible, eliminate legal abortions.
The reasons are many but most hinge on the idea that abortion is an abomination and should be removed from society. Here is the catch 22 we as a nation find ourselves in, though; outlawing abortions does not stop abortions, it mere stops legal abortions. The World Health Organization collects data from all over the world on all manner of medical procedures, abortion included. In a world where the internet puts that data at our finger tips, I would invite those who disagree that a choice to have a legal abortion should exist to determine *why* they believe that and then look to see if the facts back up their choice of methods. In most cases, I think you would find that targeting the abortion right itself isn’t the best method for achieving the goal of lowering the abortion rate. Let’s look at some of the common reasons given, and why they don’t necessarily match up with reality.
Making Abortion Illegal would stop abortions
With abortion legal in the US, roughly 20 out of every 1000 women have one. Western Europe has less restrictions in general than the US on abortion, and roughly 12 out of every 1000 women have an abortion there. South Africa, the only state in Africa to legalize abortion, has roughly 15 per 1000. If making abortions illegal stopped abortions, you would expect the WHO’s statistics for abortions in places where it was illegal to be far fewer than places like Europe where it’s readily available, much less the US or South Africa where it’s more highly regulated. This isn’t the case.
In the rest of Africa, an average of 29 of every 1000 child bearing women get abortions. In Latin America, 32 of every 1000 receive it. Making the procedures illegal shows to have no actual bearing on decreasing the occurrences of the procedure. It merely makes them more dangerous.
We need to raise regulations for safety measures.
This is the commonly cited argument for the current round of restrictions to abortion access. Why would we not want safer procedures, right? Who could possibly object to trying to protect women? The sad fact is, the statistics again do not support the supposed results. There is a 0.3% chance of complications from an abortion. To put that in perspective, there is a 1% chance of complications from taking an aspirin. Than means you’re 3 times more likely to have issues with taking an over-the-counter pill than you are with a legal abortion under current regulations. So as you can see, we’re already starting with an extremely low rate of danger, but better safe than sorry, right? Again the facts would say wrong. The current round of legislation is designed so that it lengthens the time it would take for many women to get an abortion. An ultra-sound law recently passed in Texas and other states means that if a woman does not wish to be vaginally violated by a state ordered ultrasound she must wait until the fetus is recognizable by a transabdomonal ultra-sound, which is typically 8 weeks. Coincidently, this marks the end of when performing an abortion is at its most safe. Abortions prior to 8 weeks literally hold a one in one million chance of fatality. Abortions up to 20 weeks become slightly more dangerous, with one death out of every 29,000 abortions. 21+ weeks, of course, increases the risk further to one death our of every 11,000 procedures (still safer, however, than child birth which holds a 1.29% fatality rate). Now, to put all of this in prospective, let’s find a common denominator for all of these numbers to see how they match up together. Since our largest number is a million, we’ll go with it.
Number of death per 1,000,000 procedures:
Abortion under 8 Weeks - 1
Abortion up to 20 Weeks - 34
Abortion 21+ Weeks - 91
Child Birth - 12,900
If you were looking to make something safer, why would abortion be your target? And if you truly wished it to be safer, making it more readily available would be a better choice than making it more restrictive. Merely delaying the procedure, as the current round of laws do, easily makes the procedure 34 times more dangerous. And forcing a woman to carry the baby to term that she doesn’t want astronomically increases the likelihood of her death over allowing her to have the abortion she sought to begin with. Incidentally, the current infant mortality rate in the US is 0.615%. So out of those 1,000,000 births, 6,150 of those children would have died. That seems a far better place to focus our attempts at safety.
Truly Reducing Abortions
So are we a hopeless cause? Is there no way of really reducing the rate of abortions? The statistics actually say that there are. Europe holds the distinction of having one of the highest and lowest abortion rates in the world. Western Europe has a rate of roughly 12 out of every 1000 women, where Eastern Europe has a rate closer to 43 per 1000. What is the primary difference between the two? Education and Birth Control. Western Europe pushes formal sexual education and has birth control affordable and readily available to most women. Eastern Europe tends to rely more on traditional and less accurate forms of birth control. The results are pretty stark and logical. Many abortions come from unwanted babies. Teach women how to avoid getting pregnant and give them the tools to do so, and you reduce abortions. Keep them ignorant, or make dependable contraceptives hard to get, and you create a recipe for desperation that will not look to laws for permission.
If your goal is to reduce abortions, then the facts say that the easiest way to do that is through education and contraception. If your goal is to make abortion safer, then the facts say that reducing barriers to a woman getting an abortion when she is going to anyway is the way to go. If you still insist on pushing an agenda that raises barriers to abortion without providing education and contraception to women, then it’s time to admit you really do not care about the women or children themselves, and that you are more likely pursuing control over the female body by stating that if she has sex she will be forced to endure consequences that are not medically necessary merely because you wish it to be so. If that is your goal, at least be honest with yourself and the public at large.
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