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(or, "Why I'm Pro-Choice" for Blogging for Choice Day)
The abortion rate is down to its lowest level since 1974. Yay. Everyone has their own interpretation of that decline, including the prevalence of high school abstinence education (funny, since most women getting abortions are over 18) to comprehensive sex education to emergency contraception to increased contraceptive use to a thriving economy (really?) and on and on. We're getting closer, though not that close, to "safe, legal, and rare" and a lot of folks who are ooky about abortion* are cheered by this. And rightly; no one really strives to need an abortion. But if the rate continues to fall and abortion becomes less common, we need to make sure that we're not stigmatizing those women who need abortions. I've heard some women, some allies, click their tongue because they "don't understand how these college-educated women can get pregnant accidentally". So let's do the numbers, shall we?
Assume a perfect world.** Assume that everyone is using an effective contraception method: condoms, pills, shots, IUDs, tubal ligation or vasectomy. And assume that they're grouped so that we can easily see who's using what.
Condoms work about 85% of the time with typical use, give or take a few percentage points.*** That means they will fail about 15 times out of 100. There are 900 students at the school I'm teaching at next month. Let's assume they're all using condoms (and that none of them are dating their classmates). Total for this year: 135 pregnancies.
Birth control pills (patches, rings, etc) will work about 92% of the time with typical use. The college I went to had 1800 students. If they are all using estrogen-based contraceptives as their method of pregnancy (and again, none of them are dating their classmates) the total pregnancies in one year will be 144.
Tubal ligations will work about 99.3 percent of the time; that's only four failures out of a thousand on any given year. I pass the residences of about ten thousand people on the way to work each morning. Total: 70 pregnancies.
There are lots of folks who will be unexpectedly pregnant each year, no matter how careful they are with birth control. (You are free to mention abstinence to me, but I should note that lots of spouses will be unhappy with that idea. And let's please not talk about fertility awareness, which clocks in at less than 75%.) Some women will take stock of their situation and decide to continue the pregnancy. Others will have compelling reasons for ending it. It's not my place to judge who should be in which camp, although boy howdy do I have my opinions on that.
So in a perfect world, and in the absence of uterine replicators, we still have women who need abortions. Then we have to talk about all the ways that our world isn't perfect: people lie about contraceptive use. Some folks can't convince their partners to use birth control. People get abused, pressured, manipulated, threatened. We can prevent lots of pregnancies, we can ease the burden of unexpected parenthood, but at the end of the day, we will always need abortions as a last resort.
Currently, about 40% of women have an abortion at some point in their lifetime. I'd love to see that number fall too. But we will never be able to outlaw abortion without harming women. So on the anniversary of Roe, let's remember that truth.
____
*I knew that I had experienced a major ideological shift when I stopped asking whether someone was pro-choice and started asking if they were pro-choice enough.
**For the purposes of this statistic-friendly world, everyone is heterosexual and sexually active. I know that's not EVERYONE's perfect world, but shh, I'm doing some math here.
***Sources here: http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fb_contr_use.html
The abortion rate is down to its lowest level since 1974. Yay. Everyone has their own interpretation of that decline, including the prevalence of high school abstinence education (funny, since most women getting abortions are over 18) to comprehensive sex education to emergency contraception to increased contraceptive use to a thriving economy (really?) and on and on. We're getting closer, though not that close, to "safe, legal, and rare" and a lot of folks who are ooky about abortion* are cheered by this. And rightly; no one really strives to need an abortion. But if the rate continues to fall and abortion becomes less common, we need to make sure that we're not stigmatizing those women who need abortions. I've heard some women, some allies, click their tongue because they "don't understand how these college-educated women can get pregnant accidentally". So let's do the numbers, shall we?
Assume a perfect world.** Assume that everyone is using an effective contraception method: condoms, pills, shots, IUDs, tubal ligation or vasectomy. And assume that they're grouped so that we can easily see who's using what.
Condoms work about 85% of the time with typical use, give or take a few percentage points.*** That means they will fail about 15 times out of 100. There are 900 students at the school I'm teaching at next month. Let's assume they're all using condoms (and that none of them are dating their classmates). Total for this year: 135 pregnancies.
Birth control pills (patches, rings, etc) will work about 92% of the time with typical use. The college I went to had 1800 students. If they are all using estrogen-based contraceptives as their method of pregnancy (and again, none of them are dating their classmates) the total pregnancies in one year will be 144.
Tubal ligations will work about 99.3 percent of the time; that's only four failures out of a thousand on any given year. I pass the residences of about ten thousand people on the way to work each morning. Total: 70 pregnancies.
There are lots of folks who will be unexpectedly pregnant each year, no matter how careful they are with birth control. (You are free to mention abstinence to me, but I should note that lots of spouses will be unhappy with that idea. And let's please not talk about fertility awareness, which clocks in at less than 75%.) Some women will take stock of their situation and decide to continue the pregnancy. Others will have compelling reasons for ending it. It's not my place to judge who should be in which camp, although boy howdy do I have my opinions on that.
So in a perfect world, and in the absence of uterine replicators, we still have women who need abortions. Then we have to talk about all the ways that our world isn't perfect: people lie about contraceptive use. Some folks can't convince their partners to use birth control. People get abused, pressured, manipulated, threatened. We can prevent lots of pregnancies, we can ease the burden of unexpected parenthood, but at the end of the day, we will always need abortions as a last resort.
Currently, about 40% of women have an abortion at some point in their lifetime. I'd love to see that number fall too. But we will never be able to outlaw abortion without harming women. So on the anniversary of Roe, let's remember that truth.
____
*I knew that I had experienced a major ideological shift when I stopped asking whether someone was pro-choice and started asking if they were pro-choice enough.
**For the purposes of this statistic-friendly world, everyone is heterosexual and sexually active. I know that's not EVERYONE's perfect world, but shh, I'm doing some math here.
***Sources here: http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fb_contr_use.html
