Abortion-Rebutted.com

Abortion is trending down. Maybe. From the data we have (abortions reported in the context of formal medical care) abortions have declined both in number, and in rate. (You can check our main “Statistics” page for a regularly updated breakdown of statistics related to abortion.)

Here’s the thing, type: “Is abortion rate declining” into a search engine, and you’ll likely find an article titled : The U.S. Abortion Rate Continues to Drop: Once Again, State Abortion Restrictions Are Not the Main Driver from the Guttmacher Institute. This article attempts to reason that abortion bans “don’t work” to lower the rate of abortion. In most capacities the article sufficiently captures the data, though they make a necessary disclaimer in their last paragraph that any increase in self managed abortion would be uncaptured in their statistics.

The issue with the article is easy to miss, but it remains a stark example of how misrepresenting key statistics can skew the perception of reality. To clarify: I’m not taking issue with the thesis of the article, which I think they are able to sufficiently demonstrate. Rather, the issue here is that Nash and Dreweke try to rob the Anti-Abortion movement of a potentially substantial victory on a false premise.

First, lets imagine a scenario: The rate of abortions (% of pregnancies that end in abortion as opposed to live birth) is declining across the U.S. What does this information tell us? All this information can confirm is that there are more babies being born, proportionally, than there were in previous years (again, only from reported data). This could be due to a number of extrinsic or intrinsic factors, but these factors are necessarily limited, to the realm of access women have to abortions, or their perceptions of abortion. The abortion rate tells us only one thing: a smaller percentage of expectant mothers choose to kill their children in the womb. Pro-Abortion advocates may decry this information as indicative of “forced birth” on the rise, but that would clearly indicate success from national abortion bans. If not due to abortion bans, it must mean that the women who are having children, are becoming more antagonistic towards abortion generally. This could be attributed to fewer Pro-Abortion women growing families, or a shift in the opinions of mothers more generally. However, Nash and Dreweke, in an absurd attempt to discredit both of those theories, says the following:

“A closely related argument focuses on the abortion ratio (the number of abortions per 100 pregnancies ending in either abortion or live birth), which fell 13% between 2011 and 2017.^1,2 Abortion opponents often attribute this decline to more pregnant individuals deciding or being forced to carry a pregnancy to term. If this were the case, then there would have been a corresponding increase in births over that time, which did not happen. Rather, both the number of U.S. abortions and the number of U.S. births declined from 2011 to 2017, with births dropping by 98,000 and abortions by 196,000.” ¹

Now, I may lack the qualifications to work at the Guttmacher Institute, but even I can tell you that line of reasoning falls flat on its face. Did you catch it?

“If this were the case, then there would have been a corresponding increase in births over that time“

That claim is blatantly false. Time for some quick math:

If I have 50 apples, and choose to eat 25 of them, I ate 50% of my apples. Now, if next year I have 20 apples, and choose to eat 20 of them, I have chosen to consume 100% of my apples, but it does not follow, therefore, that I have eaten more apples. My apple consumption rate simply doubled, telling me nothing about the number of apples I consumed.

The (reported) abortion rate is on decline, at the very least, that implies victories for Anti-Abortion advocates on the battleground of “brick and mortar murder marts” and it could even be indicative of the beginning of a cultural shift. Our friends at the Guttmacher Institute may be burdened by that fact, but we ought to count this as movement in the right direction. Advocates for abortion try to pull out all the stops to make any gains for the Anti-Abortion movement seem insubstantial, counting on a complete surrender to shore up their resource of never ending innocent blood, but one fact remains: If we ban abortion we win in a total route, and so we’ll keep fighting for that golden opportunity to put the devil on his heels.

– M.

Citations:

1. Authors          Elizabeth Nash, Elizabeth Nash, Guttmacher Institute, and Joerg Dreweke. “The U.S. Abortion Rate Continues to Drop: Once Again, State Abortion Restrictions Are Not the Main Driver.” Guttmacher Institute, August 30, 2022. https://www.guttmacher.org/gpr/2019/09/us-abortion-rate-continues-drop-once-again-state-abortion-restrictions-are-not-main.
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