Increased Contraceptive Use Results in Increased Abortion Rates?
From 1997-2007 Spain increased contraceptive use rates from 50% to 80%. They doubled the abortion rate over the same time period.
(Dueñas, et. al., Contraception, January 2011 - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21134508)
What gives? Apparently, people expected their contraceptives to work and planned their lives around that expectation. Apparently, they forgot that small risks taken repeatedly over long periods of time result in very large cumulative risks. A contraceptive method with a 1% failure rate results in a 70% chance of getting pregnant over 10 years. Or maybe they just don't understand the statistics of contraceptive use and most people who do are wedded to a theory of sexual freedom that doesn't allow them to point out such facts?
(Ross, Family Planning Perspectives, Nov/Dec. 1998 - http://www.jstor.org/pss/2135382)
As I see it, what matters most in a country's abortion rate is the attitude toward unplanned pregnancies. Are they welcomed or at least accepted? Are they viewed as unacceptable hindrances to one's goals in life? For too many people, children are an unacceptable hindrance. Yet, they are under the illusion that they can control their fertility, even over long periods of time, (e.g., from college through the establishment of one's career and marriage). No wonder New Yorkers have an abortion rate of 39%.
When it comes right down to it, abortion is just backup birth control half the time. That is to say, half of all abortions happen to women who were using contraceptives in the month they got pregnant. For the vast majority of the other half of abortion cases, it is the only birth control used. Hardly any abortions are due to the "hard cases."
As the Supreme Court noted in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, "In some critical respects abortion is of the same character as the decision to use contraception." and "for two decades of economic and social developments, people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail."
So, when I hear "experts" talk about increasing contraception use rates in the name of decreasing abortion, I gotta wonder if they know what they are talking about. If they don't, why are they the only "experts" one hears about in the MSM? If they do know what they are talking about, why don't they give the full picture. It's just not that simple. As Spain has reminded us once more, depending on the environment, increased contraceptive use can have exactly the opposite effect.
