Question for our times: How to lower the number of abortions?
a) make them illegal
b) promote abstinence for women, and men, not willing to have a child
c) encourage contraception
Conservative legislators and jurists throughout the country have opted for a) make abortion illegal, thinking that will release thousands of fetuses now headed for extinction. Of course, history — the history that Justice Samuel Alito glides over — shows that women, when abortion was illegal, sought Park Avenue (or European) obstetricians for D and Cs, or back-alley abortionists, or the ever-handy coat-hangers. A lot of women, particularly poor women who could afford only the coat-hangers, died.
As for b), the enthusiasm for abstinence, our legislators have had enough extramarital scandals for us to doubt their enthusiasm for this solution.
c) Contraception is the key. When the Affordable Care Act made contraception insurable, rates of abortion dropped. In 2017, the rate was 13.5 abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age, the lowest rate since 1973. The reason: women had access to affordable, easy-to-get contraception, from diaphragms to the pill to IUDs. And men learned that condoms are not an affront to masculinity, but a way to protect their partners not just from pregnancy, but from sexually transmitted diseases.
Yet Arizona, Mississippi, Texas, Florida, and Arkansas - with high rates of teen pregnancy — have made abortion almost impossible. As for sex education in public schools, it is not mandated, and includes “opting in” and “opting out” barriers. With “opt in,” parents must expressly enroll their child; with “opt out,” they can decline. Schools do not give parents those options for American history, English, mathematics….
As for the curricula itself, think “abstinence.” Abstinence reigns supreme in many states’ curricula. President Trump had stressed support for “abstinence only” curricula. If a state does not stress “only abstinence,” it can stress “abstinence as the preferred choice.”
Sex education has always been a lightning rod for the Moral Majority. In 1980, when New Jersey was the first state to mandate sex education, Jerry Falwell spurred his troops on, objecting that the curriculum would lead to acceptance of pedophilia (Politico: “The Sex Ed Wars Will Never End”). In 2021, Jerry Falwell Jr. resigned from Liberty University over a sex scandal revolving around the family’s “pool boy.”
Cruelly, Americans who hoped that contraception might make abortion legal, but also rare, face the irony: Those who seek to quash legal abortion want also to quash contraception. A woman is trapped. (The Washington Post: “Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves Won’t Rule Out Banning Contraception”). On the one hand, she cannot learn about the varieties of contraception. Indeed, she cannot easily buy them, even on-line. On the other hand, if she does get pregnant, she cannot legally get an abortion. This is the “Handmaid’s Tale,” brought to you by scores of jurists and legislators.
The onslaught of rhetorical balderdash obscures the intent of these restrictions. Sanctity of embryos? Judicial originalism? States’ rights? Hardly. This is about the rights of women. In restricting abortion, legislators and jurists are not letting women make decisions about their bodies, their families, their morality, and making physicians bystanders in those decisions. They don’t trust women. Do they see women as inherently immoral, stupid, uncaring? Or, perhaps like the 1595 debaters Valens Acidalius and Simon Gediccus, they wonder: Are Women Human?
Joan Retsinas is a sociologist who writes about health care in Providence, R.I. Email retsinas@verizon.net.
From The Progressive Populist, June 15, 2022
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