Abortion

I'm personally a strong believer in legal abortion, but it's easy to see how it can be viewed as a conflict between the mother and child.

There are some philosophical things that are tough to reconcile between lifers and choicers, but I think we'd do well to focus on common ground on which most everyone can agree:

Abortion is a dumb method of birth control.

Reducing the number of abortions is a worthy goal. Whatever one's stance is on the morality of it, we can agree that it's wasteful.

Around the world, there are lots of different tactics taken toward abortion. In some places it's completely legal under all circumstances, and in other places it's never legal, and everything in between. Statistically, it seems that legalization (or criminalization) of abortion has little effect on the number of abortions.

That's not the same as saying it's the same all around the world. Western Europe has a much lower abortion rate than we do in the US, for example. Why? The correlating factors seem to be:

excellent sex education
easy availability of more practical birth control

I believe that anti-abortion folks are shooting themselves in the leg by also being opposed to sex education. Ignorance is a breeding ground (literally) for unwanted pregnancy. And if they think outlawing premarital sex will eliminate it, they need to buy a ticket out of dreamland before they can discuss politics.

The seven percent of women who do not use contraception account for 53% of unwanted pregnancies.

Instead of talking about whether abortion is right or wrong, we should just agree that we want to reduce it, and do what works.

Preaching doesn't work. Education does.

Filed Thu - August 16, 2007, 10:28 AM in

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