[Vision2020] Let's get real about abortions

[Art Deco]

Let's get real about abortions
By *David Frum*, CNN Contributor
updated 9:12 AM EDT, Mon October 29, 2012


*Editor's note: David Frum, a CNN contributor, is a contributing editor at
Newsweek and The Daily Beast. He is the author of seven books, including a
new novel, "Patriots," and was a special assistant to President George W.
Bush from 2001 to 2002.*

*(CNN)* -- When Richard
Mourdock<http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/10/24/gop-senate-candidate-pregnancies-from-rape-gods-will/?iref=allsearch>delivered
his notorious answer about rape and abortion, I was sorry that
the debate moderator failed to follow up with the next question:

"OK, Mr. Mourdock, you say your principles require a raped woman to carry
the rapist's child to term. That's a heavy burden to impose on someone.
What would you do for her in return? Would you pay her medical expenses?
Compensate her for time lost to work? Would you pay for the child's
upbringing? College education?

"If a woman has her credit card stolen, her maximum liability under federal
law is $50. Yet on your theory, if she is raped, she must endure not only
the trauma of assault, but also accept economic costs of potentially many
thousands of dollars. Must that burden also fall on her alone? When we used
to draft men into the Army, we gave them veterans' benefits afterward. If
the state now intends to conscript women into involuntary childbearing,
surely those women deserve at least an equally generous deal?"

That question sounds argumentative, and I suppose it is.

Opinion: Mourdock's rape remark and
extremism<http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/24/opinion/avlon-mourdock-rape-remark/index.html>

As a general rule, societies that do the most to support mothers and
child-bearing have the fewest abortions. Societies that do the least to
support mothers and child-bearing have more abortions.

Germany, for example, operates perhaps the world's plushest welfare
state. Working
women receive
<http://www.zuv.uni-heidelberg.de/international/hilfen_engl.html>14 weeks
of maternity leave, during which time they receive pay from the state. The
state pays a child allowance to the parents of every German child for
potentially as many as 25 years, depending on how long as the child remains
in school. Women who leave the work force after giving birth receive a
replacement wage from the state for up to 14 months.

As a general rule, societies that do the most to support mothers and
child-bearing have the fewest abortions. Societies that do the least to
support mothers and child-bearing have more abortions.

Germany, for example, operates perhaps the world's plushest welfare
state. Working
women receive
<http://www.zuv.uni-heidelberg.de/international/hilfen_engl.html>14 weeks
of maternity leave, during which time they receive pay from the state. The
state pays a child allowance to the parents of every German child for
potentially as many as 25 years, depending on how long as the child remains
in school. Women who leave the work force after giving birth receive a
replacement wage from the state for up to 14 months.

Maybe not coincidentally, Germany has one of the lowest abortion rates,
about one-third that of the United States. Yet German abortion laws are not
especially restrictive. Abortion is legal during the first trimester of
pregnancy and available if medically or psychologically necessary in the
later trimesters.

Even here in the United States, where parental benefits are much less
generous, abortion responds to economic conditions. In the prosperous
1990s, abortion rates declined rapidly. In the less prosperous '00s,
abortion rates declined more slowly. When the economy plunged into crisis
in 2008, abortion rates abruptly rose
again<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704458204576074251590376210.html>
.

These trends should not surprise anyone. Women choose abortion for one
overwhelming reason: economic insecurity. The large majority of women who
chose abortion in 2008, 57%, reported a disruptive
event<http://www.guttmacher.org/media/nr/2012/08/21/index.html>in
their lives in the previous 12 months: most often, the loss of a job
or
home.

Obama on Mourdock: Male politicians shouldn't make abortion
decisions<http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/10/24/obama-on-mourdock-male-politicians-shouldnt-make-abortion-decisions/>

Of the women who choose abortion, 58% are in their 20s. Some 61% of them
already have a child. Almost 70% of them are poor or near poor.

Three-quarters say they cannot afford another child.

Pro-life and pro-choice debaters delight in presenting each other with
exquisitely extreme moral dilemmas: "Would you ban abortion even in case of
rape?" "Would you permit abortion even when done only to select the sex of
the child?"

These dorm-room hypotheticals do not have very much to do with the
realities of abortion in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Here's an interesting example of those realities: The Netherlands has one
of the the most liberal abortion laws in the world. Yet for a long time,
the Netherlands also reported one of the world's lowest abortion rates.
That low incidence abruptly began to rise in the mid-1990s. Between 1996
and 2003, the abortion rate in the Netherlands jumped by 31% over seven
years.

What changed? The Guttmacher Institute, the leading source of data on
reproductive health worldwide, cites "a growing
demand<http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3310607.html#17>for
terminations from women in ethnic minority groups residing in the
country." Well over half of all
abortions<http://books.google.com/books?id=wN-nXmH4FooC&pg=PA294&lpg=PA294&dq=abortion+immigrants+netherlands+teenager&source=bl&ots=rLM1tT1N-Y&sig=F2Hrr74Fw4QHr3qnAegs3bLKxbE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=NSSNUO2xBebI0AHEm4HIDQ&ved=0CCEQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=abortion%20immigrants%20netherlands%20teenager&f=false>performed
on teenagers in the Netherlands are performed on girls of
non-Dutch origins.

These girls and women weren't being raped. They weren't selecting for the
sex of their child. They chose abortion because they had become sexually
active within male-dominated immigrant subcultures in which access to birth
control was restricted, in which female sexuality was tightly policed, in
which girls who become pregnant outside marriage are disgraced and in which
the costs and obligations of childbearing loaded almost entirely on women
alone.

Abortion is a product of poverty and maternal distress.

A woman who enjoys the most emotional and financial security and who has
chosen the timing of her pregnancy will not choose abortion, even when
abortion laws are liberal. A woman who is dominated, who is poor and who
fears bearing the child is likely to find an abortion, even where abortion
is restricted, as it was across the United States before 1965.

Santorum: Mourdock criticism 'gotcha
politics'<http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/10/24/santorum-mourdock-criticism-gotcha-politics/>

So maybe at the next candidates' debate, a journalist will deflect the
discussion away from "what if" and instead ask this:

"Rather than tell us what you'd like to ban, tell us please what you think
government should do to support more happy and healthy childbearing, to
reduce unwanted pregnancies and to alleviate the economic anxieties of
mothers-to-be?"

Those are the questions that make the difference. It's amazing how little
we talk about them.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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