Who’s driving high abortion rates? It’s the religious right

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Abortion

Who’s driving high abortion rates? It’s the religious right
George Monbiot


From Northern Ireland to the US, conservatives stifle measures that reduce the killing of foetuses

Anti-abortion protesters in Belfast: ‘Laws restricting abortion tend to be most prevalent where contraception and comprehensive sex education are hard to obtain.’ Photograph: Alamy
@GeorgeMonbiot



Here is the fact that everyone debating abortion should know: there is no association between its legality and its incidence. In other words, banning abortion does not stop the practice; it merely makes it more dangerous. The abortion debate is presented as a conflict between the rights of foetuses and the rights of women. Enhance one, both sides sometimes appear to agree, and you suppress the other. But once you grasp the fact that legalising women’s reproductive rights does not raise the incidence of abortions, only one issue remains to be debated: should they be legal and safe or illegal and dangerous? Hmm … tough question.

There might be no causal relationship between reproductive choice and the incidence of abortion, but there is a strong correlation: an inverse one. As the Lancet’s most recent survey of global rates and trends notes: “The abortion rate was lower ... where more women live under liberal abortion laws.” Why? Because laws restricting abortion tend to be most prevalent where contraception and comprehensive sex education are hard to obtain, and when sex and childbirth outside marriage are anathematised.

Young people have sex, whatever their elders say – they always have, and always will. Those with the least information and the least access to birth control are the most likely to suffer unintended pregnancies. And what greater incentive could there be for terminating a pregnancy than a culture in which reproduction out of wedlock is a mortal sin?
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How many more centuries of misery, mutilation and mortality are required before we understand that women – young or middle aged, within marriage or without – who do not want a child may go to almost any lengths to terminate an unwanted pregnancy? In the absence of legal, safe procedures, such sophisticated surgical instruments as wire coat hangers, knitting needles, bleach and turpentine will be deployed instead. How many more poisonings, punctured guts and burst wombs are required before we recognise that prohibition and moral suasion will not trounce women’s need to own their own lives?

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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/13/whos-driving-high-abortion-rates-religious-right

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