Interesting find. Is Abortion Rare? from NYT [View all]

[Tennessee Gal]

~snip~

Here are the facts. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 1.21 million abortions were performed in the United States in 2008, down from 1.31 million in 2000. Twenty-five percent of these were medical abortions induced by mifepristone in the first nine weeks, as opposed to surgical abortions. Guttmacher also estimates that, at current rates, three in 10 women will have an abortion by age 45, a number that many readers quoted in the comments section of this blog.

~snip~

But the statistic that caught my eye, and led me to call abortion “rare” was this: In a given year, 2 percent of American women between the ages of 15 and 44 have an abortion. That means 98 percent of them do not.

~snip~

If the right-wing manages to outlaw abortion, the abortion rate will not go down. It was about the same before the 1973 Roe v Wade decision, which recognized a woman’s right to privacy, as it was in 2008. (Approximations of illegal abortions in the 1960s range from 200,000 to 1.2 million a year, and the total population was under 200 million until the end of that decade. If the truth lies closer to the larger number, the rate was actually higher than post-Roe.) But abortions will become more dangerous. According to some estimates, fifty percent of the maternal deaths in the first half of the 20th century were due to illegal abortions. Was that a culture of life?

http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/is-abortion-rare/