Abortion and the Election, Part V: FOCA

Last time I said that I was finished blogging about this issue, which turns out not to be true, since I have noticed one more hot button issue associated with abortion that has picked up steam in the Evangelical community: opposition to the Freedom of Choice Act. There’s a petition circulating against FOCA that you may be interested in signing. This is a bad piece of legislation, I believe. I think the worst part is that it mandates (as far as I can tell – and I could be wrong) that even doctors with a moral opposition to abortion would be forced to perform the procedure. I can say with certainty that if I were a medical doctor, I would resign without hesitation before being forced to perform an abortion.

My prediction is that Barack, despite his campaign promise, will not sign FOCA. The reason is that it would ignite a culture war to end all culture wars. The Catholics, who own something like one in six of this nation’s hospitals, have talked about closing (not selling) their hospitals if the act goes through, which would probably finish tanking the economy. Barack wouldn’t want to jeopardize the economy and health care further, and he wouldn’t want to intensify the so-called culture war. He has much more important bipartisan things to accomplish, namely restoring the economy, working on energy policy, and reforming the health care system. One thing that we have learned about O’Bama is that he is a smart democratic politician, and I just can’t imagine him throwing away his presidency on this single issue.

But let me be clear: while I oppose FOCA, I have 100 times more disdain for the pro-life movement, since it is their social and economic policies that make it almost impossible for our country to achieve the low abortion rates enjoyed by Western Europe. So if you sign FOCA, I challenge you to examine another document, called the 95/10 initiative (related to the now-defunct Pregnant Women Support Act), being supported by the Democrats for Life and some pro-life democrats in Congress. This piece of legislation gets its name because it has the goal of reducing the abortion rate by 95% in the next 10 years (that was starting in 2005).

Will reducing abortions involve making contraception more available? Yes. Will reducing abortions involve ‘spreading the wealth’ to single mothers who need to finish high school? Yes. Will reducing abortions involve long, paid maternity leave so that women don’t have to sacrifice their careers? Probably. Will reducing abortions involve increasing special needs funding and children’s health care? Yes. Unfortunately the pro-lifers, fiscal conservatives, and laissez-faire Republicans will be the very same people who defeat these common-sense measures. They are too busy being concerned about Joe the Plumber and his fake bid to buy his company. But if you are really pro-life, you may want to rethink your staunch opposition to “spreading the wealth.”

Abortion and the Election, Part IV: Conclusions

Do you agree with me that each abortion is a moral tragedy? Then let’s attack the conditions that lead to abortion, using all of our resources. The pro-life movement has thus far rejected this path, unfortunately. They are only consumed with one issue: making sure that someone else bears the moral weight. Because, after all, if abortion is made illegal, and a girl has an abortion, then she and her doctor are the guilty ones. For those of us who are truly want to decrease the abortion rate, we need to get busy figuring out how to do this. One way to proceed is to look at countries that have already been successful in lowering the abortion rate. Western Europe makes a good example, since almost all of its countries have the lowest abortion rates in the world, and much lower than in our own country.

What have they got that we haven’t? I mentioned one thing last week, and that is the generous maternity leave. Germany, for instance, has a national law that gives women over two years of paid leave. This is a fantastic way to respond to the fact that most women who have experienced abortion cite the need to continue work or school as their reason for having an abortion. It just can’t be a coincidence that women who live in countries that celebrate pregnancy by giving women special opportunities to continue their career and/or education after having a baby don’t get as many abortions.

Western European women also have a much easier time getting contraception, and it’s not weird for teenage girls to be on birth control. GASP - I know, I know, the most horrible word that evangelical Christians can think of is “condoms.” James Dobson, for instance, has decided that sex education in public schools is one of the three great moral evils of our time (with abortion and homosexuality, of course). The common line is that giving teenagers condoms send ‘mixed messages.’ But this is refuted by statistics published by the Center for Disease Control that show that there is a reliable year-to-year decline in the number of teens who are sexually active and a simultaneous rise in the rate of condom use. The moral of the story is that making contraception available does not sexually liberate teenagers.

If you care about abortion, you must seek practical solutions. If you don’t want to look at those solutions, well, I think that betrays that your concern about abortion is merely about the question of moral responsibility. The distinction between pro-life is pro-choice is not helpful. The morally significant distinction is between those who desire to stop abortions from happening and those who don’t really care, and there are plenty who care deeply from both sides of the pro-life/choice debate, and there are plenty who don’t really care on both sides.

Abortion and the Election: Part III: What Does it Mean to Be Pro-life?

Here are the facts: 1) abortions happen in all countries; 2) the 19 countries with the lowest abortion rates have legalized abortion (although sometimes there are caveats); and therefore 3) the legality of abortion has no obvious causal connection with the number of abortions that actually take place.

So what does it mean to be ‘pro-life?’ I am becoming more and more convinced that ‘pro-life’ is one of the biggest misnomers in our society, since it is usually a code word for ‘anti Roe,’ and as I get to know the movement, I fear it is little else. Now, there is some genuine work being done in Crisis Pregnancy Centers, but besides this, I see little evidence that these folks actually desire to reduce abortions.

I suspect foul play because it is not just that the ‘pro-life’ movement fails to embrace policies that decrease the number of abortions; rather, the same people that belong to the pro-life movement fervently advocate against these common-sense measures. I want to give more examples next week, but I’ll limit myself to only one this week. Germany, a country with the second-lowest abortion rate in the world, has national legislation that mandates that women get more than 2 years of paid maternity leave. Bad for business? A strain on the GDP? Perhaps, but that is surely one factor in the low German abortion rate, especially considering that 75% of American women cite the need to stay in school or work as their motivating factor for getting an abortion. Germany, unlike America, gives women every reason in the world to become a mother! Talk about a pro-life country!

But the mandatory 3-year paid maternity leave will not happen in America anytime soon, mostly because of conservatives (you remember those people who are claim to be ‘pro-life’). You know what they would say: “That’s government interfering in business!,” or “Hey government, get the hell out of the private sector!” Or my favorite: “Women with children shouldn’t work!” (Although they mysteriously supported Sarah Palin in overwhelming numbers).

Pro-lifers, who condemn abortion in the strongest terms possible (murder), are unwilling to take measures to remove one of the major temptations for abortions. Instead, they simply want to make abortion illegal. What do they believe that making abortion illegal will accomplish? I am afraid I know: they don’t want to be responsible for abortions. Apparently then, their grief over abortions is not as important to them as the question of moral responsibility. If abortions were declared illegal, and therefore the pro-lifers themselves were not responsible for abortions, then you know that there would be an intense celebration within the pro-life community. ‘Hooray, abortions are illegal!’

Their celebration would mask the fact that the abortion rate would probably be unchanged, if statistics and surveys are any indication.

Abortion and the Election, Part II

What I am trying to do in this blog series is separate the issue of whether Roe v. Wade should be overturned from the issue of whether abortion is morally acceptable. I believe strongly (although I will not argue in this blog series) that there is no moral justification for abortion (with all the usual caveat’s – mother’s health, rape, etc). I consider this to be an issue that Christians should be able to agree on. But the issue of overturning Roe v. Wade is a different issue entirely.

A country-by-country comparison turns up some astounding results about the relationship between access to legal abortions and the number of actual abortions, regardless of legality (I'm getting most of my statistics here). Europe is a good test case, since abortion is fully legal throughout the continent. But when you compare Western Europe to Eastern Europe, you will find an enormous disparity between the actual number of abortions. In most Western European nations, the number of actual abortions is 10 or less per 1000 women; in some Eastern European nations, the number goes to 50 or even 80 abortions per 1000 women (our country is somewhere in the middle, like 25/1000).

Now the real shocker for my anti-Roe friends: in countries where abortion is strictly illegal (a list is available here ), the abortion rates are sometimes very high. Look at Latin American countries, such as Brazil, Peru, or Chili. The number of abortions (all forbidden by law) performed there is often 40-50 per 1000 women. You have to go all the way to Israel or Japan to find examples of low abortion rates and no access to abortions on demand (although in both of these countries, abortion is legal for many other reasons, such as a potential defect in the fetus, or if the mother is poor).

Understanding these statistics can be complicated, but the simple point I want to make is that simply overturning Roe v. Wade will not be the ‘silver bullet’ that most Christians are hoping for. It will of course reduce the number of legal abortions, but it is not clear how it would affect the number of actual abortions. Since the abortion rate is tragically high in some areas of the world where abortion is legal (such as Eastern Europe), and also high in areas where abortion is illegal (Latin America), and low in some areas where it is legal (Western Europe), we have to conclude that there is no close correlation between the legality of abortions and how often they happen.

I am pro-life, and I am a liberal. Contradiction? No, because I do not see Roe v. Wade as my enemy. My enemies are those social conditions that lead to unwanted pregnancies and promt women to want an abortion. Those of us who are pro-life simply have to be more resourceful and thoughtful if we truly want to stand up and say “no” to abortion. Talk (and making abortion illegal) is cheap.

Abortion and the Election, Part I

I want to spend the two weeks before the Presidential election addressing the topic of abortion as it relates to public policy. This is an important issue for the millions of Christians who feel trapped. On the one hand, many evangelical Christians, unlike any time in the past 30 years, identify more with the Democratic party than with the Republican party on most issues. But there are many people in this “conservative Christian yet Democrat” demographic whose conscience will not allow them to vote for Democrats in the end because of abortion.(For a clear example of this struggle, go here)

I believe that abortion is wrong in the moral sense. I have seen arguments that attempt to make abortion morally justifiable, but I remain unimpressed. So if my choice was between allowing millions of abortions to happen or not, I would probably be forced to vote for Republicans, despite the fact that I disagree with them on about every other issue. But this is not the choice. There are a few considerations which make this issue more complex, which I hope to cover this week and next. I hope that my “Christian yet Democrat” audience will consider the issue more deeply than they have before.

First, as a practical matter, let’s ask what would happen if Roe v. Wade were overturned tomorrow. Well, the number of legal abortions would certainly go down – to zero, actually. But the actual number of abortions would not go down much at all. It is well-documented that before Rove v. Wade, there were a lot of illegal abortions, which often times permanently maimed or even killed the confused teenage girl having the procedure done. There are of course no statistics on this (that’s why they called them ‘back-alley’ abortions), but we know that they were common. In fact, this was one of the liberal motivations for Roe. If you overturned Roe tomorrow, the number of back-alley abortions would be absolutely astounding, with the additional evil that a girl may be maimed. As Christians, we need to ask ourselves if we want to stop abortions, or stop legal abortions.

So for those of us who are deadly serious about keeping abortions from happening, whether they are legal or illegal, the act of making abortions illegal is only a small part of the solution. After all, a back-alley abortion is still an abortion, and declaring it to be illegal does not change the fact that it happened. The truly important thing is not to simply create laws, but to work for the kind of society in which young women do not want to have abortions. This is the only way to stop back-alley abortions. On this issue, I judge that the liberals are doing much better than the conservatives. I’ll give some specific examples next week.