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The New York Times
Opinion
Behind the Abortion
Decline
EDITORIAL,
nytimes.com on the Web, January 26, 2008
Coinciding with this month’s 35th
anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling that legalized abortion, a new study
shows that the United States continues to make progress on reducing the abortion
rate. The progress would be greater if more was done to avoid unintended
pregnancies.
Between 2000 and 2005, the last year in the study by the Guttmacher Institute,
the number of abortions performed yearly dropped from 1.3 million to 1.2
million, the fewest since 1974. The proportion of pregnancies ending in
abortion also declined significantly.
Abortion opponents like the National Right to Life Committee seized upon the
numbers as vindication for their strategy of demonizing abortion and making it
harder for women to obtain one. Many states now mandate counseling
sessions beforehand. But a harder look at the data suggests another
explanation.
Almost two-thirds of the decline in the total number of abortions can be traced
to eight jurisdictions with few or no abortion restrictions — New York,
New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, California, Oregon, Washington State and
the District of Columbia. These are places, notes the Guttmacher
Institute’s president, Sharon Camp, that have shown a commitment to real sex
education, largely departing from the Bush administration’s abstinence-only
approach. These jurisdictions also help women avoid unintended pregnancies
by making contraception widely available.
The lesson: prevention works. Restrictions on abortion serve mainly
to hurt poor women by postponing abortions until later in pregnancy. While
shifting social mores may change some people’s behavior, the best practical
strategy for reducing abortions is to focus on helping women avoid unwanted
pregnancies.
One of the most intriguing findings of the abortion study has to do with RU-486,
which allows women to safely terminate a pregnancy in its first weeks without
surgery. Guttmacher Institute researchers found that a significant decline
in the number of abortion providers over the past decade is being offset by an
increase in providers that offer the drug.
This growing access, along with refinements in ultrasound imaging help explain
the positive trend toward earlier abortions. It has long been true that
nearly 90 percent of abortions in this country occur in the first trimester, but
the number that occur within the first eight weeks of pregnancy has increased
sharply.
Still, in 2005 about one in five pregnancies ended in abortion, emphasizing the
need for a national emphasis on better sex education and access to
contraception.
(Emphasis added.)
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