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A New Look at Abortion
Statistics – Part II The ABORTION RATE Is The Most Important Statistic Part Four of Four Gunter N. Franz, Ph.D. Good evening. This article first ran yesterday. However, because of some technical glitches, readers had difficulty understanding the tables. That problem has been corrected. Thank you. Understandably, pro-lifers focus on the total number of abortions occurring each hour, each day, each year. (See Part I of this series at www.nrlc.org/News_and_Views/Aug10/nv080610part5.html.) Every child killed by abortion represents an individual tragedy--a tragedy that can't be undone. And collectively, the number of abortions since Roe v. Wade is dispiritingly huge. Beyond being appalled about what has been happening to our country since 1973, we also sometimes wonder if our pro-life work has amounted to anything. Have women responded to our educational efforts? Have women observed the calamitous effects of abortion and therefore shied away from it? Has the wide-spread use of ultrasound imaging during pregnancy convinced them that what they see in the pregnant womb is a child--their child--and not a mere lump of "tissue"? And the answer is: Yes! We have made a big difference. I present here data that support this contention. The key is to understand what women do when they are confronted with an unexpected pregnancy. How likely is a woman to have an abortion? Is it more likely today than it was in the seventies or eighties? Opinion polls suggest that women, and the public in general, are more pro-life today than they were several years ago. But we can go beyond mere opinion, because there are reasonably accurate statistics about what women actually do with regard to abortion, as opposed to what they tell a pollster. The statistic that tells us what women do when with regard to abortion is the abortion rate, the number of abortions per 1,000 women of child-bearing age (ages 15-44). The figure below shows data based on the Guttmacher Institute's (GI) reports.
The figure clearly shows that women availed themselves of abortion less and less since the peak of 1980-81. From 1980 to 2005, the abortion rate dropped by about 34%, while the number of women of child-bearing age increased by over 18%. The strong reversal in women's use of abortion is shown more clearly in the next figure.
During the seventies, the "popularity" of abortion rose dramatically, peaked in 1980-81, and than began a steady decline. By 2005, the abortion rate was back to levels not seen since 1974. The decline in the abortion rate is even more dramatic when we factor out repeat abortions. By 1974, already 16% of women who had an abortion in that year, had had at least one previously. This percentage of repeat abortions rose steadily over the years, peaked in the late nineties, and was around 44% of all abortions by 2004. After factoring out repeat abortions, we can compute a rate for the first abortion. The first abortion is potentially the "threshold" abortion that can lead to more abortions. As the next figure shows, women became less and less likely to cross that threshold as the years went by: by 2005, women had a 30% lower rate for a first abortion than in 1974. And since its peak in 1979, the first-abortion rate had dropped 42% by 2005.
Clearly, there is a significant group of women who have embraced abortion-as-birth-control; but even the rate for repeat abortions has dropped by 24% since its peak in 1989. The obvious question for pro-lifers is: Why did women change their behavior with regard to abortion? Anti-life apologists claim that (1) an increased use of contraceptive and birth-control practices and (2) fewer abortionists led to the decrease in the abortion rate. Pro-lifers will point to this: (1) by 1980-81, the pro-life movement had reached "critical mass" in terms of numbers, organization, visibility, and action. (Remember, this was the election year that made Ronald Reagan president.) Large numbers of Protestant became politically active and joined the pro-life movement during that time. (2) Either from personal experience or from the reports of friends, women had begun to understand that "abortion is a bad thing," as former NARAL president Kate Michelman once admitted. (3) The persistent legislative activity of NRLC and its state affiliates (such as laws to ban partial-birth abortions) refocused the public's mind onto the fact that abortion is not an innocuous "choice," but kills a baby. And (4), the persistent drop in the abortion rate was also due to the wide-spread use of ultra-sound imaging during pregnancy--pregnant women see their baby, not just "fetal tissue." While the number of individual abortionists has dropped, new large-scale abortion enterprises, principally Planned Parenthood's, have emerged. As to the increased use of contraceptives and birth-control devices, one has to observe that the change in the abortion rate was very abrupt around 1980-81. As you can see in the final figure, the pregnancy and child-birth rates did stay within a range of a 10% variation over 1980-2005, but the abortion rates changed much more dramatically. (Note that the scale for the abortion rates is on the right. The pregnancy rate is the Guttmacher Institute's estimate.)
On balance, it seems that the "pro-life" explanation of the attitudinal shift is the stronger one. (This commentary is based in part on a workshop presented by Dr. Gunter N. Franz at the National Right to Life Convention on June 24, 2010, in Pittsburgh, PA. Other commentaries will follow in Today's News & Views) |
