PRO-CHOICE IS PRO-ABORTION

I'm moving this discussion out of my e-mail and into this blog. I've gotten a number of replies to this already (which is what prompted my creating a blog in the first place). This e-mail came from a friend and I am posting it here because she sent it out to several folks, meaning she wanted as many people as possible to read it. I replied to her personally, then shared my reply with my friends. What I will do is post the original e-mail, post my reply to the original e-mail, and then post the comments of one other friend who updated the statistics for me. The lady who updated the statistics for me gave me permission to pass this on, but I will keep her name anonymous until she feels like coming on herself and passing another comment, if she would like. Anyone else who would like to comment, please feel free to do so. Many thanks!

ORIGINAL E-MAIL

With all due respect, please consider the facts below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xkT_W5l9-k&feature=related

Number of abortions per year: 1.37 Million (1996)

Number of abortions per day: Approximately 3,700

Who's having abortions (age)?
52% of women obtaining abortions in the U.S. are younger than 25: Women aged 20-24 obtain 32% of all abortions; Teenagers obtain 20% and girls under 15 account for 1.2%.

Who's having abortions (race)?
While white women obtain 60% of all abortions, their abortion rate is well below that of minority women. Black women are more than 3 times as likely as white women to have an abortion, and Hispanic women are roughly 2 times as likely.

Who's having abortions (marital status)?
64.4% of all abortions are performed on never-married women; Married women account for 18.4% of all abortions and divorced women obtain 9.4%.

Who's having abortions (income)?
Women with family incomes less than $15,000 obtain 28.7% of all abortions; Women with family incomes between $15,000 and $29,999 obtain 19.5%; Women with family incomes between $30,000 and $59,999 obtain 38.0%; Women with family incomes over $60,000 obtain 13.8%.

Why women have abortions
1% of all abortions occur because of rape or incest; 6% of abortions occur because of potential health problems regarding either the mother or child, and 93% of all abortions occur for social reasons (i.e. the child is unwanted or inconvenient).

At what gestational ages are abortions performed:
52% of all abortions occur before the 9th week of pregnancy, 25% happen between the 9th & 10th week, 12% happen between the 11th and 12th week, 6% happen between the 13th & 15th week, 4% happen between the 16th & 20th week, and 1% of all abortions (16,450/yr.) happen after the 20th week of pregnancy.

Likelihood of abortion:
An estimated 43% of all women will have at least 1 abortion by the time they are 45 years old. 47% of all abortions are performed on women who have had at least one previous abortion.

Abortion coverage:
48% of all abortion facilities provide services after the 12th week of pregnancy. 9 in 10 managed care plans routinely cover abortion or provide limited coverage. About 14% of all abortions in the United States are paid for with public funds, virtually all of which are state funds. 16 states (CA, CT, HI, ED, IL, MA , MD, MD, MN, MT, NJ, NM, NY, OR, VT, WA and WV) pay for abortions for some poor women.

MY RESPONSE

Hey *****,

These are very interesting statistics. Are there more recent ones? There is a very strong correlation between family income and rate of abortion, so obviously poverty is a strong factor BUT not the only one.

Another thing to ask is what is the religion of the women having abortions? That isn't addressed in this poll (or any others I've seen either). In NYC, where the hispanic and black population is very high (I don't know the numbers), ALL of the hispanic people that I have ever met are Catholic. Black people tend to lean towards protestant, well actually...American black people (folks who trace back to slavery times) tend to be protestant...Black folks that are from the Caribbean tend to be Catholic. But at any rate, I would bet a good amount of money that most of these people are church going folk. If this is true, then priests and preachers are not doing enough from the pulpit, or through special church programs, to give these girls (and their families) the moral guidance to abstain from sex, find birth control, or have adoption as an alternative to abortion.

Again, I am an advocate for more proactive methods of reaching out to people to give them the guidance they need to make the right moral choices, instead of trying to regulate morality through the U.S. Constitution (where it doesn't belong). If the Conservative perspective is to keep government out of our lives...that has to include our moral lives, as well as our economic lives. If you let politicians tackle poverty (which is half the problem here) and the churches stay out of politics and tend to the moral keep of their flock, then we probably would have made alot of headway towards changing the grip abortion has on our young people. Divide and conquer mentality. By supporting politicians who are anti-lower and middle classes (anti-poverty), but pro-life...we are cutting off our noses to spite our face. The place for moral guidance is in the home and in the churches, not in our government.

As I mentioned to you before...free will is the divine gift God gave me at my conception. It is my responsibility to decide my own moral path (with help from my church). In my perception, it is against God's will to have the government regulate my moral choices. A faith untested is not worth having. Conservatives can't have it both ways..you can't deregulate the government's role in business and economics, but then regulate our moral lives.

So, I disagree with the subject line in this e-mail....pro-choice does not equate to pro-abortion. Pro-choice indicates that a person is using the divine gift of free will, which no other person, politician, priest, whoever has the right to take away. It is my choice to have an abortion or not, and I will suffer the consequences of my actions come judgement day. As such, I am pro-choice, however, that does not translate into pro-abortion.

My two cents.
-M

E-MAIL WITH UPDATED STATISTICS

As an abortion provider myself, I can tell you that some of these statistics are woefully out of date (in particular the one about 48% of abortion facilities providing services after 12wks in the pregnancy). Since the time that these statistics were put out, the number of 2nd trimester abortion providers has dropped rapidly due both to the "graying" of providers and the regulatory difficulty of having a facility that provides these types of procedures. For instance, in the state where I practice (NJ) there are only 2 providers who do terminations past 12 wks (you need to be a licensed ambulatory surgery center in order to provide these procedures)-- NJ is one of the most liberal states when it comes to abortion law (only NY and CA have more liberal laws than us). For late 2nd tri procedures (the ones that fall into the 1 -2 % category)-- there are only 6 providers in the country that regularly do procedures (in NY, CA, KS, NE, NJ)-- since these procedures are most often performed on patients diagnosed with severe fetal abnormalities, the very young (15 and younger) or (relatively speaking) older women (40+) , it means that these women and their partners often need to travel great distances to receive care (these are not actual statistics-- this is just from experience in my office over the past 5 years).

Only 10% of all medical schools provide training in abortion care and when they do, it's generally only 1st trimester abortion care, which means that if one of our patients who has travelled to us from out of state or from a great distance can't access emergency care if she needs it b/c most docs aren't trained to handle emergencies of this nature.

The majority of the patients that I see describe themselves as people of faith (and I have seen, literally every religion from catholic, jewish, christian, buddhist, muslim and evangelical (and many others) represented in my office). Statistically (and you can check this through both the CDC and the Alan Guttmacher Inst-- AGI actually collects the most comprehensive statistics in the country as almost all abortion providers in the country hand over demographic information to them annually) more catholic women have abortion than women of any other organized religion.

56% of women who choose an abortion are already parents, and most choose to have a termination out of because they are considering the welfare of the children that they have already and their ability to provide for them.

Margaret is absolutely right in that the ability to make private medical decisions and decisions about family life should not be regulated by the government-- and being pro-choice most certainly does not translate into being pro-abortion. Ever patient who walks in our door receives birth control counseling and birth control if she wants it or is medically a candidate for it. But the reality is, even with 100% perfect birth control use, no method of birth control is 100% (even tubal sterilization has a 1% failure rate). The need for abortion will always be there and until we, as a society, create a better environment for motherhood (more supportive both socially and economically), a better system for women who would prefer to choose adoption and better education and access to birth control, we will not see abortion numbers decline.

***

Abortion provider and member of the board of the Abortion Care Network and the National Coalition of Abortion Providers.