British Woman Has Four Abortions in Three Years, Including Late-Term

Not even that, but even birth control is better than aborting a 22-week old fetus?!!

What do you mean "even"? Obviously it's better -- there is nothing wrong with using birth control. It's true that in rare cases (and maybe 1 in 1,000 couples a year will have this happen) an egg can fertilize and fail to implant in the uterus due to birth control. I see this as a far preferable outcome to a first-trimester abortion (or heaven forbid a late-term one). Are we dealing with life at that point? Yes. But it's a trade-off. In this case, the pill is acting like the morning-after pill, and the morning-after pill is undoubtedly preferable to a first-trimester abortion, in my opinion. RU 486, in contrast to the morning after pill, works AFTER implantation and development has begun, and is unquestionably an abortofacient.

There are plenty of places to get free condoms in most cities. You can have imperfect use with birth control methods, but condom breakage is a biggie. So is forgetting to use it (obviously), but breakage is a big deal. The pill and the shot and the patch (internal methods) are much more effective at preventing pregnancy than condoms. Obviously using both is preferred, but if a couple is only willing to use one, the hormones are the better choice.

What’s the cheaper option? That’s what I mean by “even”. I would assume a great deal of birth control use would be cheaper for the woman to use than getting repeated abortions? Let’s say a woman used birth control for those three years instead of getting four abortions, which do you believe would cost less? It would appear to me that birth control would be cheaper, but I could be wrong.

Of course it would be cheaper. Kroger offers generic birth control pills for $9 a month. I’m sure other chains do as well. That’s around $100 a year. First trimester abortions run between $500 and $1000 a year, but leaving cost aside, it’s substantially more traumatic for people to have an abortion than to take a birth control pill. If you’re talking about government funding, it could be provided to every woman of child-bearing age in the country who wants it for less than 10 billion a year. Access is not the issue. Caring enough to take it is.

Repeat abortions have long been a problem in England, where thousands of women have had three or more.

Repeat abortions are also a problem in the US--the last time I saw a statistic on it (several years ago), about 60% of abortions were repeats. The problem is that they are "free"--paid for out of taxes rather than out of pocket. If it were up to me, any abortion paid by anyone other than the mother of the baby being terminated would be accompanied by an ovarectomy. I'd also make sure the mother gets to see the post-abortion baby.

Cutler resorted to using abortion as a form of birth control even though she was on the pill each of the four times in which she became pregnant.

Sorry, but for the pill to be effective, it actually has to be taken. It sounds more like she's claiming the pill failed because there is still a stigma associated with using abortion as a primary form of birth control (even though countless women do so).

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