Yeah....because all the chicks and dicks out there getting knocked up and having abortions can't afford a couple of bucks for condoms when they get drunk and fuck.

Give me a break.

The real problem is with abortion is Planned Parenthood targeting minorities for abortion...do your research.

<tag> Your it. Go!

American schools in conservative dreams and in some places reality is for only abstinence to be taught. If you don't teach about contraceptives...and accuse them of causing diseases...how would they learn?

Well done Krellin, you made some ascertians and then imagined that your research was better than mine.

Feel free to pretend you actually know what you're talking about and keep talking. I'll just mute you again, because it is easier than listening to you.

I care a lot about your opinion; but your mind is not open enough to engage in a conversation. So until that changes i will ignore your attempted trollong.

"Feel free to pretend you actually know what you're talking about and keep talking. I'll just mute you again, because it is easier than listening to you.

I care a lot about your opinion; but your mind is not open enough to engage in a conversation. So until that changes i will ignore your attempted trollong. "

Ditto, Sir Super-Troll.

You are apparently *stupid* enough to believe that jackasses that can afford a couple for 40 ouncers can't buy a fucking condom...And therefore believe that if the government hands out birth control for free they will **suddenly** become responsible.

Jackass...it's the god damned WELFARE CHECK that keep's 'em pumping out kids. There is no financial burden to having kids, becuse for every birth, you get a bigger check...

Mock me if you want...and yet, I have distant relatives who LIVE THIS LIFE.

Bury your head in the sand and pretend low lifes aren't low lifes. Keep paying taxes to support the *stupid* and (apparently) highly fertile lower-class assholes.

@orthaic...you don't care about my opinion. You care about YOUR opinion. THAT is why you mute opposition, you damned coward. You don't attempt to answer legitimate arguments that refute your stance...you just belittle them and then, like a bitch, mute the poster.

Fuck off....grow a pair of balls, man.

Nope can't see anything but the three responces made by me and one by tantris. I know There are more because of the count... But they're probably not worth reading.

"Considering that abortions rates do not go down when abortion is banned"

This is a really stupid claim, and it's hard to respect the political intelligence of anybody who takes it seriously (even, yes, the New York Times).

The study cited in the article you linked is based on patently terrible statistical reasoning. You know some science, so I won't insult you by explaining why. But let's just look at abortion in the United States pre- and post- Roe, shall we?

According to Planned Parenthood ( www.plannedparenthood.org/files/PPFA/​med_​social_​benefits_​2009-11.pdf ), there were 200k to 1.2 million abortions in the 50s and 60s. Let's say it was 2 million to be safe.

That's 1 million per decade. Over 40 years, it would be 4 million. Of course, the population in 1950 was (slightly) less than half of what it is today. So being very generous, we'll more than double that number again and assume there would have been 10 million abortions by 2012.

How many abortions have there actually been since 1973? 50 million, according to CDC. That's a 500% increase over the (generous) projected pre-legalization rate.

Well, lo and behold. Just like elementary economic and legal theory predicts, consumption of abortion went way up once it became legal and access became dramatically easier. Who knew.

"Well done Krellin, you made some ascertians and then imagined that your research was better than mine."

For krellin to imagine that his research was better, he would first have to imagine that he had research at all.

@semck83:
The argument you are making is pretty bad. First off, there has been a doubling in population over that same time period. We have moved from a very controlled/very traditional/very religious society in the 1950's, to one that is less so now. If a woman got pregnant at that time, abortion was not done often and generally the woman just had to get married. The entire society has changed. The population has changed in huge ways.

And, beyond that...
"Estimates of the annual number of illegal abortions in the 1950s and 1960s range from 200,000 to 1.2 million (Cates et al., 2003; Rock & Jones, 2003; Tietze & Henshaw, 1986)."

So, you were off by a factor of 20. The numbers are per year. So, there were somewhere between 2,000,000 and 12,000,000 illegal abortions performed in the decade from 1950-1959.

Tantris,

I did of course take account of the population doubling (see my post), but you're right I missed the "annual," which is indeed a rather huge difference. Mea culpa there. Nonetheless, see the discussion here for evidence that abortion did indeed rise substantially after Roe.

http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/DonohueLevittTheImpactOfLegalized2001.pdf

My mistake, though embarrassing, still does not alter my main prior point: the article cited is terrible statistics, worth nothing. There are far too many cultural, legal, social, and other differences among the nations in question for any direct comparison of abortion statistics, ignoring other factors, to be worth anything at all.

@semck83:
Maybe...though I am not accepting that argument...but, it doesn't prove your side. I mean, take out the population changes...and, it is on the high side of the esimates, but 48,000,000 over 4 decades is very reasonable based on that information. This is without the changes in society and without the doubling in population. You put those in place, and...well, it seems like it may be used approximately the same, or maybe less. What will happen when we have easily available prescription contraceptives?

Tantris,

Sorry, but you pretty well have to accept the argument. Comparing vastly different societies without controlling for other variables carefully leads to meaningless statistics. That's not a controversial point.

Indeed, you show some cognizance of it when pointing out the cultural difference among times, and the difficulties that presents.

This is sufficient to establish that the article linked and the conclusions it drew were unwarranted. My attempted additional point was just gravy. So while I haven't "established my side" in the sense that I haven't shown that abortion did rise sharply, I have shown that the opposite conclusion is presently unwarranted.

Second -- I was generous at first, but on the flip side, nothing justifies your unquestioningly usng the highest numbers available. At 200,000, my point would remain true without correction, even taking population into account. At 1.2 million, yes, it wouldn't. The truth probably lies between.

I can't currently access any of the papers cited by PP. I also can't access this paper right now, which is cited by Donohue and Levitt, but it gives another analysis. (See the abstract).

http://ideas.repec.org/p/har/wpaper/9910.html

Most telling, perhaps, is the fact that annual abortions were up over 30% from even the most ambitious pre-Roe estimates within a handful of years.( http://www.mccl.org/us-abortion-stats.html ). This point is the stronger because those years were the least subject to the societal change that you fairly point out.

As for contraceptives: no doubt their easy accessibility cuts down on abortion. (This is only one of the reasons why comparing different countries' abortion rates unthinkingly is absurd: that access is much easier in some than in others). My gripe is with the silly claim that legalizing abortion does not increase the practice. Indeed, I think it highly questionable which of the two would affect the numbers more. So far in this discussion, I haven't seen either of us point to numbers even close to precise enough to discuss that intelligently.

@smeck "Well, lo and behold. Just like elementary economic
and legal theory predicts, consumption of abortion
went way up once it became legal and access
became dramatically easier. Who knew."

Ok, ignorijg the firgures - only because i don't have any and yours seems to be as questionable as anyone else's.

The basic economic theories you refer to are rational economic theory and assume the humans do not take emotions into account when making purchases. This has to been shown to be wrong even in the case where something as simple as basic food stuffs are concerned.

In general, i think behavioural economics is a better model, and in particular in this case.

I don't know about tue legal studies they may be equally flawed, the assumption there is that the law prevents abortion from happening. But if it does not then the legal case is wrong. Taking an example like prohibition, i suspect that the law had some effect on drinking rates in the US, but not the predicted legal one.

Now comparing countries today which are culturally different is as flawed as comparing cmthe US of the 50s and the US of the 00s, so in this case we have no data to work from. Our best estimate however is that woman make this tough decision, often for the rest of their children's welfare, and i would claim - without imagining i have figures to back it up - that supporting mothers increases child welfare, promotes life, and is the best thing you can do to improve (ie reduce) abortion rates; whether that means access to education or to contraception or to health care or to economic stability.

All four might have the greatest impact. Another cultural change you might attempt would be to promot adoption as a standard for most children; there was a standard for children at around the age of 7 to he adopted by another family in the norse middle ages (if my primary school history is anything to go by) there is no reason to assume that adopted parents shouldn't provide a better child raising if properly vetted. Career family raising groups could become standard in most communities. But this is an rather extreme cultural change compared to anything else suggested.

orathaic,

I agree that rational economics is at best an approximation, although it becomes a pretty good one in extreme cases. (And I'd argue that criminalization of abortion represents an extreme price hike, in the sense that clinics and hospitals will no longer do it, it will be harder to come by, by all accounts medically riskier, and beset by the risk of criminal sanctions). Indeed, I think the critiques you mention aren't completely on-point: emotions can play just fine into rational economic theory, in the sense they set the basic prices and desires involved. But yes, it's not a perfect theory, and psychology can tell us something about how to correct it at the margins.

Leaving that aside, the rest of your post seems to be saying "We don't know, and these various things probably have an impact." So it seems we're in agreement after all. I was just taking issue with your statement that criminilization had no effect, not that the other items do have one.

@smeck '(And I'd argue that
criminalization of abortion represents an extreme
price hike, in the sense that clinics and hospitals
will no longer do it, it will be harder to come by, by all accounts medically riskier, and beset by the risk
of criminal sanctions' - this makes sense, but i woupd argue that rational economics like this makes most sense when emotions are not at stake, that simple things like choosing between two otherwise identical shirts the rational human will choose the cheaper.

It is when things become complicated, with multiple variables, that emotions come into play. Humans are bad at decisions which require multiple variables to be compared; so three tshirts which have different prices, are made from different materials, are different colours... It becomes easier if one is much cheaper, or the colour of one is clearly much nicer, but otherwise only emotions/intuition can help us choose, so something as simple as which one we saw first might be tue deciding factor...

A similar difficulty is with variables regarding predicting the future, it is harder to guage how big of a risk doing or not doing something will be. Perspective adds a distortion to value, there are some great cognitive illusion here. I would argue that not knowing future costs, nor possi le effects on other children and several other factors such as possible complications in pregnancy, mean this is an emotional decision not a rational one. And once made the 'cost' will be largely irrelivant.

I particularily think this is a very difficult choice for most women to make; thus i would put forward the proposal that rational economic theory specifically fails to model the behaviour we see - though i will not propose a test to prove this.

As for my claims that we don't know. I am leaving out figures specifically because i can't prove them. There are reasonable doubts, and ethical problems with experimenting on something like a country sized group. Though that doesn't mean we should simply ignore the anecdotal 'natural' experiments.

The question remains IF legalisation/prohibition has little or neglibile effect and empowering women to control their reproduction actually definitely reduces the abortion rate, then why do the standard pro-life lobby* oppose education, acces to contraception, government funded childcare and any other pro-woman or pro-mother policies?

And even if prohibition would have a sizable effect, why not combine it with these other pro-woman policies?

The economic arguements don't wash with me; i don't believe you can make a sincere pro-life argument and then deny basic provision of health care, food and shelther to children.

However the feminist narrative does make sense - though their are pro-life feminists, i can clearly see the pro-woman/anti-woman dicothemy (while i acknowledge that most dicothemies are simplifications, this one makes sense - there are likely many shades of grey) So is the typical american pro-life lobby (as opposed to individual pro-lifers who have had their stance incorporated into the republican party platform, at the cost of any other views they might have) is this group fundamentally anti-woman WHILE ignoring the pro-woman strategies which would definitely help life?

Is this a fault of the simple Red-Blue dicothemy?

It is a pity nobody has replied. 18 replies and no content!

I also struggle to understand the arguments against increasing access to contraception. It increases the freedom enjoyed by women and reduces abortion. Surely conservatives support more freedom and less abortion.

@krellin, re: your point about condoms. Hormonal contraceptives are much more effective than condoms at preventing pregancies. Condoms are 97% effective with perfect use, but this quickly falls to be between 80% and 90% with typical use - and if you look up what 'perfect use' entails, you'll quickly see that there are around 10 things you're supposed to do with condoms that most users probably do not do. Hormonal contraceptives are 99% effective with perfect use, and perfect use of hormonal contraceptives is much easier than perfect use of barrier methods.

And even then - using condoms perfectly is 97% effective, but that's not exactly 100% effective. Many people use multiple methods of contraception for that reason, which is definitely to be encouraged.