Framing Abortion

Abortion just won’t go away as a wedge issue. A surprising new study from the Guttmacher Institute (Press Release), however, found that abortions are at their lowest level since 1973. This would appear to be good news for pro-lifers amd something they would broadcast across their talking heads print, television and Internet network. But they are largely ignoring the report. Why? Because it doesn’t fit their frame and actually challenges several of their long-held, central tenets.

What did the report find? The main finding is that new, more restrictive laws had very little impact on this decline and that it instead appears related to economic decline and improved birth control methods. The five major findings were as follows: 1. A notable drop in rates in several states, including California, New York and New Jersey, that have not enacted new restrictions. 2. Rates dropped in all regions of the country, not merely those in the Midwest and South where new regulations have passed. 3. The decline has been underway since 2008, even though the new laws weren’t passed until 2011. 4. The decrease in abortion has been coupled with a decrease in the birth rate, suggesting that fewer women are getting pregnant in the first place. 5. An increase in the number of low-income and poor women who use long-acting methods of birth control, often provided by pubicly funded birth-control services.

So the new laws, much like the Death Penalty, don’t appear to be having the deterrent effect that conservatives want to believe. Poor and working class women are actually making informed choices and taking advantage of government-sponsored programs to better protect themselves against unwanted pregnancies. And women in general appear less interested in reproduction, at least at the mopment. In fact, it appears that the result of some of these new restrictions is to push the very type of abortions most reviled by pro-lifers (late term). Why? Because there restrictions force women to wait before they can get the procedure.

In the end, the data provides yet another case where government intervention appears to have positive social outcomes – in reduced unwanted pregnancies and reducing the abortion rate. But conservatives want to continue their war on women’s bodies and on sex in general by fighting against not only abortions but the very thing that could dramatically reduce them – reliable birth control available at reasonable cost to all women. It is a moral position supported only by the most repressive notions of our deeper desires and the role women play in male desire. When I read about these debates, a question always comes to mind that I never hear anywhere else – has there ever been a pharmacist in the last ten years that pushed his store to refuse to sell condoms? Are any of the right-wing wingnuts railing against easy access to them? Hmm, I wonder why?