hooser
10mo ago
"Abortion" is a stand in for the wild claim that "they" are trying to "take away" unspecified "rights."
Your characterization is highly uncharitable. When we talk about "abortion rights", we are talking about the right to an abortion.
For a young woman that has any sex life, the possibility and consequences of getting pregnant loom large. If the woman doesn't want to have children (yet), abortion is the safety net of last resort. The most commonly available birth control methods--condoms and pills--have a typical-use failure rate of 13% and 7%, respectively. That's the proportion of women who become pregnant within the first 12 months after initiating the use of that birth control method. Even with perfect use, those rates are 2% and 0.3%, and every woman should ask herself how sure she is that she is using them perfectly. IUD's have much better rates (1%), and 10% of US women of reproductive age have them installed, and hopefully that number keeps going up; nevertheless, that rate is not 0.
Every young woman who is having any sex with a man has to ask herself what will she do if she gets pregnant. It's no surprise that so many want to keep abortion as an option.
Plenty of pro-life advocates understand this perspective, and are taking a constructive approach. Around where I live, I see bill-boards advertising support services for any woman who is pregnant and is willing to carry the baby to term. They arrange health services and adoption (if the woman wants to give the child away), or connect to support services for mothers with infants.
I don't know how good any of these services are, but I like the principal of this approach. There is a huge penalty for a young woman to complete the pregnancy (financial, physical, and mental), and this supportive approach reduces some of that penalty.
I agree.
Whatever the prevalent culture war rhetoric around sex and abortion, it seems that young women are actually more likely to follow that ideal than previously. Teen birth rates are way down, a quarter of what they were in 1991. Teens are less likely to have sex than before, those who do have it later than before, and with fewer partners source. The number of abortions is down by about a third, compared to early 90's.
These trends don't count as a culture war win for conservatives because they weren't achieved through wider adoption of conservative ideals. But these trends are a definite win for the goal of reducing the deaths of unborn children. Wider adoption of IUD's will further reduce these deaths.
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