Abortion – Changing the Conversation

In a landmark paper published this week in Lancet, researchers at the Alan Guttmacher Institute reported that abortion rates are down worldwide, due in large part to increasing use of effective contraception. The decline in developed countries was most marked in Eastern Europe, an area that until recently did not have widely available contraception.

I think the data are very real. I have seen many patients over the years who emigrated here from the former Soviet Union and who had upwards of 5 abortions, because, they told me, this had been their only available form of birth control. Here in the US, these women are using effective contraception, and not having abortions.

Another important finding from the study was that abortion rates were the same regardless of abortion laws. Again, I am not surprised. Abortion is not like drinking or gambling, a viceful pleasure that needs to be regulated by the state. It is a woman’s desperate response to an unplanned pregnancy, and desperate women do desperate things, regardless of the laws. But give these same women easy acccess to effective contraception, and the need for abortion disappears.

Unfortunately, the proportion of abortions that are unsafe increased from 44 to 48% in the same time period. According to an interview in the NY times with one of the study’s authors;

Generally, where abortion is legal it will be provided in a safe manner..And the opposite is also true: where it is illegal, it is likely to be unsafe, performed under unsafe conditions by poorly trained providers.

I am greatly encouraged by the media play on this study, and hope that it will help drive the battle over abortion into the common ground between the two sides – contraception.

In this regard, I read a very encouraging post in a The Mirror of Justice, a blog on Catholic legal theory that seems to be getting a lot of play on the internet (it’s number 4 when I googled “abortion rates” and “Lancet”…)

Here’s my question. If this study were true, and if it were the case that making abortion illegal would most likely only drive it underground, without having much effect on its actual incidence but making it far more dangerous for women to have an abortion, would that be a reason to rethink the Church’s teachings, not on the morality of abortion, but on the tight connection between abortion’s (im)morality and its legality? I’ve tried to get this conversation off the ground a few times at MOJ, but I feel like we often get side-tracked onto the question of abortion’s morality or into the empirical question whether studies like this one are actually correct.

If this is how the Catholics are starting to think, then there may be hope that one day abortion will become, as many of us hope, legal but rare.

Update – the conversation’s starting…