This week we have a guest post from Pro-life speaker, And Then There Were None Founder, and Guiding Star board member, Abby Johnson.
Every time I post something on my Facebook about abortion, there will inevitably be someone who makes a comment that says something like this, “Don’t women know how to use birth control these days? What is wrong with them? With so many birth control options these days, no one should ever have an abortion.”
I supposed that is a really common misconception…that birth control reduces the abortion rate. But is that true? Look at this quote from Ann Furedi, the former director of British Pregnancy Advisory Service, Britain’s largest abortion provider:
Often, arguments for increased access to contraception and for new contraceptive technologies are built on the assumption that these developments will bring down the abortion rate. The anti-choice movement counter that this does not seem to be the case in practice. Arguably they are right. Access to effective contraception creates an expectation that women can control their fertility and plan their families. Given that expectation, women may be less willing to compromise their plans for the future. In the past, many women reluctantly accepted that an unplanned pregnancy would lead to maternity. Unwanted pregnancies were dutifully, if resentfully, carried to term. In days when sex was expected to carry the risk of pregnancy, an unwanted child was a chance a woman took. Today, we expect sex to be free from that risk and unplanned maternity is not a price we are prepared to pay.
It is clear that women cannot manage their fertility by means of contraception alone.
Contraception lets couples down. A recent survey of more than 2000 women requesting abortions at clinics run by BPAS, Britain’s largest abortion provider, found that almost 60% claim to have been using contraception at the time they became pregnant. Nearly 20% said that they were on the pill. Such findings are comparable to several other smaller studies published during the last decade… It is clear that contraceptives let couples down… The simple truth is that the tens of thousands of women who seek abortion each year are not ignorant of contraception. Rather they have tried to use it, indeed they may have used it, and become pregnant regardless.
Here’s a statistic from the Guttmacher Institute, Planned Parenthood’s research arm. This stat makes Planned Parenthood look terrible, so I can’t imagine that this is not accurate. They have absolutely nothing to gain by putting this out there: “More than half of women obtaining abortions in 2000 (54%) had been using a contraceptive method during the month they became pregnant.”
How is it that abortion supporters understand that birth control does not reduce abortion, yet pro-lifers don’t? Birth control was created so that we could separate sex from procreation. How do we not get that, pro-lifers? When you separate the act of sex from babies, of course abortions occur.
In a book written by Petchesky, she comments on the research of demographer and feminist Susan Scrimshaw who linked rising abortions to wide acceptance of the birth-control pill. Let’s look at a quote from Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, famous abortion-supporting feminist: “Until a ‘perfect’ method of contraception is developed, which will probably never happen, periods of heightened consciousness and extended practice of birth control will inevitably mean a rise in abortions.”
But Scrimshaw reminds us that the pill, as a more effective method of reversible contraception than women had ever known, contributed to a climate of expectations that women need not and should not have to fear an unwanted pregnancy. Having a baby when you didn’t want to became “unthinkable” for new generations of women, or for older generations in new stages in their lives. This change of consciousness undoubtedly contributed to the rising abortions, for women who did not use the pill as well as those who did.
I’m not saying that you should only have sex when you are fertile. But to be perfectly honest, you should only have sex when you are open to life. Because believe it or not, babies are many times a result of sex. And that’s the way it was intended to be.
Look at these studies and articles, all showing that as the contraception rate increases, the abortion rate increases.
– Habit Persistence and Teen Sex: Could Increased Access to Contraception have Unintended Consequences for Teen Pregnancies?
– Adolescent sexual health in Sweden
– The False Promise of Contraception
– Greater Access To Contraception Does Not Reduce Abortions
Bottom line: Contraception does not reduce abortion. You may say, “Well, I’m on birth control for xyz health problem.” Okay. I wrote an article specifically for you. You can view that here.
The great news is that you don’t have to use birth control to space your children. Natural Family Planning works and is as effective, and sometimes more effective, than the birth control methods out there. Check out these websites for more information.
– Facts About Fertility
– I Use NFP
– Natural Womanhood
Read:
Part I: All the pro-life facts about contraception (that you probably don’t want to know)
Part II: Ladies: we deserve better than hormonal birth control
Part III: How my life changed forever after I got the Depo Provera birth control injection
This has been reposted with permission. The original post can be found here.
photo credit: Thailand: Over the counter BC via photopin
No. Nope. Not even close. These women were not using their birth control *correctly*. Just using it isn’t enough; you have to use it right. If you skip more than three birth control pills in a month, you are far more likely to get pregnant. 3 pills in 28 days. That’s not a large margin of error. But statistics show that with consistent, proper use, only 2 to 3 percent of women using the pill will get pregnant. And of those 2 to 3 percent, many would not choose to have an abortion.
Birth control doesn’t increase abortions. Correlation does not equal causation. In fact, statistics point in the opposite direction: access to birth control DECREASES abortions. Furthermore, in states where “abstinence only” sex ed is taught in school, teens are having *more* abortions and there are *more* teenage mothers and they are contracting *more* STDs. If anything, abstinence-only sex ed which tells young people that birth control is bad is doing a lot more harm to them and to society than teaching them about birth control and encouraging people to use it.
Don’t cherry pick stats from Guttmacher. I’ve spent a good amount of time on that website myself, and you are ignoring a lot of other statistics which belie your arguments here.
I don’t understand being pro-life but also anti-birth control. You cannot reduce the abortion rate without birth control. It does not happen.
Hi Val. Yes, there are always two statistics for any form of birth control, the method or perfect-use effectiveness, and the typical-use effectiveness rate. Since the typical-use effectiveness rate is how people “typically” use the method, I think it’s very appropriate to include such statistics, since that is the effectiveness that we’re going to see in the real world, because not everyone remembers to take their pill every single day, or to take them at the same time every day. Also, even with a 2-3% failure rate, when we’re talking about millions of women on the pill, more than 25% for those women in the most fertile years of their reproductive life – girls/women in their teens and 20’s – we’re still talking about hundreds of thousands of unintended pregnancies, and that’s if everyone uses it perfectly, which doesn’t happen. Around 60 million US women are on the pill. If every single one used it perfectly, that’s over half a million pregnancies. Yet women are repeatedly told that if they use contraception, they don’t have to worry about pregnancy, and couples are stunned when pregnancy happens despite its use.
You say we cannot reduce the abortion rate without birth control. If you are talking about *artificial* birth control, I would have to disagree with you. When women’s natural bodies and functioning are looked at as flawed and in need of chemical manipulation or medical devices to “improve” us, there will never be respect for our function of creating new life either. I feel when women are respected in our most basic functioning and in our natural cycles, this will flow over into respecting women in other ways, including supporting women in education and in the workforce, and supporting women in our maternity. Women shouldn’t have to alter our systemic functioning in order to participate in the culture and in the workforce. When women are accepted as we are, for who we are, then there will be greater hope that our children will be too.
Also, I’d just like to comment that Natural Family Planning is one method of birth control that is promoted by the Chinese government. A study comparing two similar communities, showed that the community where there was a high percentage of couples using NFP had a decrease in abortion rate over a similar community where IUD-use was the prevalent form of bc, even though the abortion rates of the two had been statistically similar prior to the introduction of NFP. (Shao-Zhen Qian, “China Successfully Launching Billings Ovulation Method” World Organisation Ovulation Method Billings. 2002. http://www.scribd.com/doc/44154023/China-Successfully-Launching-Billings-Ovulation-Method#scribd)