WHILE exorbitant amounts of money are funneled into a political battle over abortion, society suffers by having to pay the opportunity cost of this ongoing dispute. Rather than focus time and resources on challenging a woman's right to choose, American society should divert these scarce resources to attacking the causes of abortion.
First of all, the quickest and surest way to slash the number of abortions is to make contraception both readily available and affordable. There are at least over three million unintended pregnancies each year, about 1.3 million of which end in abortion. Hundreds of thousands of these could have been prevented had the couple had access to cheap contraception. Rather than consolidate efforts to administer such seemingly palpable measures, many of those who are opposed to abortion also raise loud voices against family planning centers, which openly provide support to millions of low-income women and teenagers. According to Planned Parenthood, family planning centers as well as other publicly funded programs help "avert 1.3 million [unwanted] pregnancies and 632,000 abortions."
While some may immediately claim that these centers are costly to the government, the National Organization for Women (NOW) shows that for every public dollar spent in family planning services, more than three dollars is saved in the following year that would have "otherwise be spent for health and welfare services associated with unintended births." Others may squawk about the fact that Planned Parenthood's centers provide abortions, but the point is that greater funding will help them prevent the number of abortions they have to give. Given all of these facts, reasonable pro-choice and pro-life advocates should form an alliance, abandoning their claims about abortion in exchange for a multilateral effort to prevent unwanted pregnancies by making contraception easily accessible and affordable, if not free for those who need it most.
Second, as with many important issues, the devil is in the details -- the false details. In today's America, those most likely to be misinformed about the reproductive process and concurrently have an unwanted pregnancy are teenagers. Rather than being insured such an education in order to promote civil responsibility, teens inevitably get their facts from unreliable sources: television, movies and equally naive peers. Evidently, relying on parents to educate their kids on the awkward subject of sex is ineffective. Putting such an undue burden on parents is both unrealistic and unfair, and leads to the creation of a cycle of uninformed parents passing myths on to their children.
According to NOW, although numbers vary based on how the question is worded, a strong supermajority of parents believe that sex education programs should be provided in community settings such as schools. While a small minority of orthodox parents may stress that such programs promote sexual activity, this claim is unfounded, because all of such programs promote abstinence as not only a legitimate route, but the optimal option. Nonetheless, as college students we all know that there are kids that will have sex regardless of how much we preach abstinence, thus at least providing them with basic knowledge about sex is essential. Increasing the availability of knowledge to those who are most vulnerable to a lack thereof can only have one effect: decreasing unwanted pregnancies (and therefore decreasing the number of abortions).
Many pro-life advocates will retaliate by making the audacious claim that an even better way to reduce the number of abortions is by completely outlawing abortion. This claim, both uncompromising and unfounded, completely neglects not only history, but also contemporary studies conducted by reliable organizations. For example, although official records of illicit activities are not kept, the estimates of illegally performed abortions per year in pre-Roe v. Wade America ranged as high as 1.2 million per year.Furthermore, according to NOW, between 1880 and 1973, many "thousands of woman died or suffered serious medical problems after attempting to self-induce their abortions or going to untrained practitioners who performed abortions with primitive methods or in unsanitary conditions." Clearly, the era when abortions were illegal is not a glorious one, nor one that needs to be revisited.
More evidence from nations in which abortion is illegal further buttresses this analysis. For example, according to the World Health Organization, of the 46 million abortions performed annually around the globe, roughly 20 million occur in dangerous conditions due to "poorly trained providers, unsanitary circumstances, and crude and dangerous methods of self-inducement." This results in the annual death of 80,000 women, thus "accounting for at least 13 percent of global maternal mortality." Many thousands more face long-term health problems that "range from chronic pelvic pain to infertility." Also important is that almost all of these deaths and damages could be avoided granted safe conditions that can only be offered in two ways: illegally to the rich, or legally to all.
Too often, opponents of an ideology will argue for their beliefs without considering either the plausibility or the actual effects of it. In this case, proponents of the pro-life dogma believe that eliminating abortion will lead to "no more babies being killed." This fallacious belief results in the mobilization of their adversaries, the pro-choice lobby, and subsequently creates a perpetual feud that consumes millions of dollars and endless amounts of time.
If the pro-life lobby wins, the result is that a woman's privacy is invaded in the name of morals, but more importantly, abortions continue at steady and large rates, except with one stipulation: Many mothers, especially poor ones, will perform unsafe, illegal abortions that can result in death. Since 1973, the pro-choice lobby has generally been the victor in the battle, yet they have no choice (ironically) but to continue to defend their position. This futile battle would be better replaced by a conjoined, consolidated effort to lower the number of abortions by attacking the problems that unnecessarily increase the number of abortions. This would secure the pro-choice lobby's support while making the better satisfying the pro-life lobby by decreasing the number of abortions without impeding on a mother's privacy and right to choose.
Sina Kian's column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at skian@cavalierdaily.com
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