AZspot

To the contrary: there is some kind of social pathology at work here. Abortion has become a massively institutionalized response to a grave set of underlying social conditions. Recognizing this gives us the possibility of initiating a meaningful response to those factors.

Abortion is an often-desperate response to the problem of being accidentally and unhappily pregnant. About half of all pregnancies in the US are unintended.

The burden of this unhappy accident falls on women. While a man can attempt to evade the crisis of having conceived an unwanted child, a pregnant woman experiences that crisis within her own body.

We need better customs and laws enforcing male sexual and paternal responsibility. But still, the brute facts direct us to the particular life circumstances of women. We need to know what is happening in so many women’s lives, and in our culture more broadly, that leads to so many unwanted pregnancies for women. We do know a few things.

We know that far too many people are having sex outside of a context in which a resulting pregnancy can be handled without resort to abortion. Our culture lacks an ethic of sexual responsibility, and women disproportionately pay the price.

We know that far too many people who have sex are not using birth control, or not using it properly. While only abstinence is 100% effective to prevent pregnancy, birth control is better than an unwanted pregnancy. Those who are opposed to abortion need to support access to birth control and accurate information on how to use it. They have often opposed such access.

We know that over 60% of pregnant women are poor or near-poor (up to 199% of the federal poverty line). Three-fourths of surveyed women who have had abortions say their lack of financial resources contributed to their decision. Those who say they care about abortion must support rather than oppose universal access to health care and social welfare services so that no woman has to choose abortion for lack of resources.

We know from surveys that many women choose abortion because of the perceived impact of a pregnancy on their romantic and family relationships. We need safer, sturdier, healthier relationships between men and women. We need families and religious communities that support rather than ostracize pregnant women.

We know that the choice to give up a child for adoption is very difficult, and that successful domestic adoptions are hardly routine in this society. It takes enormous moral support not just to carry an initially unwanted child but then to make the wrenching decision to give it up for adoption. We need to get better at this.

On those Christian grounds, it is good news that abortion rates in the United States dropped 5 percent in 2009 (the latest year of reporting) to the lowest rate in 40 years—15 abortions per 1,000 women of childbearing age. Rates have generally trended downward since 1981, when they peaked at 29. Health officials attribute the recent drop to more widespread use of contraception, especially by teens, and the use of more effective types of contraception.

U.S. abortion rates remain high, however, compared to other countries where abortion is legal. In Belgium and Germany the rates are below 10 per 1,000 women, and in the Netherlands, where abortion is freely available up to 21 weeks, the rate is 5, the lowest in the world. The Dutch have achieved that low rate through widespread education about family planning and easy access to contraception and by inculcating a general understanding that abortion is an irresponsible means of birth control.

The editorial concludes that this “nuanced position on abortion may not bring people to the barricades, but it points to a coherent, responsible policy.”

I think this is basically right, but it’s worth noting how this differs from the more absolutist pro-life position found among conservative Catholics and evangelicals. If you believe that abortion is morally comparable to killing babies, then nothing short of legal prohibition really makes sense. That’s why there’s a certain logic to not making exceptions even in the case of rape: why should an innocent child be killed because of the crimes of its father?

But the position sketched by the Century rests on a different view of of the value of pre-natal life–though one that also differs from a pro-choice position that assigns zero value to it. (I doubt this view is as widespread among pro-choicers as pro-lifers sometimes seem to think, but there probably are people who hold it.)

What this more moderate view presupposes is that pre-natal life has value, but that its value is not equivalent to the value of a newborn baby (or a 2-year old, a 5-year old, an adult, etc.). Moreover, it generally presupposes that this value increases as the pregnancy progresses: a very early abortion is less serious, morally speaking, than a very late-term one. To say, as the PC(USA) does, that “all life is precious to God [and so] we are to preserve and protect it” seems to allow for these kinds of distinctions.

I think that this kind of “gradualist” position makes sense of many people’s common moral intuitions. Most parents or would-be parents, I think, would say that a miscarriage at a very early stage of pregnancy would be a less grievous blow than one at, say, 7 or 8 months, much less the death of a newborn or older child. In other words, we generally act like the embryo or fetus is not, morally speaking, a fully realized person. Or to take another thought experiment: if you could save either a Petri dish full of fertilized embryos or a single child from a burning building, wouldn’t the right choice clearly be to save the child?

If you’re serious about reducing abortion, the most important issue is not which abortions to ban. The most important issue is how will you support women to have the babies they want.

As a general rule, societies that do the most to support mothers and child-bearing have the fewest abortions. Societies that do the least to support mothers and child-bearing have more abortions.

Germany, for example, operates perhaps the world’s plushest welfare state. Working women receive 14 weeks of maternity leave, during which time they receive pay from the state. The state pays a child allowance to the parents of every German child for potentially as many as 25 years, depending on how long as the child remains in school. Women who leave the work force after giving birth receive a replacement wage from the state for up to 14 months.

Maybe not coincidentally, Germany has one of the lowest abortion rates, about one-third that of the United States. Yet German abortion laws are not especially restrictive. Abortion is legal during the first trimester of pregnancy and available if medically or psychologically necessary in the later trimesters.

Even here in the United States, where parental benefits are much less generous, abortion responds to economic conditions. In the prosperous 1990s, abortion rates declined rapidly. In the less prosperous ’00s, abortion rates declined more slowly. When the economy plunged into crisis in 2008, abortion rates abruptly rose again.

These trends should not surprise anyone. Women choose abortion for one overwhelming reason: economic insecurity. The large majority of women who chose abortion in 2008, 57%, reported a disruptive event in their lives in the previous 12 months: most often, the loss of a job or home.

The only concern I was left with was the fact that abortion was covered by the Universal Health Care, and I still believed that was wrong. But as I lived there, I began to discover I had been misled in that understanding as well. Abortion wasn’t pushed as the only option by virtue of it being covered. It was just one of the options, same as it was in the USA. In fact, the percentage rates of abortion are far lower in Canada than they are in the USA, where abortion is often not covered by insurance and can be much harder to get. In 2008 Canada had an abortion rate of 15.2 per 1000 women (In other countries with government health care that number is even lower), and the USA had an abortion rate of 20.8 abortions per 1000 women.

And suddenly I could see why that was the case. With Universal coverage, a mother pregnant unexpectedly would still have health care for her pregnancy and birth even if she was unemployed, had to quit her job, or lost her job. If she was informed that she had a special needs baby on the way, she could rest assured knowing in Canada her child’s health care needs would be covered. Whether your child needs therapy, medicines, a caregiver, a wheelchair, or repeated surgeries, it would be covered by the health care system. Here, you never heard of parents joining the army just so their child’s “pre-existing” health care needs could be covered. In fact, when a special needs person becomes an adult in Canada, they are eligible for a personal care assistant covered by the government. We saw far more developmentally or physically disabled persons out and about in Canada, than I ever see here in the USA. They would be getting their groceries at the store, doing their business at the bank, and even working job, all with their personal care assistant alongside them, encouraging them and helping them when they needed it. When my sister came up to visit, she even commented on how visible special needs people were when the lady smiling and waving while clearing tables at the Taco Bell with her caregiver clearly had Downs Syndrome.

Many anti-choice women are convinced that their need for abortion is unique — not like those “other” women — even though they have abortions for the same sorts of reasons. Anti-choice women often expect special treatment from clinic staff. Some demand an abortion immediately, wanting to skip important preliminaries such as taking a history or waiting for blood test results. Frequently, anti-abortion women will refuse counseling (such women are generally turned away or referred to an outside counselor because counseling at clinics is mandatory). Some women insist on sneaking in the back door and hiding in a room away from other patients. Others refuse to sit in the waiting room with women they call “sluts” and “trash.” Or if they do, they get angry when other patients in the waiting room talk or laugh, because it proves to them that women get abortions casually, for “convenience”.

To understand Mitt Romney, you have to understand the most difficult passage of his political life: how he changed his position on abortion. Not the story he tells about it, but the real story. Romney began his political career as a pro-choicer. In the story he tells, he had an epiphany, a flash of insight, and committed himself thereafter to protecting life. But that isn’t what happened. The real story of Romney’s conversion—a series of tentative, equivocal, and confused shifts, accompanied by a constant rewriting of his past—paints a more accurate picture of who he is. Romney has complex views and a talent for framing them either way, depending on his audience. He values truth, so he makes sure there’s an element of it in everything he says. He can’t stand to break his promises, so he reinterprets them.

(via givemesomethingtoread)

(via the-feature)

Let’s get down to brass tacks: Presidential candidate Rick Santorum, Personhood Pledge-signing, Griswold vs. Connecticut-opposing, Mr. Ban Abortion in All Circumstances With No Exception for the Life of the Mother, believes that the actions of his own wife should be treated as criminal. Why? Because, back in 1996, his wife had a procedure that resulted in the deliberate death of her fetus, even though it was a matter of saving her own life.

Karen Santorum’s difficult pregnancy and resultant life-saving, induced early delivery is no secret; in a 2004 interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, her husband characterized the 1996 procedure as a harrowing but necessary. Karen, in her 19th week of pregnancy, received a risky surgery to save a pregnancy that doctors thought had little chance of survival. After the surgery, she came down with an infection, and doctors told Rick that unless the source of the infection — the fetus — was removed, his wife would die and his already-born children would be motherless. The doctor also told Santorum that his wife’s fetus would not survive outside of the womb. According to Santorum, Karen went into labor as a result of the antibiotics, and then doctors gave her a drug that further induced labor. She delivered, and unfortunately the doctors were right.

Shortly after Santorum first talked to the press about his wife’s pregnancy and their subsequent loss, rumors began circulating that Karen had actually had an abortion rather than induced delivery. Our Silver Ribbon goes so far as to assert that Karen Santorum did, in fact, have a second-trimester abortion.

But whether or not Karen Santorum had an abortion or medically induced the birth of a non-viable fetus shouldn’t matter in the eyes of someone with views as extreme as Santorum, as he is one of a disturbingly large group of politicians who believe that women should not be allowed to abort under any circumstances. Santorum’s even against abortion if there were no hope of the fetus surviving to full term, or even if the woman carrying the fetus risked death doing so. Karen Santorum would have died if the fetus were not removed, and labor was induced and not halted knowing that the fetus would not survive. How is this not technically “abortion?” In Santorum’s world, it would probably qualify as infanticide.

The procedure, whereby labor is induced to remove the fetus before it has any chance of surviving on its own, is considered by Mr. Santorum to be a ‘partial-birth abortion’, and he is correct. He also personally authorized one to save his wife, whom he loves. Mr. Santorum is opposed to any and all forms of abortion. Incest?

Too bad. Rape? Too bad. Twelve years old? Too bad. Wife, mother, daughter, lover, friend dying? Too bad.

This hypocrite needs to be kept out of all elective offices for the rest of his life.

“Abortion in any form is wrong,” said Santorum in 2000, three years after the tragedy. He should have added, “Except for my wife. If your wife’s life was at stake and the only thing that could save her was an abortion, well, too bad. Your wife will have to die. It was different with my wife. You see, I love her. I don’t even know your wife’s name.”