Playing With The Data

Michael J. New defends the contraceptive unfriendliness of the pro-life movement against the Dish's critique. He writes:

[In] 2003, Guttmacher released an article in “International Family Planning Perspectives” that showed simultaneous increases in both contraceptive use and abortion rates in the United States, Cuba, Denmark, Netherlands, Singapore, and South Korea.

The study he links to concludes:

When fertility levels in a population are changing, the relationship between contraceptive use and abortion may take a variety of forms, frequently involving a simultaneous increase in both. When other factorssuch as fertilityare held constant, however, a rise in contraceptive use or effectiveness invariably leads to a decline in induced abortionand vice versa.

He then links to a study that found among American women "2 percent said that they did not know where to obtain a method of contraception and 8 percent said that they could not afford contraceptives." The earlier study was of 197 countries. From the BBC report:

[G]lobally, the number of married women of childbearing age with access to contraception has increased from 54% in 1990 to 63% in 2003, with gains also seen among single, sexually active women. But there were still significant unmet contraception needs, and a lack of interest among pharmaceutical companies in developing new forms of birth control that provide top protection on demand, the institute said.

And:

The Guttmacher Institute's survey found..that improved access to contraception had cut the overall abortion rate over the last decade.

Theocons cannot have it every which way. Practically speaking, if you really believe that all abortion is murder, a huge program of contraception education and access is the most practical life-saver out there. And yet the Catholic pro-lifers refuse to embrace it and go to these kinds of lengths to deny reality. By their own logic, they are the ones enabling the massacre of millions.

2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan