by The religious right purports to be deeply concerned about the high rates of abortion in the United States, but its most stalwart proponents have succeeded in implementing and maintaining policies that keep the abortion rate high.
I draw this lesson from discussions in Naomi Cahn and June Carbone’s wonderful new book, Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture. The book is primarily a study of the way in which different family forms have emerged in different parts of the country, and the political ramifications of the polarized value systems that result. But the data it contains reveals a deep incoherence in the American government’s family planning policies.
The most effective way to lower the abortion rate would be to increase the availability of contraceptives and information about contraception, especially to poor women. This is precisely what the federal government did in the 1970s, hoping to reduce out-of-wedlock births to poor women. But the Reagan administration cut contraception funding and shifted family-planning efforts toward adoption counseling and abstinence education, which were more acceptable to its conservative base. The consequence, of course, was very high levels of abortion.
Since then, there has been a toxic political equilibrium, in which the conservative right keeps contraceptive funding low. The left has not called them on the way that such policies increase the abortion rate, perhaps because proponents of family planning are reluctant to admit that abortions are a bad thing. But somebody needs to say it: the religious right is responsible for many abortions in America.
Cahn and Carbone observe that two different family systems, presupposing different norms, now exist in the United States. The older, more traditional model demands marriage before (or very soon after) sexual activity begins, identifies responsible parenthood with marriage rather than maturity or economic self-sufficiency, aims at socialization into traditional gender roles, and embraces authoritarian models of parenting. The appropriate response to unplanned pregnancy is the shotgun marriage. Same-sex marriage seems to flout this entire complex of values, elevating the happiness of adults over the well-being of children.
This model remains prevalent in much of the United States. Where it does, the Republican party has reliable support: the political affiliation of a state correlates well with the median age of first marriage. But where it prevails, divorce rates are the highest in the country, because early marriages are the most likely to fail. Teen pregnancy, high rates of sexually transmitted diseases, and single motherhood are frequent. The problem is that, although this ethic has considerable continuing power, it is in decay. Its enforcement mechanisms have weakened. Unhappy couples can no longer be forced to stay together, and teenagers can’t be prevented from having sex.
At the same time, a new sexual ethic has emerged and is now deeply entrenched in the blue states. This model, which Cahn and Carbone call the “new middle class ethic,” is tolerant of premarital sexuality so long as contraception is carefully used, with abortion as the responsible fallback. It calls for postponing marriage and parenthood until the completion of higher education, and aims at more egalitarian gender roles within marriage. It produces lower rates of divorce and teenaged motherhood, but also falling fertility and more people living alone.
The red-state, conservative ethic has always been suspicious of sex education. Evangelical Christians, who are the most militant proponents of the red-state ethic, are three times as likely as non-evangelicals to believe that sex education should not be taught in schools. (108; all page references are to Cahn and Carbone’s book.) Government support for contraception, especially contraception provided to teenage girls without their parents’ knowledge or consent is anathema. Such girls should not be having sex at all. Contraceptive information is likely to encourage them to flout moral norms with impunity. Unwanted pregnancy is unfortunate but valuable as a deterrent to premarital sex.
It was this ethic that produced the move to abstinence-only sex education, which is now the predominant approach in a third of American schools. (110) But there is no evidence that such education makes abstinence until marriage more likely (96% of Americans have sex before they marry, see 175), or produces a decline in teen or nonmarital births, and some evidence that it produces an increase in both, because it is more likely that a girl will not know how to contracept at the time of her first sexual experience. (3, 111) The effect is particularly pronounced with respect to black and Latina girls, who are disproportionately exposed to abstinence-only education. Two-thirds of white women, but fewer than half of black women, have received instruction about contraception before their first sexual encounter. (111)
It is no accident, then, that the United States has the highest rate of unplanned teen pregnancies in the industrialized world. (8) Three in ten teenaged girls become pregnant before they turn 20, and four-fifths of these pregnancies are unplanned. (91) In 2006, half of all pregnancies were unplanned, and these were concentrated below the poverty line. (90) The rate of unintended pregnancy is 69% for African-American women, 54% for Latinas, and only 40% for white women. (173)
Here is where abortion comes in. Among African-Americans, 43% of conceptions end in abortion, compared with 25% of Latinas and 18% of whites. It should be no surprise that the rate of abortion correlates heavily with the rate of unplanned pregnancy. African-American teen births dropped in the 1990s, but this was true in large part because abortion rates, which fell for white teens, remained higher for minority teens (172).
If you want to lower the abortion rate, then, the most obvious way to do it is to provide better information about contraception to the women who now are experiencing high rates of unintended pregnancy, in schools and also by providing comprehensive sex education to women over 18 (173).
The Republican leadership, however, has opposed any such funding. Most recently, they succeeded in pressuring Obama to strip out expanded funding for family-planning services from the stimulus bill. House Minority Leader John Boehner emphasized that any such funding would benefit Planned Parenthood, which delivers abortion services. He did not mention that such funding would lower the rate of abortions.
Republicans worry that sex education will lead to more premarital sex. There’s not much evidence that this is true of any particular sex ed program. The major effect of such programs is to prevent sex that was going to happen anyway from leading to pregnancy and disease. (It is true that the birth control pill helped bring about the sexual revolution of the 1960s, but it’s too late to reverse that.) But even if keeping girls ignorant would reduce the rate of premarital sex to some extent, how many abortions would be too high a price to pay for that?
The argument I’ve just been making is, of course, a classic blue-state argument. I’m not really the one who can make it effectively to pro-lifers, since I’m a strong supporter of abortion rights: I still endorse the much-reviled argument that such rights are required by the Thirteenth Amendment.
But somebody on the religious right ought to be reflecting on the now-obvious fact that the policies that they have been supporting are directly responsible for millions of abortions. If leadership is now going to be exercised in order to reduce the abortion rate, it will have to come from them. Opposing contraceptive education is politically popular in the red states. But how can a politician who sincerely believes that abortion is the killing of a person, and who is aware of the data I’ve just described, ethically take advantage of this opportunity?
Reading this one would suppose that the data shows a decline in abortion rates during the 1970s, what with all the federal money flowing to contraceptive funding. But the data doesn’t show that–to the contrary.
Koppelman is right that rates of unplanned pregnancy correlates to the rate of unplanned pregnancies among demographic groups (though the rate of unplanned pregnancies itself may not be particularly meaningful given the breadth of the term). But Koppelman doesn’t grapple with the hard questions here, and apparently assumes that the differences in pregnancy rates are driven largely by lack of contraceptive education or lack of access to contraception. But he doesn’t provide any support for those assertions, because there is none. Koppelman does discuss contraceptive knowledge at the time of first sexual encounter, but doesn’t explore whether knowledge remains fixed at those levels or whether a significant share of the pregnancy rate differences can be explained by these first encounters. Given that Guttmacher Institute reports that 98% of sexually active teens have used some sort of contraception, it seems that consistency of usage and other factors affecting risk exposure, and not knowledge or access, may explain a large part of the the differences (and that differences in usage patterns may be also be explainable without reference to knowledge or access differences).
Koppelman’s references to the effects of abstinence education are, to my understanding, a bit misleading. Abstinence-based education may not affect the rate of pre-marital sex, but may affect the age of first sexual intercourse, and so may still have a meaningful positive effect. And the best reading of the evidence, again to my understanding, is that abstinence education has no meaningful effect on pregnancy rates as compared to so-called comprehensive education programs.
To the extent that Koppelman is serious about reducing abortions, there are laws that could be proposed, and it needn’t be abortion or contraception opponents who make concessions. After all, it’s the regime that Koppelman supports that has restricted ability of abortion opponents to so much as tinker with abortion restrictions.
This is a curious bit of reasoning, which flattens the opposing viewpoint into a strawman for easy disposal, but in doing so, utterly fails to take into account the wide variety of viewpoints contained therein, and so misses the target entirely.
“The Religious Right seems concerned about abortion. But, that concern is false, because if they were truly concerned about abortion, they would promote contraception availability, education, and use, for that would definitely prevent more abortions by preventing the pregnancies in the first place. It is obvious that when the federal government under Reagan changed its policies to promote abstinence and adoption, abortion rates flew upwards, and the two MUST be causally linked.”
Although it hints around it, this article says little about how the religious right views contraception and philosophical approaches, or whether those views are good are not (and prefers instead simply to assume that they are not, apparently). If one is a thoroughgoing utilitarian, or sees no issues with the use of contraception, then one could indeed reach the point that as long as contraception is the lesser of two evils, or it is neutral (or good) in and of itself, then why not use it to prevent pregnancies, therefore preventing abortions? Of course, the majority of the religious right may not view it in either of those ways.
On the other side of the coin, many on the religious right probably do think it is the government’s place to prevent murder, and the majority of the religious right therefore support abortion laws.
Looking more closely at the statistics, provided by the Guttmacher Institute here: http://www.guttmacher.org/presentations/trends.pdf, one sees that abortion rates rose rapidly from nearly nothing in 1969 through 1981(!) to a high of 1,600,000 per year, then remained relatively stable until 1991, when they begin to decline rapidly.
Using the logic you forward, it would seem that the abortion rates were increased by the Federal Government’s policies of funding contraception and sexual education, and leveled off due to the Reagan administrations reversal of those policies. (See pgs. 2 and 4.)
You do make a strong recommendation for federalism, even despite your obvious preference for federal programs which force red states to contribute to the new sexual ethic in the blue states by supplied contraception. If indeed the blue states have this new ethic, why not have their legislatures enact local programs to supply contraception? If indeed the red states where the Republican ethic holds true experience lower such rates, why not leave them alone?
The argument you make seems to be more about power than about preventing abortion. It bemoans those darn Religious Right Republicans who have (somehow) caused abortions in blue states from their perches in Washington by preventing state legislatures from providing contraception to teens by preventing their distribution in schools (to say nothing of state-run health-care clinics…but how did Washington prevent that, exactly?). If we could only get legislation enacted at the federal level which would fund contraception, then we could lower the numbers by fiat.
The statistics provided by Guttmacher and by Thomas, above, either point out the serious flaws in the arguments presented, or at least show that the issue is much more complicated than a simple “provide contraception to reduce abortions” argument makes it.
I think the answer to this question is obvious: “the Right” is more concerned with the culpability of the individuals performing abortions, and the culpability of society for permitting such acts to occur, than the actual number of abortions performed. In other words, the main issue to the right is: “Should we, as a society, permit a mother to kill an unwanted child?”, not “What is the most effective way for us, as a society, to minimize child killings?”
Honestly, I think the first question is much more fundamental, difficult, and relevant than the second. It makes sense that the Right focuses on it, and failure to focus on the second doesn’t appear (to me) to undermine their support for the first. Also, because the two are separate questions, I don’t think that failure to focus on the second evidences any sort of hypocrisy…although the charge, I’m sure, will be leveled.
Of course, abortion rates involve more than access to contraception — almost everyone in the country can obtain a condom, and the Guttmacher studies do show that women who experience unintended pregnancies typically are using some form of contraception.
Instead, the studies from the nineties, which examined the quite dramatic drop in teen pregnancies, showed a combination of factors was involved, and the single most important was improved use of contraception, particularly by high risk groups.
Those of us who lived through the many changes from the pill (with fears of forgetting, if not breast cancer) to IUD’s (and infection worries) back to condoms (which we don’t control) to diaphrams (which are much less effective for women who have already had children) recognize that effective contraception involves either disciplined use or access to the right method.
In the nineties, a major change involved the advent of long acting injectibles. Doctors were more willing to recommend them for young women, and they didn’t depend on individual discipline, but they did require access to medical care. The New York Times reported that the states with the largest drops in teen pregnancies and abortions were those that made these more effective contraceptives available to poor women. The marginal effect of improved contraceptive access for a group with high rates of unintended pregnancies and abortions was significant.
These studies also indicated that greater abstinence, primarily for whites between the ages of 15 to 17, lowered teen pregnancy rates by 15%, but the effect of increased abstinence in the mid-teens did not lead to increased abtinence until marriage. Instead, the Guttmacher studies showed that increased abstinence played almost no role in declining pregnancy rates among 18-19 year olds, which were almost entirely do to improved use of contraception.
Guttmacher’s international studies show that the countries with the lowest abortion rates tend to be those that make contraception systematically available to all women. David Brooks celebrated the U.S. high birth rate in his column earlier this week, but he didn’t examine where that high birth rate comes from. Well educated women in the US (and women in the Northeast as a whole) have birthrates that look like those in Northern Europe. Well educated women tended to have significantly lower birth rates even during the era when contraception was illegal and I suspect that anyone sharp enough to get into Harvard can figure out how to obtain birth control without a high school class sex ed class. What is different in the US is the relatively high birth rates by poor and minority women, and those high birth rates, which as Koppelman points out reflect dramatically higher rates of unintended pregnancy, involve lesser access to health care, less systematic provision of effective contraception, and (though harder to prove) less ability to say no to unwanted sexual activity. Yet, the teens at greatest risk of early sexual activity are those most likely to be enrolled in abstinence only classes.
But Koppelman’s larger point is the right one. Those of us who are pro-choice do not embrace abortion as a positive good. Instead, we have no desire to bring back the scarlet letter, and we take the issue of childbearing too seriously to leave it to the vagaries of contraceptive accidents. We would happily join in efforts to reduce abortions by increasing the effectiveness of the contraceptive choices open to women, but we see the real issue as giving more women the opportunity to avoid unwanted pregnancy and childbirth.
If we want to talk about hypocrisy, let’s talk about the incessant drumbeat that derails efforts to provide more effective contraception by changing the subject to abortion. If you have a problem with contraception, say so. If not, why not, join in measures that will also reduce the number of abortions?
This argument claims to be aimed at why a truly anti-abortion person should support contraceptive education, etc. But it fails on its own terms. Put aside all issues about whether this approach truly reduces abortions, whether teen sex has negative consequences apart from pregnancy (or disease), and everything else. The fatal flaw is this:
“This model, which Cahn and Carbone call the “new middle class ethic,” is tolerant of premarital sexuality so long as contraception is carefully used, with abortion as the responsible fallback.”
That’s the rub. As long as the regime relies, in the end, on “abortion as the resposible fallback,” it cannot be sold to someone who believes that abortion is murder. The right-to-life groups would be happy at the macro, institutitional level, with reducing the number of abortions from over a million to some fraction of that. But as a cultural/family matter, you cannot plausily expect someone to adopt a worldview that still maintains this is murder, but plans such a potential murder as the “responsible fallback” from the outset.
If you want to persuade people to stop being anti-abortion, that’s one thing. Or, if you could construct a model that allows people to remain as anti- as ever, while adopting the rest of your scheme, that’s fine, too.
But this model purports to tell people “you should adopt my view, even keeping that core belief that divides us,” but then smuggles in dropping that core belief as an essential element of the plan.
That is either a logical flaw or a self-delusion (putting aside the possibility that it is a deeply dishonest attempt to trick people into dropping a core belief without their realizing it).
That is either
It is not fair to write, as Prof. Koppelman does, that “the policies that [the religious right] have been supporting are directly responsible for millions of abortions.” His own argument, even if correct in its assumptions and its chain of reasoning, shows only an indirect link between the policies (little or no public support for contraception and sex education) and the outcome (numbers of abortions), since intervening between the policies and the outcomes are the choices couples make, first, to have sexual relations without attending to the consequences, and second, to abort the child conceived. Only on the supposition that the people in question are incapable of choice can the policy-outcome nexus be called direct.
On the question of hypocrisy that Prof. Carbone raises, it is important to remember that the federal courts, by inventing purported constitutional rights to contraception and abortion, effectively quashed full and free public debate on these issues. Those who think contraception and abortion morally wrong — the traditional teaching of Christianity, after all, and still orthodox teaching for Catholics and some others — are limited in the policies we can advocate to matters that involve public funding, since policies we think are genuinely right have been stigmatized as unconstitutional. Who cannot see that the effort to prove the current situation to be irrational is a step toward a constitutional decision that will overturn Harris v. McRae, the 1980 case upholding the Hyde Amendment? Is there no hypocrisy in first distorting a debate by removing constitutional legitimacy from one side, then complaining that the debate is distorted?
Prof. Carbone writes, “we see the real issue as giving more women the opportunity to avoid unwanted pregnancy and childbirth.” I think that those Professor Koppelman condemns as the religious right see the real issue as developing a culture in which pregnancy can be wanted and childbirth welcomed in an environment formed by love. Law cannot make such a culture develop, but unintended consequences, though obliged to be weighed, cannot disable every effort to encourage it.
Andy Koppleman’s and June Carbone’s posts have caused me to consider how we might reduce abortions and unwanted pregnancies. The “progressive” thought of the twentieth century suggested a few possibilities. In the end, we drew back from their implications.
One possibility is to sterilize the “wrong people”—the utopian vision of the eugenics movement. The eugenics movement was the only charity to which Justice Holmes ever made a monetary contribution. His other contribution was Buck v. Bell http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=274&invol=200 the Supreme Court opinion approving of Virginia’s eugenics program. But Holmes’s line therein, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” may have scared off even the most aggressive utopians.
Another possibility would be B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism—we could aggressively program people to have the desired number of children (via abstinence or safe sex education). Burgess’s (novel) and Kubrick’s (movie) “A Clockwork Orange” seemed to spell behaviorism’s doom.
The more recent remedy for procreational excess (and abortion under Andy Koppleman’s theory) is sex education and safe sex (retaining abortion as a backup). I fear that we are already in Huxley’s “Brave New World.” We have free sex, medical marijuana, and very little responsibility. Children are a burden for others to bear. Is that the world we want? I fear that is where we are headed.
The traditional Christian perspective is that sexual relations should occur only within marriage. Children should be born into a two-parent family that will raise and nurture them. Sexual relations are a wonderful reward for those who are willing to settle down, take on the commitment to another person, and care for the products of that relationship. This is a tough sell under the best of circumstances. It works best when children receive a consistent message from home, school, peers, celebrities, and entertainment. They learn to practice discipline and to live with unfulfilled desires. That is an especially tough sell today, when few parts of the culture support the traditional ethic. At the least, I don’t want to send my children to a school that undercuts this ethic. I would like to have a school voucher system that would enable parents to choose the education (including the sex education) that their children receive.
Back to limiting abortion–my preferred remedies for abortion are sympathetic care for women who have chosen and experienced them, stiff penalties for those who perform them, and better public health care for pregnant women and children. That combination of remedies does not please my secular friends on either the left or the right, but I suspect that a lot of people from a variety of faiths and political persuasions who believe in the sanctity of life would support it.
Peg Brinig, friend to many commentators on this blog and sometimes co-author with June Carbone sent me the following comment (which she agreed to let me share):
“I think the key thing pregnant women need is support—preferably from loving husbands, but after that from the father, their parents, the church, and the community.”
we should ban all forms of abortion because it is not right to kill an unborn child’`~
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