So here it is the weekend of the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and a little earlier in the week brought an Associated Press news story that many of you might have missed given that it was buried under internet blackouts and Republican candidates slap fighting each other like something out of a three Stooges movie. What the story said didn’t surprise me one bit but would probably shock anyone who’s ever screamed “Abortion is murder!!!” at a college campus. It turns out that abortion rates are actually much HIGHER in countries and areas that don’t allow them at all.
Just so there’s no confusion (and because you often have to break matters of abortion down to an idiot’s level when talking to the “pro-life” crowd): Even though an area would have abortions listed as illegal, it had no effect on people getting them. None. In fact, the areas where abortion was strictly forbidden under the law had more of them than areas where they were easy and legal to obtain.
Now of course journalists, researchers, academics, and scientists never like making a conclusion that could upset the red state people that don’t value their findings anyway, so they bent themselves into a pretzel trying to “explain” these findings. They said that countries that allowed abortions probably also had an easier time locating birth control (sure, probably). That they viewed women as in control of their own bodies and thus women were more empowered to make sure the sex they were having was protected (alright, I can buy it). That people in pro-choice countries were just generally more educated about sex and took precautions to avoid unwanted pregnancies (I can even buy that too).
However, the other conclusion is unavoidable only if you’re desperately trying to avoid it: people do NOT care if abortion is illegal if they do NOT want to be parents. You can NOT force a woman to have a child she does NOT want. If you try to do this, the law is unenforceable and only makes her likelihood of dying in the abortion procedure go up twenty fold.
Are you hearing me pro-lifers? You will save NO fetuses but you WILL kill more mothers…more mothers who will probably be moms and giving birth later on but just aren’t ready at 19 years old. So once again we are faced with more evidence that making abortion illegal will have no effect on it, will only put more good Americans into prison (where we already have the world’s highest incarceration rate), and that if you really want abortions to go down the best tool is sex education in birth control, easy access to birth control, and cutting down the number of unwanted pregnancies BEFORE they’re pregnancies.