In what he describes as an insight that came to him in his sleep, Mark Shea recently opined, “I think I figured out the difference between what I want and what American conservative Christianists want: I want to end abortion. They want to outlaw it. Good luck with that.” (The term “Christianist,” in this usage, is a pejorative coined by Andrew Sullivan to describe “those on the fringes of the religious right who have used the Gospels to perpetuate their own aspirations for power, control and oppression.”).
Taking his earlier claim in the most charitable light, I think Shea is raising an important distinction, one which pro-lifers can sometimes forget: overturning Roe v. Wade isn’t the end goal. Ending abortion is the goal… or better, creating a culture of life, in which all human beings are viewed as gifts from God rather than as burdens or parasites. The question, then, is how do we get there? One approach is to cut down the supply of abortion by regulating it, and even making abortion illegal. Another is to try to reduce demand for abortion by creating the social conditions such that women would never choose to abort their children (I’ll call them the “Supply” and “Demand” positions from now on).
The first thing that should be recognized, of course, is that there’s no necessary tension between these two things: a person could support outlawing abortion and expanding social programs as a two-pronged approach to promote a culture of life. But routinely, people in the Supply camp are against expanding the size and scope of government, and people in the Demand camp are against legal restrictions on abortion. Shea spoke out against the Georgia heartbeat bill by parroting pro-choice activists’ claim that the law lead to “prison for miscarriage” (an absurd claim that both the Washington Post and even Staci Fox, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Southeast denied). So it’s worth analyzing each side of this debate-within-the-debate: if the goal is to eliminate abortion, how best can we do it?
I don’t claim to have all of the answers on this question, but I think it’s worth analyzing a few of the claims that I’ve heard from people on the “Demand” side. So here are a few common claims that you may have heard (or may hold):
- Outlawing abortion won’t actually reduce the abortion rate, as women will just have illegal abortions;
- These illegal abortions are actually worse, because they’re unsafe for the woman – so you don’t save the child, you just end up getting the mother killed; and
- The most effective way to eliminate abortion is for the government to expand social programs, to create a better safety net for vulnerable women.
How do these particular claims hold up to scrutiny? Let’s look at some data. To avoid allegations of bias, I’ve purposely refrained from using any obviously pro-life sources.
(1) Legality and Abortion Rates
The idea that the legality or illegality of abortion would have no bearing on the abortion rate is an idea that can’t pass even cursory logical scrutiny. It requires believing that no pregnant woman factors the legality or risk of abortion into her calculation of whether or not to have an abortion. If that were true, abortion would hardly be a hot-button political issue, since abortion laws would (in this universe) have no bearing on abortions.
But of course, that isn’t right. The number of abortions in the U.S. exploded after abortion was legalized. We don’t know just how many illegal abortions there were in the U.S. before the 1970s, but we don’t need to. We can see the effects in the macro-level trends. John J. Donohue III and Steven D. Levitt (the latter of Freakonomics fame) took a closer look at what we can know from the data:
It is true, and for obvious reasons, that no one has good data on the number of illegal abortions. Both theory and evidence, however, strongly suggest that the prevalence of abortion rose sharply after legalization. From a theoretical perspective, there is no question that the dollar cost, the medical risk, and the taint associated with engaging in illegal conduct fell after legalization, all of which would lead to higher rates of abortion. With respect to the dollar cost, Kaplan (1988, p. 164) notes that “an illegal abortion before Roe v. Wade cost $400 to $500, while today, thirteen years after the decision, the now legal procedure can be procured for as little as $80.” Kahane (2000) documents that the number of abortion is quite responsive to the price, so on that basis alone one would predict substantial jumps in the number of abortions after legalization. Empirically, if legal abortions simply replaced illegal ones, it is hard to understand why it took seven years after Roe for the number of legal abortions to reach a steady state. The number of legal abortions more than doubled between 1973 and 1980. Michael (1999) using self-reported data on pregnancy outcomes histories finds abortion rates to be roughly and order of magnitude higher after legalization.
source
In other words, the best data suggested that the abortion rate after abortion legalization was about ten times what it was before. This is consistent with the data that we see for legal abortions.Susan Hanson, a professor of Political Science and Women’s Studies at the University of Pittsburgh:
The number of American women receiving abortions has certainly increased, from 193,000 in 1970 to almost 1.3 million in 1977 (Figure 1). What is striking is the apparent lack of any sharp bend to the curve after Roe. Almost no legal abortions were performed in the United States before 1965; middle- and upper-class women could go to Mexico or Sweden, while poor women did without or suffered from self-induced or black-market abortions.
Source
So the abortion rate in the U.S. skyrocketed from 1970 to 1977, as abortion became legalized first at the state level, and then as a newly-discovered constitutional right. Here’s the Figure 1 to which Hanson referred:
But if this was simply a case of illegal abortions becoming legal abortions, we should expect to see the rates stay relatively flat. But we don’t: the data, even on legal abortions, suggests that the presence of legalized abortions is changing people’s behavior over the course of several years. And this is further established by another powerful piece of evidence, cited by Donohue and Levitt:
Consistent with this finding is a dramatic decline in the number of children put up for adoption after abortion became legal. According to Stolley (1993), almost 9 percent of premarital births were placed for adoption before 1973; that number fell to 4 percent for births occurring between 1973 and 1981.
source
So from 1973 to 1981, as the abortion rate is skyrocketing, the adoption rate is plummeting by more than half.
Now, this suggests two things. First, there’s an obvious relationship between the legality of abortion and the rate of abortion. Legalized abortion dramatically increases the likelihood of abortion. Second, the relationship between legality and abortion rate is complicated by the various states’ laws. Recall the surge Hanson documented after individual states started legalizing abortion – people can easily cross state lines, if they would like. So what happens if the Supreme Court strikes down Roe, and it’s back to states to decide abortion laws? Chances are good that you’ll end up with a patchwork of laws. What would happen to the abortion rate then? Obviously, it wouldn’t go down as dramatically as it would if there was a nationwide ban. But there would still be some decline. The Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of Planned Parenthood, documented the effects of mandatory counseling and waiting period laws:
We conclude that mandatory counseling and waiting period laws that require an additional in-person visit before the procedure likely increase both the personal and the financial costs of obtaining an abortion, thereby preventing some women from accessing abortion services. If neighboring states have similar laws, so that access to an abortion provider who does not require this strict form of waiting period requires extensive travel, then such laws are likely to lower abortion rates, delay women who are seeking abortions and result in a higher proportion of second-trimester abortions.
Source
From the data they cited, it’s clear that some women responded to waiting periods and counseling by having abortions later in their pregnancy (not many: it was a 2-3% increase in second-trimester abortions), or by simply going out of state (particularly women who lived closest to an out-of-state abortionist anyway), but enough women simply didn’t have an abortion that the overall abortion rate declined dramatically. In Mississippi, the abortion rate fell by 22%; adjusting for the women who went out-of-state, the overall decline was still 11-13%. Remember, that wasn’t from the state outlawing abortion – that was from the state implementing a 24 hour waiting period, similar to what’s used in the purchase of a firearm, and for the same reason: the idea that life-or-death decisions shouldn’t be done in the height of emotion or on the spur of the moment. Simply saying “wait a day, and if you still want your abortion, you can have it then” decreased the abortion rate by something like 11-13%, even though they could legally drive to the state next door.
Obviously, no one can say (a) what the post-Roe state laws would look like, or (b) what their exact effects would be, but there’s solid reason to believe that state restrictions on, or outlawing of, abortion would dramatically decrease the abortion rate. Even the Guttmacher Institute concludes that “policies that either expressly or indirectly reduce women’s access to abortion services decrease their use of the procedure.”
(2) Legality and Abortion Safety
What about maternal mortality? One of the most common arguments against outlawing abortion is that illegal abortions are terribly dangerous. This is the “safe” in the now-defunct Democratic slogan that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” As Ellen Goodman of the Boston Globe wrote back in 2004:
At times, I’ve had a fantasy about my generation as the last brigade parading for reproductive rights under a banner of “Post-Menopausal Women for Choice.” After all, those of us who remember when birth control was illegal and when 10,000 American women a year died from illegal abortions don’t have to imagine a world without choices. We were there.
source
These days, Planned Parenthood president Leana Wen is claiming it’s 5,000 women per year. Both numbers are entirely fictitious. I was pleased to see, on the verge of publishing this post, that the Washington Post beat me to the punch, thoroughly debunking the Planned Parenthood’s figures (it’s well worth a read).
It turns out, you don’t even have to look outside of Planned Parenthood to know their numbers are phony. Back in 1960, Mary Steichen Calderone (the then-medical director of Planned Parenthood) declared,
Abortion is no longer a dangerous procedure. This applies not just to therapeutic abortions as performed in hospitals but also to so-called illegal abortions as done by physicians. In 1957 there were only 260 deaths in the whole country attributed to abortions of any kind. In New York City in 1921 there were 144 abortion deaths, in 1951 there were only 15; and, while the abortion death rate was going down so strikingly in that 30-year period, we know what happened to the population and the birth rate. Two corollary factors must be mentioned here: first, chemotherapy and antibiotics have come in, benefiting all surgical procedures as well as abortion. Second, and even more important, the conference estimated that 90 per cent of all illegal abortions are presently being done by physicians.
source
Now, 260 maternal deaths from abortion in a year is still high, but it’s nowhere near the 10,000 that activists like Goodman claim. And that was 1957. Over the next three decades, abortion – and all surgery – got a lot safer (for the woman, not for her child) as medical technologies advanced. In 1999, the CDC traced the history of maternal and infant mortality rates over the course of the 20th century, and what they found was incredible: from 1915 to 1997, “the infant mortality rate declined greater than 90% to 7.2 per 1000 live births, and from 1900 through 1997, the maternal mortality rate declined almost 99% to less than 0.1 reported death per 1000 live births.” If you look at the chart below, you’ll see that this miracle of modern medicine has a lot more to do with asepsis, antibiotics, and penicillin than it does with whether or not abortion is legal – Roe (and even the early-legalizing states) don’t happen until the decline is almost done:
This is why the Washington Post rightly raps Planned Parenthood and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists:
Wen is a doctor, and the ACOG is made up of doctors. They should know better than to peddle statistics based on data that predates the advent of antibiotics. Even given the fuzzy nature of the data and estimates, there is no evidence that in the years immediately preceding the Supreme Court’s decision, thousands of women died every year in the United States from illegal abortions.
source
So to recap: “back-alley abortions” weren’t actually done in back alleys but (over 90% of the time) in a physician’s office, and when they were particularly dangerous, it was because surgery in the early- and mid- 20th century was dangerous.
(3) Social Programs and Abortion
Now to the other side of the coin: if the characteristic approach of the “Supply” side pro-lifers is to limit or bar legal access to abortion, the focus of the “Demand” side is away from outlawing abortion and on expanding the social net, to make abortion feel less necessary to scared pregnant women. It’s undeniably a good goal, but it’s worth asking: how effective is this approach?
First, let’s look at the macro-level trends, according to the Guttmacher Institute:
Since 2014, the abortion rate has continued to drop. Broken down by presidency, (legal) abortions rose under Nixon (R), Ford (R), and Carter (D); they peaked early in the Reagan (R) years and then began a fairly steady decline that continued through the GHW Bush (R), Clinton (D), GW Bush (R), and Obama (D) years. (We don’t have the data yet for the Trump years). Nothing in that graph suggests that the abortion rate depends in any major way on who the president is, or on federal social policies. After Clinton and the Republican GOP announced “welfare reform” in early 1996, the abortion rate dropped.
Closer examination of the data tells a similar story. The Guttmacher Institute found that “higher wages increase birthrates,” but “do not significantly affect abortion rates,” and concluded that “when women’s economic conditions improve, their contraceptive effort declines.” In other words, the birthrate goes up because the pregnancy rate goes up, not because the abortion rate goes down. In fact, since the abortion rate stays the same, this means that there are actually more abortions. That’s wages. What about welfare? The same report found that “Neither the gender-specific economic variables, AFDC [Aid to Families with Dependent Children] benefits nor Medicaid coverage has a significant effect on the abortion rate,” and that “the economic results are much more sensitive to the particular measures employed, and no consistent pattern appears. The AFDC results suggest that the effects of welfare on reproductive behavior have been greatly exaggerated by some in the current policy debate.”
Part of the reason that social programs seem not to have much of any effect on the abortion rate is that women’s reasons for aborting are often a complicated mix of both economic and (primarily) non-economic reasons. From another Guttmacher Institute report:
Among the structured survey respondents, the two most common reasons were “having a baby would dramatically change my life” and “I can’t afford a baby now” (cited by 74% and 73%, respectively—Table 2). A large proportion of women cited relationship problems or a desire to avoid single motherhood (48%). Nearly four in 10 indicated that they had completed their childbearing, and almost one-third said they were not ready to have a child. Women also cited possible problems affecting the health of the fetus or concerns about their own health (13% and 12%, respectively).* Respondents wrote in a number of specific health reasons, from chronic or debilitating conditions such as cancer and cystic fibrosis to pregnancy-specific concerns such as gestational diabetes and morning sickness.
The most common subreason given was that the woman could not afford a baby now because she was unmarried (42%). Thirty-eight percent indicated that having a baby would interfere with their education, and the same proportion said it would interfere with their employment. In a related vein, 34% said they could not afford a child because they were students or were planning to study.
In the in-depth interviews, the three most frequently stated reasons were the same as in the structured survey: the dramatic impact a baby would have on the women’s lives or the lives of their other children (32 of 38 respondents), financial concerns (28), and their current relationship or fear of single motherhood (21).
source
If you’ve got a woman considering an abortion because she’s worries about what her volatile boyfriend might do when he finds out she’s pregnant again, or you’ve got a girl worried about what her parents might think or what this’ll mean for her college prospects, or you’ve got a woman who simply doesn’t want to deal with morning sickness… what’s the economic incentive or social program that shifts that balance?
There are two major caveats here: first, this point is about the ineffectiveness broad-scale programs like welfare in reducing the abortion rate in any noticeable way. That doesn’t mean that all social interventions are doomed to fail. But it does mean that we shouldn’t be naïve about the likelihood of success. Second, none of this means that we shouldn’t have social programs that help low-income or high-need populations. There are plenty of good reasons to do so – it’s just that “reducing abortion” doesn’t seem to be one of them.
Conclusion
I assume the good faith of those in both the “Supply” and “Demand” camp of the pro-life movement, that the two sides overwhelmingly share the same goal of eliminating (not just outlawing) abortion, and helping to create a culture more open to life. I realize that there are bad apples on both sides of the question who aren’t pursuing that goal, but it’s not fair to tar the overwhelming number of people operating in good faith.
Given this, it makes sense to take a hard look at what empirically works and what doesn’t. And to that end, it seems crystal clear that pro-lifers reducing the legal availability of abortion have a dramatically better plan than those who only seek to reduce poverty or expand the social net.
Mark Shea recently opined, “I think I figured out the difference between what I want and what American conservative Christianists want: I want to end abortion. They want to outlaw it. Good luck with that.
Thou shalt not kill ..
Mr. Shea is a Catholic living in America which has positive law in support of sins crying to Heaven for vengeance but one will never read him condemning the Godlessness of Liberty and The US Constitution and how it has utterly failed to defend life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness.
The first ever secular state – divorced from Throne and Altar- America was doomed from the get go because it refused to accept any form of Kingship (from George III or Jesus Christ) and so it has been justly punished and will continued to be punished until it becomes a Catholic Confessional State that legislates in communion with the Universal Kingship of Jesus Christ and the idea that abortion or sodomy can be dealt with outside the Kingship of Christ is just a wispy and wearying exercise that repeats the error of american practical politics.
You admit the data on how much abortion happened before it was legal is sketchy but still make the argument it increased abortion by 10x since the 70’s?
The starting numbers are crap. Also a lot happened in that time, like the sexual revolution (which cannot be undone with outlawing abortion even if you want to) and the population of the US going from 200 million to 300 million…
Rates increasing 7 years after Roe V Wade is most easily explained as “Abortion didn’t magically get offered on every street corner overnight.”
You seem to be suggesting that women are getting pregnant more often because they know they can get an abortion safe and easy, and that if abortion were illegal they’d choose not to get pregnant. That isn’t at all realistic. Demand for abortion doesn’t evaporate if abortion is legal, rates of abortion would be higher than the mythical 200k before Roe.
Even if we accept that it increased when it was legal, there’s no 1:1 conversion there.
A back alley abortion should not be considered the equivalent of one performed safely in a professional environment by anyone.
“They’ll have penicillin so it won’t be as bad when women have to go back to coat hangers” is disingenuous.
It’s indisputable that legal abortions are safe. (https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/03/16/593447727/landmark-report-concludes-abortion-is-safe)
It’s indisputable that unlicensed, illegal abortions did happen before Roe and they were gruesome and horrible.
You’re using a lot of words here to try to convince yourself some inconvenient truths aren’t true.
You want to ban abortion, and the fact that a lot of desperate women are going to end up killing themselves because of it doesn’t change your mind.
Phil,
It’s hard to get DIRECT data on the exact number of illegal abortions since a lot of women would deny having abortions (and a lot of doctors deny performing them), particularly when it was illegal. But we can get a good INDIRECT estimate by looking at the impact of legalized abortion on birth rate, adoption rate, etc.
You say, ““They’ll have penicillin so it won’t be as bad when women have to go back to coat hangers” is disingenuous.” How? The arguments about the dangers of illegal abortion are acting as if illegal abortion in the 21st century would be like abortion in 1900, and that’s a ridiculous assumption. Illegal abortion in 1960 wasn’t even like illegal abortion in 1900, so the scare tactics of “abortion used to be dangerous” is a bunk comparison.
You say, “You want to ban abortion, and the fact that a lot of desperate women are going to end up killing themselves because of it doesn’t change your mind.” But this is emotional manipulation with no supporting data.
Dear Phil. If America made abortion illegal and prosecuted women who contracted with a killer to slaughter her unborn child and the law prosecuted both the doctor and the mother for conspiracy to commit murder and murder, do you think that would reduce the rate of abortion?
Or, are you so in favor of letting full grown adults legally slaughter innocent unborn tiny humans with impunity that such a idea makes no sense to you?
Hateful lawmakers here are already doing that and no effect. Purvi Patel for one. Abortion was illegal in the US and women still risked jail and death.
There will also be ectopic pregnancies, rape and incest pregnancies, and non-viable pregnancies.
So no, clearly draconian laws don’t prevent abortion demand. It just makes it worse for all the people going through a hard time.
It prolly is true that were abortion illegal and punishable as a capital crime (premeditated murder) then mothers who hired doctors to kill their tiny defenseless unborn human persons would be worse off than they now are because now they can’t even be picked-up for littering and the putative “pro-life” crowd never describes the murdering moms as criminals, but, rather as victims.
And what about the father of the unborn person?
Does misandry demand he just shut-up while the woman he impregnated decides whether to kill the tiny defenseless unborn person or bear the child and force him to pay child support?
O, and how is it hateful to labor to protect the innocent life of tiny defenseless inborn persons?
The Ten Commandments still exist and yet Godless America legislates directly in opposition to Thou Shalt Not Kill; is that hateful of Our Creator?
As to rape and incest, instead of inflicting capital punishment on the innocent and defenseless unborn person. why not send the rapist to prison forever?
How does punishing the innocent actualise justice?
You didn’t respond to me and brought up a bunch of unrelated arguments.
You’re done pretending that outlawing abortion will magically end the need for abortions? Fine. Admit it. Don’t just change the subject.
How many rape victims are going to end up killing themselves because they still needed abortions despite abortion being illegal?
No one knows, but it’s going to be many.
You don’t care.
You want this to be a simple question of wrong and right, where you’re right and you get to pat yourself on the back. You don’t care about the desperate women you’re driving to suicide. This is not about helping anyone, this is about you feeling like you saved babies without doing anything more difficult than voting.
I say “Hateful” because it’s not about saving babies. If it were, they’d be focusing on lowering infant mortality rates to be in line with the rest of the rich nations. Instead they are only about punishing women for sex and not caring about rape victims or other desperate women in desperate situations.
It’s hateful because it’s entirely about hate.
Dear Phil. It isn’t even clear that you know what is in your own mind and so stop pretending you have the gift of afflatus and can know what is in the mind of ABS.
All problems are, ultimately, of a spiritual nature and, thus, your consequentialism is apt for an American practicing American practicality but not for a Catholic man.
It is always evil/wrong, everywhere and at all times, to murder innocent defenseless life.
If you can’t get that simple black and white truth straight you really should consider that silence of golden
“It isn’t even clear that you know what is in your own mind”
Honestly, what does this even mean?
“It is always evil/wrong, everywhere and at all times, to murder innocent defenseless life. If you can’t get that simple black and white truth straight”
It’s not black and white whether the early embryo is a life or not. And when you take away a freedom from millions of women, you damn well do need to think about it beyond black and white. If it’s outlawed, and the abortion rate stays high, all your idiotic ban is doing is killing more women in addition to the embryo you’re trying to save.
Why are you even here if you’re so lazy you insist it’s simple wrong or right? Just cheerleading for your side and booing rape victims, ectopic pregnancy victims, and other women you look down on?
—“It’s not black and white whether the early embryo is a life or not.”—
Try consulting any medical textbook; they spell it out…in Black. And. White.
Or you, who cheers for hired child murderers.
Even taken at its most charitable, Shea’s argument has a major flaw.
Abortion is homicide. Legal abortion is government-sanctioned homicide.
You could throw the question of reductions out the window–assume that there will be no reductions whatsoever, that every single abortionist and every one of their prospective customers will defy the law and continue as they would have before–and it would still be worthwhile, simply to strip this blood-soaked abomination of the governmental imprimatur it currently enjoys.
I applaud you for admitting you don’t care how many women die preventable deaths as long as your government has no part of it. I wish the rest of the anti-choice side were so honest.
Incidentally, what are you doing to abolish the death penalty or the military?
And, not for nothing, it’s not homicide. Abortions are almost always done before brain activity or when no brain has developed like ancephaly. We don’t put doctors in jail when they pull the plug on brain-dead comatose patients: it’s not homicide if there’s nothing going on upstairs.
Dear Phil. The blood thristy are usually more circumspect in their argumentation and so for what it is worth, you are at least forthright 🙂
I have to admit, Phil, I’m impressed.
Between the name-calling, the false dichotomies, the presumption of malice, the false equivalences, the flat-out factual inaccuracies, and the baseless diversions, you’ve managed to demonstrate a significant portion of the so-called “pro-choice” movement’s intellectual and moral bankruptcy–and all that in the space of a mere 6-7 sentences.
As I said–impressive.
100% nailed it right there . Well done
Phil,
There are major flaws in your reasoning. When the doctor pulls the plug on a brain dead patient, in their mind, the patient has no hope of recovering brain activity. I doubt for one second that if doctors believed a patient diagnosed as brain dead were to recover brain activity, enough where a machine would not be needed to keep them alive, that pulling the plug would not be viewed as murder.
But in the baby’s case, we know the brain activity argument that you use to compare them to a brain dead patient, will start. Everything is functioning normally, until the abortionist kills. So your argument fails.
What you, and others like you want, is the ability to judge whose life has worth, and whose doesn’t. It’s amazing that the person or people doing the judging, their lives somehow always have worth. This is the same argument that was used in Nazi Germany, after all, in their minds, the Jews were less than human, so they were worth less. That is the only way that abortion can be justified, when one human being is said to have more worth than another. This argument fails when one human being is denied the chance to ever live the life that they had begun.
The pro-lifers position that you disdain, on the other hand, is the only consistent position. All life has worth. And no human being has the right to take an innocent life, no matter who they are.
Abortion is too much power for humans to handle. Imagine if a class of people were allowed to go around and kill with total impunity.
The pro-abortion side of the debate will lose sooner or later.
This debate is very similar to slavery. The anti-slavery position had one argument throughout, and the pro-slavery side had any number of arguments, none of which addressed the one anti-slavery argument.
“You cannot own another human being.”
“We treat our slaves better than you treat your factory workers.”
“That’s another issue, you cannot own another human being.”
“You’re just pro-freedom! You don’t care about the slaves after they’re freed! How will they support themselves!”
“That’s another issue, you cannot own another human being.”
It’s the same today with abortion…
One side has the moral high-ground, and has the same argument throughout, and the other side has a bunch of arguments that DON’T address that one argument.
“My body, my choice.”
“You cannot kill an innocent human being.”
“You’re only pro-birth! You don’t care about the child after it’s born!”
“That’s another issue entirely, you cannot kill an innocent human being.”
“You don’t care about women’s health and want them to die in back alley abortions!”
“That’s another issue entirely, you cannot kill an innocent human being.”
In the 19th century, not only would people literally rather die than give up their slaves, they had no problem letting hundreds of thousands of other non-slave owners die before giving up their slaves.
In the 21st century, people will rather die, and will let thousands of others die rather than give up abortion.
The issue of abortion is black and white. Either God/Creator creates human life or he doesn’t AND such life is special. The consequences of Phil’s philosophy is that: (a) there is no metaphysical spark for human life, and (b) not all human life is equal. Why stop killing young human life with Phil’s philosophy? Old people are a drain on society and why not get rid of them next?? It is black and white. You either protect all human life or just admit that human lives have different values.
Murdering the unborn isn’t healthcare. It’s infanticide and murder.
The safest assumption backed by science and reason is that a unique human being exists at the time of conception and thence on a human developmental continuum until death. To justify denial to an innocent human being of their right to live for any reason is to usurp God’s authority. Once that door is open there is nothing to stop its progression and history has shown what horrors that leads to.
You are using some data selectively.
“But if this was simply a case of illegal abortions becoming legal abortions, we should expect to see the rates stay relatively flat. But we don’t: the data, even on legal abortions, suggests that the presence of legalized abortions is changing people’s behavior over the course of several years. And this is further established by another powerful piece of evidence, cited by Donohue and Levitt:
Consistent with this finding is a dramatic decline in the number of children put up for adoption after abortion became legal. According to Stolley (1993), almost 9 percent of premarital births were placed for adoption before 1973; that number fell to 4 percent for births occurring between 1973 and 1981.
source
So from 1973 to 1981, as the abortion rate is skyrocketing, the adoption rate is plummeting by more than half.”
Donohue and Levitt, in this and their previous publication, were arguing that legalized abortion reduced crime, including homicide.
More importantly, the “Figure 1” that shows the rise of abortion is merely the beginning of the longer chart from the Guttmacher Institute on abortion rates you show later. Looking at the longer series shows you were drawing the wrong conclusion from Figure 1. The mere availability of legalized abortion does not drive more abortion. There were many exogenous factors in the 1970s, mainly economic, that may have impacted the rise in abortion rates.
With respect to adoption, I don’t think you are understanding the numbers quoted correctly. I haven’t been to find Smolley 1993 online, so I might be wrong. The drop from 9% to 4% does not directly reflect increased abortions by unmarried women. It may reflect a willingness for women to keep their babies, of the babies they eventually had. If anything, this is a powerful argument that economic circumstances affect whether an unmarried woman chooses abortion. But it is not at all clear to me that this number can be used without knowing much more than the number you quote.
“Legalized abortion dramatically reduces the likelihood of abortion, making it about 1000% more likely.”
Clearly, you mean ‘increases’ not ‘reduces’. But the source of ‘1000%’ isn’t clear at all. If you mean the increase from 1970 to 1977 in Figure 1, you are not allowing for other influences, as discussed above. In general, not using annualized rates is sneaky argumentation. If you have some other source, you aren’t sharing it.
Hi David,
Just because Donohue and Levitt were arguing for something else in their publication, does not mean that one cannot reach another conclusion that their data obviously comes to. Something happened in 1973 that obviously affected the rates of babies put up for adoption. To reach the conclusion that Joe came up with is not wrong, based on the data.
Here is another error of yours: “The mere availability of legalized abortion does not drive more abortion.” Then you say other factors may have impacted the rise. They may not have either. Unless you can definitively prove that is what caused abortion clearly skyrocketing after it became legal, and not the fact that it skyrocketed because it became legal, then again his point stands. Marijuana usage in states where it has become legal has skyrocketed, yet I have yet to hear anyone argue it is because of exogenous factors that caused the increase, and not because marijuana became legal and more available.
Are you willing to say that if the availability of abortion goes down, that abortion rates will stay constant?
David,
First of all, thank you for commenting. To your initial claim, I don’t think anyone can avoid the accusation of using data selectively, especially in a case like this, where one of your complaints is that the dataset wasn’t even larger than it already was. There’s always more data that could be gathered, and always more conclusions that could be mined from the data.
I think it suffices to say that the data support the conclusions I describe in this post, and they don’t support the conclusions that Mark Shea and you come to (even though, again, I’m pretty sure you’re coming to those conclusions in good faith, and agree that some of your conclusions make sense in the absence of data). That doesn’t mean that mine are the only conclusions one could draw from the data. For instance, the Guttmacher Institute and I both agree on the data that abortion restrictions like waiting periods reduce the number of abortions. They view that as bad, I view that as good. But we actually agree on the raw data. I’ve lettered your specific points, and numbered my responses:
A. You say, “Donohue and Levitt, in this and their previous publication, were arguing that legalized abortion reduced crime, including homicide.”
1 – It’s true, and I agree with them – it DOES seem that one of the reasons that we saw a crime rate drop in the mid-90s is because of increased abortion in the mid-70s.
2 – That’s a good argument against people who naïvely assume that legalized abortion didn’t impact the abortion rate (if that were true, it wouldn’t impact the crime rate). For instance, you claim on literally no evidence that “The mere availability of legalized abortion does not drive more abortion.” But the actual data show otherwise, as Donohue and Levitt (and frankly, the Guttmacher Institute) show.
3 – But it’s a bad argument for abortion, as Dubner and Levitt acknowledge in the second half of Chapter
4 (“Where Have All the Criminals Gone?”) of Freakonomics. Even if you considered a fetus as only 1/1000th of a human person, the decreased crime rate wouldn’t be worth the number of abortions. It’s only an argument for abortion if you’re convinced that an unborn human being is literally worthless.
4 – Finally, as Duane pointed out already, that’s not selective use of the data. I 100% agree with them on what the data is. I’m just not endorsing everything the various authors I’m citing conclude from the data. But that’s because, as I said in the post, I’m purposely trying to use pro-choice or neutral sources to avoid charges of bias. So I necessarily won’t agree with the policy prescriptions that they might propose.
B. You said, “More importantly, the “Figure 1” that shows the rise of abortion is merely the beginning of the longer chart from the Guttmacher Institute on abortion rates you show later. Looking at the longer series shows you were drawing the wrong conclusion from Figure 1. The mere availability of legalized abortion does not drive more abortion. There were many exogenous factors in the 1970s, mainly economic, that may have impacted the rise in abortion rates.”
1- If you want to show an economic indicator (GDP, unemployment, inflation rate, etc.) that’s correlated to the abortion rate in a statistically significant and causal way, I’m definitely open to it. But I haven’t found any strong indicators of a big macroeconomic effect on abortion rates. We see the abortion rate rising when the economy is good and when it’s bad, we see abortion rates dropping when the economy is good and when it is bad. So it’s true that these “may have impacted the abortion rate,” but the data doesn’t seem to show that they did, and I can’t really prove a negative.
2- You’re interpreting the upward slope incorrectly. If abortion legalization had no effect on the abortion rate, we would expect to see an initial surge in legalized abortion (with an equal-sized decrease in illegal abortions) because there would no longer be a market for the supply of illegal abortions, and your claim is that demand remains the same. But if available supply induced demand then we would see exactly what we see here – a surge that then continues to grow. This is exactly the point the Levitt and Donohue make – the trend lines look like what we see when any illegal thing becomes legal.
3 – The claim that “The mere availability of legalized abortion does not drive more abortion” is so extreme that I find it hard to believe anyone seriously thinks this. As I said in the post, “The idea that the legality or illegality of abortion would have no bearing on the abortion rate is an idea that can’t pass even cursory logical scrutiny. It requires believing that no pregnant woman factors the legality or risk of abortion into her calculation of whether or not to have an abortion. If that were true, abortion would hardly be a hot-button political issue, since abortion laws would (in this universe) have no bearing on abortions.”
4 – Induced demand, for those not familiar with the concept, is the idea that the mere availability of a thing can cause demand (especially when it’s marketed well). We see this in some obvious instances – there wasn’t a major market for mouthwash until the Listerine Company drummed up fears of bad breath, nobody needed an iPhone X until Apple created and promoted it, etc. There’s no reason to believe that abortion is magically immune from induced demand, or the impact of legalization on demand.
When abortion was illegal, it was literally unthinkable for a certain portion of the population – they either didn’t know where to procure an illegal abortion, or were afraid of them, etc. So they didn’t even seriously contemplate abortion, and simply carried the baby to term. Once abortion is legal, is billed as safe, and can be advertised, it’s an option in a way that it wasn’t before. Plus, legalization radically decreases the price of abortion, making it a more attractive option than pregnancy and childbirth.
C. You say, “With respect to adoption, I don’t think you are understanding the numbers quoted correctly. I haven’t been to find Smolley 1993 online, so I might be wrong. The drop from 9% to 4% does not directly reflect increased abortions by unmarried women.”
1 – The Stolley data on adoption is here.
2 – If you see the chart on the bottom of p. 28 of her report, you’ll see a bell curve that peaks and then drops precipitously upon the legalization of abortion. That’s looking at the total number of adoptions. In terms of adoption rate, figure 4 on p. 33 is clear. For white women, there’s a relative decline of more than 60% in the premarital birth adoption rate from before Roe (1952-1972, 19.3%) to after (1973-1981, 7.6%). For African-American women, for whom there were already fewer adoptions, the decline is even steeper: an 87% relative drop from before (1.5%) to after (0.2%).
3 – You’re right that the drop does not directly reflect increased abortions, if you mean that legalized abortion is the only reason for the drop. Stolley argues, and I agree, that abortion legalization is probably not a sufficient explanation, but that the sexual revolution also meant that there was less of a stigma with being a single mother in the 1970s than in the 50s and 60s. So even a woman who would have kept the baby either was now more willing to directly parent the baby, instead of placing it for adoption.
4 – There’s an additional wrinkle in the complicated relationship between legalized abortion and out-of-wedlock births. Richard Stith has documented how “shotgun weddings” plummeted after Roe, arguing (persuasively, I think) that there was a general sense before Roe that an unplanned and out-of-wedlock pregnancy was both sexual partner’s responsibility, and that legalized abortion helped to facilitate a shift that abortion was “her choice, her problem” – that a woman who didn’t have an abortion was viewed as unilaterally “choosing” to be pregnant. Stith marshals a good deal of evidence for this shift in mindset, but that result would also be a complicating factor in understanding the relationship between abortion rates and unwed birth adoption rates. Some of the out-of-wedlock births post-Roe would likely have been in-wedlock births pre-Roe.
5 – Your economic arguments don’t make sense to me. It sounds like, on the one hand, you argue that the abortion rate went up in the 1970s because the economy was bad, but on the other hand, that the adoption rate went down during that exact same time period because the economy was good. Which is it?
6 – At the very least, it’s at least highly suggestive that after Roe we find the adoption rate plummeting. Out-of-wedlock pregnancies go up at the same time that the adoption rate goes down, and a bunch of kids who we would therefore expect to see aren’t there when we look for them in the data. Something happened to them, and the most convincing explanation is that they were aborted.
Finally, regarding your last paragraph, you were right about my typo, and right that that sentence was confusing and potentially misleading (although not intentionally “sneaky”). I was trying to summarize the annualized data, and (if memory serves) referring to data that I actually ended up cutting for space reasons from the post. In any case, I can see how it wasn’t clear, so I’ve changed that section to read:
“Now, this suggests two things. First, there’s an obvious relationship between the legality of abortion and the rate of abortion. Legalized abortion dramatically increases the likelihood of abortion. Second, the relationship between legality and abortion rate is complicated by the various states’ laws.”
So, thank you for catching that!
I.X.,
Joe
The church that wants to be morally consistent will say to those seeking abortion, “Come to us and we will help you through this financially and physically, and if you want to give up your child, we will find a loving family who will adopt him or her.”
It’s not like the established churches don’t a little money they could devote to ransoming the unborn.