The Alan Guttmacher Institute, research affiliate of Planned Parenthood, often announces that contraceptives have “prevented” so many thousands of pregnancies and abortions. But these are projections based on a flawed mathematical model, not genuine findings.
In 2006, when the Institute issued a report card ranking the 50 states by how aggressively they promote contraceptives, the embarrassing fact emerged that New York, California and other states receiving the highest grades also had some of the highest abortion rates in the country; some states ranked near the bottom for contraceptive services have the lowest abortion rates.
Studies from a variety of countries have shown that contraceptive programs do not reduce abortion rates. In fact, says one recent overview, “[m]ost studies that have been conducted during the past 20 years have indicated that improving access to contraception did not significantly increase contraceptive use or decrease teen pregnancy.”
Perhaps the most surprising finding is that programs promoting ECs do not reduce abortions. Yet when leading experts who favor EC programs recently summarized 23 studies gauging the effect of such programs, they had to admit that not one of the 23 found a reduction in unintended pregnancies or abortions.
Conclusion: What reduces abortions?
One clue lies in the Guttmacher data mentioned above. Abortions are lowest in “heartland” states with a more traditional culture of honoring marriage and discouraging premarital sex. New studies show that an increase in the number of teens nationwide who delay initiating sexual activity is responsible for a large part of the reduced abortion rate in recent years.
Second, these and other states place modest legal restraints on abortion, which have a well-documented and significant effect of reducing abortions.
Third, offering life-affirming services to pregnant women and their children, as proposed in federal bills like the “Pregnant Women Support Act” (H.R. 6145), could make a substantial impact on the number of abortions.
These strategies can reduce abortions without creating any moral or social problems, and could be the true common ground in the abortion debate. Will Congress seize this opportunity?
Richard Doerflinger
The full-length version of this article is posted at
http://www.usccb.org/prolife/programs/rlp/doerflinger.pdf
Please take a statistics course, it will do wonders for the both of us.
You can’t say anything about the California “study” because we don’t know how a control group would work. That number is only descriptive of California. For example, lets say a sports team won 10 games. Did that team have a good year? Well we don’t know because we are missing a bunch of other contextual factors. 10 victories is good for a football team, but a disaster for a baseball team.
But if we compare the US to other industrialized countries like France, England, Sweeden and Canada, countries with no shortage of contraception, have a teen pregnancy rate of about 1/3 of the US.