In reading your book, I am impressed by your level of respect for
ALL of God's creation. I continually wonder if you extend the same
level of respect to unborn babies. I would like to know your position
on abortion. I hope this is not too forward or personal but God
has quickened my spirit in numerous issues of respect in the last
several years. Blessings and Peace to you.
Louise
Dear Louise,
I share your concern about the fate of the unborn, and believe we
should do what we can to reduce the number of abortions that occur.
At the same time, I remember that before Roe vs. Wade, during the
eighty or so years when abortions were for the most part illegal
in the United States, hundreds of thousands of women in this country
died from abortions performed under unsanitary conditions. During
that time, abortions were banned, but that didn’t stop them
from being performed, illegally and underground, sometimes with
disastrous results. Emergency rooms saw a stream of mutilated women,
victims of self-induced and back street abortions.
In 1973, the Supreme Court's Roe vs. Wade decision declared that
the state laws against abortion were unconstitutional. In the next
20 years, after abortion was legalized by Roe vs. Wade, abortion-related
maternal deaths in the U.S. dropped more than five-fold. Countless
women were spared disabling, long-term health consequences from
unsafe abortions.
History has repeatedly shown that women get abortions even when
they are illegal, and even when they have to risk their lives to
do so. It appears to me that making abortion illegal does not succeed
in eliminating abortion, but pushes the practice underground, making
what can be one of the safest of all surgical procedures highly
dangerous, and only marginally reducing the number that occur.
One of the most extreme examples of what can happen when abortion
is made into a criminal offense took place in Romania. For 14 years
(ending in December of 1989), Romania under dictator Nicolae Ceausescu
made abortions not only a criminal offense, but one punishable in
some instances by death. No woman under 45 with fewer than five
children could obtain a legal abortion under any circumstances.
The effort to prohibit abortion was so massive that it involved
a special arm of the secret police force, called the "Pregnancy
Police," who administered monthly checkups to female workers and
monitored pregnant women. Nevertheless, the country exceeded virtually
all other European nations on rates of abortion and abortion-related
maternal mortality. Some 3,000 women a year came to Bucharest Municipal
Hospital after botched abortions, even though doing so subjected
them to terrifying legal consequences. There is no telling how many
women died without seeking medical aid, but conservative estimates
are that more than 1,000 women died each year in Bucharest alone
from bungled abortions.
That, of course, is not a fair comparison to our situation in the
U.S. today. But I do believe that it is instructive that in Western
Europe, by contrast, legalization of abortion coupled with public
education efforts on planned parenthood has not only produced the
world's lowest abortion-related maternal mortality rates, but also
reduced the number of abortions performed.
On the Swedish island of Gotland, for example, abortions were cut
by 50 percent in three years by providing improved family planning
services. That is a much greater reduction in abortions than has
ever been achieved anywhere through illegalization. Another example
is the Netherlands, where abortions are not only legal, but are
paid for by the state. This nation, where contraceptives are widely
available and comprehensive sex education is an accepted part of
the school curriculum, enjoys one of the lowest rates of abortion
in the world.
It seems clear that worldwide, the most abortions occur in those
nations where there is limited access to contraceptives. In 1990,
the Soviet Union was home to 70 million women of childbearing age,
yet did not have a single factory producing modern contraceptives.
At that time the average Soviet woman was terminating between five
and seven pregnancies during her reproductive years. Researchers
in Soviet health at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. estimated
that there were three abortions for every live birth.
When access to contraception for couples in Hungary was poor, the
country had one of the highest abortion rates in the world –
even though abortions were illegal. But when Hungary undertook a
campaign to reduce the abortion rate by distributing condoms, birth
control pills, and IUDs, and educating people about their use, the
results were stunning. Even as abortion was being made legal, there
was a substantial decline in the number performed.
The lesson seems to be that the most effective way to reduce the
number of abortions is to provide couples with the means to understand
their fertility and to prevent unwanted pregnancies. This is why
I support birth control, family planning, education, and other means
to improve the health and welfare of women and children. To my eyes
the most effective way to reduce the number of abortions is to reduce
the number of unwanted pregnancies.
Currently, a remarkably high percentage of all U.S. abortions –
about a third of the total – are undergone by teenage girls.
Our lack of education regarding family planning methods is one of
the primary reasons that we now have one of the highest rates of
unintended pregnancy among teenagers in the industrial world.
On his first working day in office, current U.S. President George
W. Bush issued an executive order, known by its critics as the "global
gag rule," that prohibits foreign family planning organizations
from receiving U.S. government aid if they so much as mention abortion
as an option for women with unwanted pregnancies. This prohibition,
which applies even if no U.S. funding is being used for the activities
in question, is seen by many in the international family planning
community as an abhorrent restriction on free speech. The ostensible
objective of the gag rule is to reduce the number of abortions,
but by greatly undercutting the funding for the delivery of family
planning services, it will probably have the opposite effect.
The international family planning programs losing their funding
as a result of the gag rule have offered a wide range of services,
from sex education to maternal health care and programs to stop
the spread of sexually transmitted diseases such as AIDS. By preventing
unwanted pregnancies, they have decreased the incidence of abortion.
These are programs that have promoted education and contraception,
not abortion, as instruments of family planning. In fact, the program
of action adopted at the 1994 Cairo International Conference on
Population and Development emphatically condemns the use of abortion
for family planning.
The International Conference on Population and Development also
affirmed family planning as a fundamental human right: "All
couples and individuals have the basic right to decide freely and
responsibly the number and spacing of their children and to have
the information, education, and means to do so." I’m afraid
that one consequence of the Bush administration’s invoking
of the gag rule will be to deliver a serious setback to efforts
to secure these rights for the people of the world.
The issue of abortion is of course highly controversial today, and
intelligent people of goodwill may disagree about aspects of the
situation. But I do believe that the most realistic and humane way
to reduce abortions is not to be found in making them illegal, but
by actively supporting family planning programs both domestically
and abroad.
