Jill and Zuzu are taking Matt to task for a post he wrote criticizing the Guttmacher study that shows that abortion bans not only don’t reduce the abortion rate, but in some cases can contribute to increasing it. His views were roughly “don’t buy it” and “so what?” Which isn’t to say that I think he’s being an asshole at all, but Zuzu is right that the first argument reeks of privilege, in that it downplays the tenacity of women and the long-standing history of underground and illegal abortion.
What I’m interested in right now is the privilege on display — Matt, who will never have to face the question of whether to have an abortion, dismisses the Guttmacher study as “questionable.” And why? Because, gosh, it just doesn’t make any sense that women would seek abortions where they’re illegal and dangerous!
It’s unfortunate that he went that route, and Zuzu is right—it only takes a few moments to see how the need to abort a pregnancy isn’t really a choice for women, and in fact the term “pro-choice” is a bit misleading on that. Not being pregnant right now is, for most women who get abortions, right in the “need” category, and need tends to be impervious to the laws in a way that want doesn’t. If he took a few minutes to really imagine what it must be like to be a woman and have the low-level but nagging fear of unplanned pregnancy following you, much less to be a woman stuck in the hellish situation of being pregnant when you desperately don’t want to be, he’d realize his quick hand-waving dismissal is what doesn’t make sense, not the study, performed by the rigorous and well-respected Guttmacher Institute.
I see what he’s getting at, though. He’s basically, without coming right out and saying it, making the standard George Lakoff argument that if you argue within your opponent’s frame, you lose the argument.
Legal abortions not only allow women determined to terminate their pregnancies do so safely, but they allow women determined to manage their pregnancies safely do so by terminating them. Meanwhile, it seems that legal abortion helps promote relatively more permissive attitudes about sex. But both of those things — fewer people refraining from sex out of fear of pregnancy and fewer people carrying to term babies they don’t really want to have out of fear of the adverse health consequences of illegal abortions are good things not untoward consequences of legal abortion that need to be swept under the rug.
I definitely see what he’s saying, and I’ve always been a proponent of the idea that we need to go on the offense on sex issues, and make the argument out loud and often that sex itself is a social good, and that access to services that make sex safer aren’t just good for the safety reasons, but because they let more people have sex. It’s not an argument made enough in our puritanical culture, where people are more comfortable with harm reduction arguments instead of joy expansion, but joy expansion has the benefit of being pretty hard to refute. If you have to start logically spelling out why you think people should have less harmless fun that improves their moods, relationships, and circulation, you will end up sounding like a Class A asshole.
Anti-choicers get this, actually. One of the big time reasons they make a lot of noise about babies (when they don’t give a fuck, really) and otherwise try to package their views as harm reduction (abstinence-only supposedly spares you from heartbreak, abstaining from contraceptions spares you from being called a “contracepting woman”, etc.) is because if they came straight out and admitted that they think people should just quit fucking is that being against sex outright is going to go over as well with people as trying to ban ice cream. We should put more effort into luring anti-choicers into debating on our terms, and force the issue to make them argue against frequent and fun sex.
That said, I don’t think of “reduce abortions” as something that’s strictly arguing on right wing turf, for a couple of major reasons. One, it shows that wingnuts are fucking liars and hypocrites—they say they hate abortion and want to stop it, but doggedly pursue policies (restricting contraception access, abstinence-only education, defunding Planned Parenthood) that will increase the abortion rate. So this study can and will be used to point out that it’s not abortion that’s the motivation for anti-choicers, but their hostility to sex. Which puts the debate on our turf—why do they hate sex so much that they wish to punish women with dirty abortions that will maim and kill them for fucking, which is not only not a crime but a pleasant past time.
The other reason is that “reduce abortions” is a pro-choice, pro-sex frame in the personal lives of many women. Like me—I personally wish to reduce my own abortions because abortions suck. They are painful and expensive and you can’t have sex for weeks afterwards.* I’ve had to consider this in a way that someone like Matt hasn’t, because having an abortion in my lifetime is a distinct possibility. For a lot of sexually active pro-choice straight women, an abortion is upsetting not because of the right wing “life” frame, but because it fucks with their own sense of control over their bodies and makes them feel like they fucked up what should be relatively simple, using contraception right. Now, a lot of women are way too hard on themselves—I bet most of us have better track records at avoiding unplanned pregnancy than at not locking our keys in the car—but the point still stands. For a huge percentage of Americans, especially women of child-bearing age, the idea of reducing abortions invokes not having more babies but less unplanned pregnancies.
*From what I understand. I’ve kept my personal abortion rate to 0, and hope it stays that way, but you still always know it’s a distinct possibility in the future. Much like the way you buckle your seatbelt knowing that accidents are distinct possibilities.
61 Responses to “We stand for more sex, less scrapings”
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Or, as Jill said in her follow-up post:
I got the same reaction from a guy when we were discussing the anti-abortion trucks that wander aimlessly around campus. When I told him that countries with abortion bans have huge numbers of abortions, and countries with more liberal laws generally see fewer abortions, he immediately scoffed and said “sounds like someone’s fudging the numbers.”
But I’ve had a pregnancy scare before, and I know what kind of decisions I’m capable of, and I know that you can multiply what I felt by millions and still have only scratched the surface of desperation; it’s just guys like that won’t believe it until the see it with their very own eyes.
I gotta take issue with your notion that the anti-sex brigades are about risk reduction. They’re about an impossible risk removal. Safer sex advocates have for years talked about risk reduction. When we talk about condoms, we (at least the responsible among us) note that they aren’t fail-proof, that they’re a risk reduction measure (a highly effective one), and that they are more effective against pregnancy and some STIs than others (condoms are more effective against gonnorhea than HPV, for instance, but that depends on the “site” of the HPV infection). The fundies state that if you follow their way, all risks are removed , which is complete shit. Again, they’re in an all-or-nothing fantasy reality while those of us engaged with the real world are actually about risk reduction. You give them more credit than they’re due.
I will gladly answer your rhetorical question.
Their god hates sex.
There is no rational basis for their hatred of sex, but there is a religious one. People will believe that black is white before giving up their religious beliefs.
Point taken, MA. I don’t think they’re really about harm reduction—I meant that the frame they use is harm reduction, except they define sex as the harm they wish to reduce.
MAJeff —
I think you’re giving the anti-choice, anti-sex people credence that they don’t deserve. The ones who actually honestly believe that abstinence is the answer are either deluded or batshit crazy, and they’re a small fraction of the ones who preach abstinence. The rest get to have it both ways: either people don’t have sex, which is punishment enough, or if they do have sex they get “punished” by STDs and unwanted pregnancy.
I don’t think there’s any good-faith belief in risk elimination there, because if there were, they wouldn’t spread lies about the effectiveness of various birth control methods.
One factor that might put the study into a new light:
Would anti-abortion laws be more frequent in places where there was not good access to birth control and sex ed? After all, the abortion rate is a reflection of the unwanted pregnancy rate.
If so, that would explain why anti-abortion laws did not reduce the rate of abortion. With this hypothesis, the number of unwanted pregnancies is greater in areas where there are anti-abortion laws due to the general anti-choice legal code.
In *theory*, there could be a pro-sex, anti-abortion place where there was sex-ed and access to contraception and women had realistic sexual negotiation power . . . but in reality, the places where women lack power to keep abortion safe and legal, they also lack power to keep other choices safe and legal.
Amanda and Paul,
You’re both on the same tack. They use risk reduction as a framing device. (It’s been particularly evident in their attacks on queerness.) However, it’s a rhetorical strategy and nothing more. Their frame is divorced from their policy goals. Indeed, our policy approaches are more appropriate to a “risk reduction” frame.
Believe me, I don’t give them credence. They are liars, first and foremost, for their silly fairy tale belief system. However, they are effective liars.
It’s funny to be accused of giving our enemies too much credence. I got a bit of that on my MA defense as well when I said that claims from the anti-sex people about condoms and “pores that can allow HIV through.” I claimed that many of them were misled, acting from what they perceived to be good faith arguments that were actually complete bullshit. These folks are bat-shit. From within their belief system, such approaches make sense. But, in the real world they merely end up in more STIs, more unwanted pregnancies, and more misery. They’re more than willing, however, to exempt their batshittiness from such results.
Being a wingnut means never having to take responsibility.
Wayward -
It’s much more complicated than “Their god hates sex.” It’s more like “their men see a positive social good in keeping women as completely subservient reproductive laborers, and have created an elaborate mythology around a few religious stories to maintain control.”
Sorry to have misread. (I don’t know whether, practically speaking, it’s important to distinguish between the ones who proceed out of pure hate and the ones who have been deluded by a hateful cult.)
paul,
I think the distinction is important, among other distinctions. We tend to treat the Right as a monolith when it’s not (just as we on the left are not). There may be some among the deluded who are reachable, once they are presented with evidence about risk reduction, etc. I’m reminded of one of my aunts, a hard-core fundie, who has said to my mother that one of the failings of the church (writ large) has been its attacks on gay people (she’s an organist….conclusions left to others). We’re not dealing with a monolith, even as much as i’d like to assume we are. folks like Dana and sharon and cookie are beyond hope. Fine; fucke ‘em
That doesn’t mean others aren’t, though.
I appreciate you attempt to reclaim MY’s post, but if this were a different activity Matt would grasp the point: criminalizing behavior does not eliminate behavior, it just increases the chance people will get harmed while engaging in it.
He would also grasp how this argument is important because it disarms the emotional framing of sin and addresses the logic of the situation, while imposing a new framing about harm reduction.
Since it’s women, wombs and sex, MY says:
1. “mmmm I’m not buying it”
and
2. “This girly argument about harm reduction interests me less than the idea legal abortion means more sex and less fear of unwanted fatherhood if something goes wrong.”
Like with drug decriminalization, saying “Drugs are awesome!” isn’t quite the point and feeds into the emotional stereotypes of the anti-drug crowd.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a lefty guy is equating abortion with more sex, it’s still the “abortion as contraception” canard and damn condescending way to talk about it for the women who actually undergo them.
In fact, I’d say “fewer people refraining from sex out of fear of pregnancy and fewer people carrying to term babies they don’t really want to have out of fear of the adverse health consequences of illegal abortions are good things” is a bit too much of an echo of “I’m so psyched about my abortion!” except more wordier, dry and more funny peculiar than ha-ha.
*And before any gun nut jumps in, I know this also applies to guns, but a rational person will notice gun control is not about gun banning.
What, you mean you don’t get to summarily dismiss the significance of a scientific study, just because you don’t like the conclusions?
Damn, who knew?
If banning abortion doesn’t stop abortion, or reduce the numbers of abortions (as it provably doesn’t), then what’s the point of banning abortion?
That’s the “reframing” that needs to be done. If people want to encourage people not to have abortions, they need to try some other method. The legislative one doesn’t work.
JupiterPluvius,
You’re assuming facts speak for themselves. The FACT that abortion prohibitions have no effect on women’s attempt to control their own fertility will NOT speak for itself. It depends upon advocates to “sponsor” and “frame” it, and honestly, with national NARAL’s move to the anti-choice catholic right under Nancy Keenan, there aren’t a lot of other sources to move this perspective into public discourse. Facts need spokespeople; they aren’t free-standing phenomena. National NARAL most likely won’t be an ally in this. Those of us who are truly pro-choice need to be LOUD about this.
Women will, and have always, seek to control their fertility.
‘
What’s the most humane approach to this? That question has yet to be entered into mainstream public discourse. Indeed, the notion of women as controlling their own reproductive capacities is still controversial, ahistorically so.
It’s weird. As a gay man, I’m often more strident on reproductive freedom than most hets I know. But, I recognize the connections. The study showing that prohibitions are basically useless isn’t all that surprising to me (hi sodomy laws). How do we deal with the real world in a way that makes every child a wanted child, that makes women decide whether or not their bodies will be used to reproduce…well, we as a society aren’t even close.
Could it be that in the countries where abortion is illegal, birth is no trip to the shore either? that is, since surgical abortion is health care just like vaginal delivery of a full term fetus, are both outcomes more risky in locations where abortion is outlawed?
I haven’t explored the study, so correct me if this was addressed by the methodology.
Point being, yes, there are risks associated with illegal abortion. However, if your most pressing concern is how to feed the three kids you already have, those risks may be pale hypotheticals.
Further, if carrying to term involves a risk to health as well as lost income, which I’m betting is proportionally more the case in Nicaragua than in California, those risks might be more present in the mind of the decider than they are to Matt.
The thing is that the study wasn’t *trying* to estimate the independent causal impact of abortion restrictions on abortion rates, *all else equal*; it was comparing how the rates vary over entire *packages* of reproductive-autonomy policies. Restrictive abortion policies have some effect on deterring abortion, but pro-autonomy contraception and overall anti-sexism policies reduce the need for abortions in the first place. The study is very good and very important for making that basket-of-policies comparison, and it’s very important for people to publicize it, but it’s just -not the same thing- as saying restriction abortion by itself does nothing to rates (e.g., the immediate rise in rates when Germany liberalized its law in 95-96). That’s all Yglesias was getting at, and nothing in the study claims otherwise. The study says plenty by itself; there’s no reason to hype it as saying something it doesn’t.
In *theory*, there could be a pro-sex, anti-abortion place where there was sex-ed and access to contraception and women had realistic sexual negotiation power . . . but in reality, the places where women lack power to keep abortion safe and legal, they also lack power to keep other choices safe and legal.
I disagree—it would still be misogynist, if more subtly so, to leave women exactly no room for error. You can have sex thousands of times and only break a condom once and that’s all it takes. Not to mention mandatory childbirth for women whose pregnancies go sour is cruel.
You also can’t lift stuff for a week after an abortion and you feel like you’ve been kicked in the guts by a mule. It’s a combination of feeling like you strained something and having bad period cramps. Not fun. Sex is about the last thing on your mind, believe me.
Although, it was still better than having my wisdom teeth taken out. Huh. Don’t know if that’s a statement on modern dentistry or just the guy I went to.
PhoenixRising,
That’s an interesting question. I’d hypothesize that there could be a small correlation b/w overall quality and access to medical services and abortion legality, but I don’t think it would amount to much in this situation, because we could likely expect in just about every country that class/ethnic stratification would still leave some women with greater access to adequate health services (incl. gyn) and abortion, although the latter might be available to an even smaller fraction of the overall population.
Ultimately, women have been reproductive FOREVER, and thus births and deaths - and attempts at enhancement and/or prevention of either outcome - have also been occurring forever. I like Jill’s post at Feministe after Zuzu’s (though I dug hers too) that takes on this intimation that maybe abortion regulation is irrelevant. Not to mention that you can just see her perfecting her legal arguments as she writes.
A friend of mine who has worked all over the world doing post-abortion counseling (training MDs in it!) and working for a gender equity org in Tanzania focused on obstetric fistula - I wish she were on this thread, teaching us all some things.
The first time I got pregnant, I was on the pill, AND used a condom. Very damned unlikely. But I had to deal with it.
Any laws that restrict our autonamy are potentially dangerous to our health. Period. (Heh. Bad pun.) I must admit, though, that I am Canadian and so all was covered. Please, Amanda, when your frigging 12th century government gets it’s shit together, promise your legions here that you’ll engage us, your Canadian allies in the fight. We might need you in return if Harper’s bastards ever snow job our majority. (I hope we never need your help, no offence.) Rock on, women.
I don’t think it would be a totally paranoid waste of time to begin now laying the groundwork for an underground railroad — a new version of the Jane network.
You can start by asking your doctor, at your next checkup, whether s/he is trained in performing abortions, and would be willing to do them if it became illegal.
Amanda, take a look at Lindsay’s post on the administration’s new birth control czar…your readers would care about this.
Okay, so I have actually lived in a country where abortion was illegal, common and dangerous. I would say beyond a shadow of a doubt that illegal abortion is more dangerous than childbirth, with the exception of women who have pregnancy complications that would absolutely kill them (like ectopic, etc.) In many countries where abortion is illegal, the high maternal mortality rates are directly related to abortion complications, not childbirth complications. Women show up in hospitals or clinics with abortion complications, die and are counted (accurately) as maternal mortalities. The biggest danger to women in childbirth in many poor countries is malnutrition, leading to anemia, leading to hemorrhage. If the woman has decent nutrition (and many poor women do, not great but good enough), her chances of making it in childbirth are pretty good. The desperation comes from family, job, marital, money, food on the table, age issues, just as it does for women who decide to get abortions in developed countries.
In the country where I lived, the preferred method of abortion was to go to a traditional healer, who would make an herbal concoction that would induce a miscarriage. This is less frightening than coathangers, but before everyone starts thinking how great and natural and crunchy this is, consider that herbal medicines do not contain exact doses and that many of these concoctions functioned rather like chemotherapy. Just as chemotherapy poisons you enough to kill the tumor but not enough to kill you (hopefully), these treatments poison the woman enough to cause her to expel the fetus in her body’s attempt to focus its energies on preserving itself while not actually killing the woman. But because the doses are not exact, sometimes this works pretty good and other times it goes very awry. Sometimes women bleed and bleed and bleed and bleed. Sometimes they are rendered infertile. Sometimes they get very sick but don’t abort and then give birth to profoundly disabled babies who often die later after a lot of suffering.
This was so common that many men felt they didn’t need to use contraception because they could just take their wife or girlfriend to a curandero if she got pregnant. There was a whole euphemistic language around it: I can’t seem to get my period. I need to have my period. Indeed, in the herbal medicine books, these recipes are listed under “Delayed menstruation.”
That speaks to a whole other problem. While access to safe abortion may be essential for women’s liberation, in the wrong hands it becomes just another way to control women’s bodies.
While access to safe abortion may be essential for women’s liberation, in the wrong hands it becomes just another way to control women’s bodies.
I honestly don’t see how. Or if you refer to men’s refusal to take responsibility for contraception, the problem lies in society’s (and, as a consequence, men’s) attitudes to reproduction, not in abortion itself. What we need to do is try and change mentalities. Granted, it’s a very lenghty and difficult process, but the first step in the right direction is undoubtedly to give women broad and legal access to contraception and abortion.
I don’t have any doubt that you know what you’re talking about re. maternal deaths in your country, but I don’t think childbirth is necessary less deadly than abortion in every country. In most African countries, childbirth has frequent horrendous complications, like fistulas.
“I disagree—it would still be misogynist, if more subtly so, to leave women exactly no room for error. You can have sex thousands of times and only break a condom once and that’s all it takes. Not to mention mandatory childbirth for women whose pregnancies go sour is cruel.”
I guess that’s assuming that there would be no abortions for medical reasons and that the fundies definition of emergency contraception as a form of abortion would be in place. But I see what you mean. Personally I think the best way to deal with the issue is to trust women to make the right decision.
One overlooked consequence of making abortion illegal is the increased power it will give to organized crime. We can’t stop the traffic in heroin, so what makes anyone think we’ll be able to stop the traffic in mifepristone?
Although, it was still better than having my wisdom teeth taken out.
Both my abortion and my tubal ligation were cake compared to getting my wisdom teeth out. Using cytotec to complete a 10-week gestation miscarriage was somewhere in the middle.
One point the Matt and a number of others miss I think is that countries where abortions are illegal are most often countries where women are relatively powerless. They have less access to contraceptives and control over their sexual lives. This will lead inevitably to more unwanted pregnancy and more abortion.
I remember reading somewhere not too long ago (I can’t recall where) that the Netherlands had the lowest abortion rate and Columbia had the highest. That would fit. Good sex education, high status for women, easy access to contraceptives combine to bring down the abortion rate.
I definitely see what he’s saying, and I’ve always been a proponent of the idea that we need to go on the offense on sex issues, and make the argument out loud and often that sex itself is a social good, and that access to services that make sex safer aren’t just good for the safety reasons, but because they let more people have sex.
I find myself making this argument a lot in internet abortion debates. Pro-lifers often assume that the only people having abortions are irresponsible teenagers who don’t use contraception and shouldn’t be having sex in the first place. When you tell them, “hey, I’m a 27-year-old married mom and I don’t want anymore kids, and my husband and I sure as hell aren’t going to abstain until menopause,” they have nothing to say to that.
Here’s an article on BBC today on this very same topic. (For some reason, they interviewed a nutter from Concerned Women for America, but the article is great).
Matt is being an asshole. He’s not being a sexist asshole, he’s being an Ivy League asshole. He’s figured something out in his own mind, so it must be right, and if the data show something different the data must be wrong. It’s the triumph of reason over reality.
When abortions are outlawed, only outlaws will have abortions.
Nations with anti-abortion laws aren’t exactly women-friendly to begin with. Since a child can inextricably link a woman to a man the need for an abortion may very well be more intense in such places.
It’s conceivable that more abortions are being sought, but the anti-abortion laws are effective enough to bring the numbers down to those in pro-choice nations.
The data don’t show what you claim they show, Bloix: they show merely that countries with restrictions tend to have just as high rates, but make *no attempt* to control for whether the restrictions *by themselves* have any effect. Other studies HAVE tried to estimate this, and find that they do; what this study shows is that the effects of the rest of the pro-autonomy policy basket that typically go with liberal abortion laws tend to cancel out the impact of those.
That’s all Matt’s saying! Calm down!
West Germany (not, mind, East germany) moved from partial legal first trimester abortion to full legal first trimester abortion in 1996 there was an one time effect in the official number in abortions. Sine then number and rate of abortions are stable or slowly sinking.
So legalisation did of course not change in any way the number of abortions, it just brought some hidden abortions (hidden as failed pregnacies or performed say in the Netherlands) into the open.
” Restrictive abortion policies have some effect on deterring abortion”
Can you prove this claim? At least here in Germany, if yyou look at the emnpire, weimar republic and so on , illegality had no deterrence effect on abortions at all.
While access to safe abortion may be essential for women’s liberation, in the wrong hands it becomes just another way to control women’s bodies.
Men have an effect on womens’ bodies by getting them pregnant. Pregnancy makes women subject to mens’ control. It’s a very simple concept. It might be passive aggressive with regard to abortion, but it’s still a way of getting a woman pregnant without her desire to be pregnant.
Also, if you use the official numbers, there are fewer abortions each year in germany.
See:
http://www.destatis.de/jetspeed/portal/cms/Sites/destatis/Internet/DE/Content/Statistiken/Gesundheit/Schwangerschaftsabbrueche/Tabellen/Content75/Alter,templateId=renderPrint.psml
number of abortions in 2001: Absolute 134,964, per 10,000 women 80,
Number of abortions in 2006: absolute 119,170, per 10,000 women 72.
Can you cite your studies too?
JupiterPluvius, I think the point is that outlawing abortion ensures that women seeking abortion run the risk of serious injury or death.
It’s a scenario that makes the anti-choicers cream their pants.
Sure, no “babies” will be saved, but their motivation has nothing to do with babies.
In developing countries where contraception is nearly absent and unavailable when present, abortion - even illegal, unsafe abortion - is often far safer than childbirth when the lifetime risk of pregnancy is 2-3/100.
Bad or worse, your choice. I suspect that this horrific calculus (and the “women eat last and starve to death preferentially” calculus) conspire to make the risks of abortion relatively minor by comparison.
Think about that. MY certainly has not.
I guess that’s assuming that there would be no abortions for medical reasons and that the fundies definition of emergency contraception as a form of abortion would be in place.
EC is only 75% effective, and there’s no guarantee it would be used 100% of the time it’s necessary.
Again, I think the car keys example is critical. Even if you create a culture where everyone uses car keys and respects the need for them (which is roughly what we have), people lose keys and lock them in the car. You still need AAA. Abortion can be reduced, but will always be necessary.
I will say that’s why I think there’s some problem with using abortion reduction as a place for “common ground” with anti-choicers instead of a wedge issue to demonstrate they’re hypocrites. They think in such absolutist terms: Stop Abortion. Anything short of that—and all reduction strategies will fall short of complete stoppage—is rejected. Now, it’s rejected out of bad faith, since they want to ban, rather than stop, abortion, but it does give them wiggle room to disregard reduction strategies.
Sorry, make that the lifetime risk of dying from pregnancy or childbirth is 2-3 in 100.
Sometimes I feel like I’m the only person who remembers the “pro-life” policies in Romania and how horribly wrong they went. Turns out that even if you ban abortion and birth control, women will still figure out a way to get abortions. Even if you require all women of childbearing age to submit to monthly gynecological exams to check for pregnancy, women will still get abortions.
Oh, and it amuses me that when I Googled for the above link, there’s a link from a “pro-life” organization decrying the high rate of abortion in Romania, as if it just sprung up out of nowhere for no reason. Idiots.
IM, I hardly see how you’ve shown that there was ‘no effect at all’ in Germany. You acknowledge there was a one-time rise–which is entirely consistent with, and in fact suggests, *some* deterrent effect. (The gradual decline is likely to just be a happy consequence of fewer unwanted pregnancies from increasing contraceptive use, etc., but I’m no expert; the US has also seen a recent decline, yes?) My knowledge of this is casual, I won’t pretend to be an expert, but this book seems to claim policy (interestingly, state level policy) does have some impact in the US.
Look, think about the weirdness of the claim being made: if the argument is that illegality has NO independent impact, but the Lancet study shows that countries with illegality + anti-women sex policies generally have about the same rates as legality + pro-women sex policies … that would imply that contraceptive access, &c., ALSO has no independent impact. And surely none of us believe that! Isn’t the more reasonable interpretation that restricting access does lower rates somewhat, AND restricting contraceptive use &c. raises them somewhat, canceling it out in net?
Again: all I’m saying is the Lancet study isn’t even *trying* to get at the specific question at issue here. What it DOES say is important enough; let’s just focus on that! Amanda is quite right in her policy prescriptions, but misstating what the study says lets the wingnuts just create a distraction and turn the conversation into “ooh look the pro-choicers distorted the study” when the issue should be about saving lives and empowering women.
Obviously, the availability of contraception has a large effect on the rate of abortions (the rate of abortions in the countries of Eastern Europe where abortions have long been legal but contraception has only recently become widely available has decreased substantially). Since this is an observational study there are possible confounding factors (such as the status of women in other respects, the availability of contraception, how safe childbirth is, …) which means that concluding from this study that the legality of abortion has no affect on the abortion rate is premature (of course, trying to claim that the legality of abortion has an affect is just as bad–actually a bit worse, since the conclusion goes against the data).
One of the things you need to remember about observational studies is that there are so many things that could influence the results that it’s very hard to predict results (there are many studies that show that something that’s ‘obvious’ is not true). That’s why when you teach stats, you always stress that correlation is not causation.
Sometimes I feel like I’m the only person who remembers the “pro-life” policies in Romania and how horribly wrong they went.
Don’t know where your link went , but here’s another
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4630855.stm
One way to raise the level of dialogue would be to get my play set in an abortion clinic, Under Siege, produced and reviewed and discussed. In it, abortion counselors and women for whom pregnancy is problematic talk about what their choices mean, not just personally but politically, too. Yadda, yadda– plenty of “abortion cases” on TV, right? But the context is always sensational– lawyer talk, cop talk, nutcakes…. I don’t see the range and structure that presents decisions about childbearing as determining what it means to be a female human being in community with other humans. I’m not trying to sell my play– I put it on my web site to give it away. But I’d like to give it to enough people so that the breadth of POV it expresses can enlarge the discussion.
Wait a moment X Trapnel. First you claim a study researching the abortion politics and abortions rates across nation states is meaningless because you don’t like the results.
And then you try to prove the point with a book about state politics in the U.S. ? Fine. I think your book proves nothing because you can just cross a state line to get an abortion in the U.S. And anyway cultural differences , access to contraception and so on determines abortion rates, state politics just correlating. And you can`t translate american results anyway and even your favorite book shows that national politics are meaningless.
See? I can play the game of handwaving as well as you or Yglesias.
Now back to real facts. I have not acknowleged a rise. All that did change was the official statistic. By bringing in grey and black abortions into legality, the statistic captured reality better.
Now you offer a different cause for a drop in abortion numbers: A spread in contraceptive use. In Germany. In the mid-nineties. Sure. Come on, Germany in the nineties was neither a developing country nor mississippi. Our great cultural change regarding contraceptives was in the early seventies (The pill).
Correlation is not causation, but the only thing that changed was the abortion policy, changing in the direction of legalization, with the usual result: fewer abortions.
(And you talking about the”Lancet study” - very telling)
(The gradual decline is likely to just be a happy consequence of fewer unwanted pregnancies from increasing contraceptive use, etc., but I’m no expert; the US has also seen a recent decline, yes?)
Actually, no. The abortion rate went down in the 1990s, but has been creeping back up again. Why? Because contraceptive use has gone down. Since it’s primarily gone down among poor women, it’s probably because of the cost.
Don’t know where your link went , but here’s another
D’oh! I’ll try it again:
http://countrystudies.us/romania/37.htm
IM, I wish you were a little less hostile here. I didn’t say it was meaningless, I said it was very important: it shows that the wingnut package of policies doesn’t lower abortion relative to the liberal package of policies. That is *not the same* as saying that abortion restriction, taken *by itself*, has no effect. This may seem a tiny difference, but it’s a very real one, and it’s why this conversation has gotten derailed instead of focusing on the actual, important, finding.
The book I linked to *does* try to get at the actual causal mechanisms, by relying on more detailed data over time and within states. Various other studies have also tried to get at the causal impact. It’s hard, and it’s unclear exactly how large the effect is, but it really doesn’t seem to be zero.
Looking again at the Germany thing: the data includes out-of-country abortions, but you might be right that there’s a lot of unreported stuff; I was assuming the data was solid, but maybe not. (Illegal abortions can be estimated, obviously, since that’s what the study that started this whole thing did.) As for why it’s been dropping steadily, I admitted I had no real idea; I meant more ‘general progress towards fewer unwanted pregnancies’ more than any one factor. Gradual drops seem to be a trend in lots of developed countries these days, yes?
And for god sake I said Lancet because that’s where it was published, a very respectable journal; if you’re insinuating anything about the Iraq morality studies, I think they’re fine work.
Again, the weirdness of your position is this: if you think contraceptive use / greater autonomy helps reduce abortion (and surely you do, right?) then anti-autonomy countries should have considerably *higher* abortion rates than liberal ones, under the hypothesis that criminalization makes no difference at all. But the study seems to say there’s no *overall* difference — so either neither factor does anything, or, as I suggest, one tends to cancel the other out.
Mnemosyne’s point bolsters what I meant: contraception, and all the other pro-woman stuff that goes with it, matters! And if we believe that, it’s kind of odd that there’s not really any overall difference between liberal and criminalizing nations in the total rate. This makes more sense if we think of two countervailing factors.
Anyway, this seems to be useless; since I’m on your side here in policy terms I don’t get the hostility. My point is merely that accurately characterizing the study will avoid letting the wingnuts cause distractions later, like they’re doing now. Oh well.
I do think the “illegal abortion causes more abortion” / harm reduction argument is a loser. It’s like the “morning after pill is not an abortion pill!” campaign, also a loser in my opinion.
And I think connecting abortion to “yay sex” is also destined to failure — many people *are* anti-sex, and while that is a problem in itself I also think it’s a problem that is better addressed independently of the abortion debate.
the one slam-dunk argument for abortion is the one that says: you’re either for abortion or you are for forced pregnancy and forced childbearing.
Sure, people choose to have all kinds of sex other people disapprove of: drunk at a party! with a casual acquaintance! on the third date! as a teenager! out of wedlock! as a feminist! etc. etc.
Let the anti-sex people knock themselves out disapproving of every possibie kind of sex. It’s their back and their monkey. But every time they say “no one MADE you have sex, you chose it, you made your bed now lie in it”…
Well, push them to the wall to articulate that last part of the argument instead of getting distracted by the first parts of it. Force them to articulate that it is the role of the state to force women to stay pregnant when they don’t want to be pregnant, and to bear children when they don’t want to bear children. There would be no abortion rate if there were no active desire for abortion, so compel them to argue for forced childbearing — IN THOSE TERMS. “please, Phyllis Shafly, tell us why forced childbearing is good American policy”.
In America at least, any other argument will fail, but that one is slam-dunk.
Perhaps I`m overly hostile and I shouldn`t have snapped at the “Lancet study”. Still you seem to accept the results of science in the case of the more famous “Lancet Study” and in this case…
I think you are trying much to hard to play the “reasonable liberal”. Angling for a job at TNR or what?
:-)
Look, if you want to critisize the study, do it. What`s wrong with the methodology? Are there better studies? Persuade me.
Instead Yglesias and you “derail” the discussion, to use your term, by argumenting from disbelief and by just assuming that deterrence work.
I´m not a social scientist and only a very mellow feminist. I’m a lawyer with a special interest in the history of criminal law. And deterrence power of criminal law is not that strong. It works more or less on property crimes, white collar crime and so on. But if the values of society or a large or powerful enough class of society clashes with the law, the law will not prevail.
In Germany in the twenties abortion was considered wrong, dirty, unspeakable, unchristian. It was also illegal in all cases and harshly punished.
For all that it was estimated that there were between 300,000 and 500,000 abortions yearly. Only 1000 to 3000 cases were prosecuted. (Population of germany then about 65 mill.)
Now you perhaps understand why I believe that the total meaninglessness of the illegality of abortion is a settled fact.
That actually came up for me once among some coworkers a couple of years ago. I was having lunch with some of the other teachers at a school I had a short-term contract with. We were all talking about our kids and they asked if I wanted more kids (I was the youngest teacher there). I said no and one of them replied that accidents happen. I then said that that’s what the clinic was for, because I wasn’t having more children. They were all shocked that I would admit to such a thing. And now that I think of it, one of the women who was the most put off by my reply was the department head and it probably had something to do with why my contract wasn’t extended.
Like premarital sex, you aren’t supposed to plan ahead for the eventuality - you know, cold, calculating, etc. So much more romantic to say “but I really didn’t have any choice but to have (premarital sex)(an abortion)” or “it just happened”.
We ain’t supposed to be rational. Get it?
AIUI this is actually true of animal-skin condoms. Which is why you should use latex unless you or your parter is allergic.
“You can start by asking your doctor, at your next checkup, whether s/he is trained in performing abortions, and would be willing to do them if it became illegal.”
Unless doctor-patient confidentiality goes both ways, I doubt many doctors would admit that they would break the law. I know that if I were a doctor, I wouldn’t.
Anyone got a law lesson here?
Sorry if it already covered.
Just to clarify my “in the wrong hands” comment, I was not suggesting that first we eliminate patriarchy (ha!) and then expand access to abortion. My point was that women who would rather not have been pregnant in the first place end up subjecting themselves to dangerous, illegal procedures because men can’t be bothered to use a condom. In this cultural context, even if abortion becomes legal, women still end up subjecting themselves to surgery they shouldn’t have had to go through if the men would use a condom or give up a quart of cane liquor a month so their wife could afford birth control pills. Much less dangerous, but still something they could have avoided if men weren’t so entitled and so cavalier about women’s health and women’s bodies.
Also, in characterizing the danger of childbirth, I should have included places that have high rates of child marriage. Young women, whose pelvises haven’t finished developing, are at much higher risk for fistula and really a lot of other birth complications. I was responding to the commenter who wondered if abortions are more dangerous in these countries because childbirth is more dangerous. I was trying to say that unless malnourished (or too young), childbirth isn’t that much more dangerous there than here. That is, it is the illegality of the abortion that makes it so dangerous, not the poverty of the country.
I think you are giving the overwhelming majority of them far too much credit.
The religious right isn’t a group of evil geniuses as much as they are a bunch of superstitious ignoramuses.
The Bible/Vatican/preferred religious authority says it, they believe it, and that’s that.
Except for the highly increased chances of having an unsafe or botched abortion when they are illegal… doesn’t that factor in here? (Psst. The answer is yes.)
Wow, was I ever incoherent last night on this thread last night. Seemed funny at the time. I should know better than to operate machinery when half-asleep.
“last night on this thread last night.”
Good grief. Speaking of incoherent…
“Except for the highly increased chances of having an unsafe or botched abortion when they are illegal”
for poor women only, of course