Abortion should NOT be rare.

[PeaceNikki]

125. So - you really want unwanted pregnancies to be rare? Hey, me, too!! We should

clarify that so we never have to diagram it that way. Oh, wait - the national party already has. It's weird that DU is so far behind.

Oh, also - rare in medical terms has a very different meaning. How far could the US reduce the number of abortions and would that meet the threshold for "rare"?

The answer to this question employs the standard set by the NIH Office of Rare Diseases Research which defines a rare disease as one having a prevalence of fewer than 200,000 affected individuals in the United States. Currently there are 1.2 million abortions per year in the United States. Thus the number of abortions would need to decline by 83 percent to meet this threshold. Such a reduction is both unrealistic at a practical level and impossible with current conceptive options. All contraceptive methods have failures—both due to the method themselves and due to user errors. Currently 54 percent of all abortions happen to women using birth control. For the purposes of this argument let us assume that all women used contraception perfectly over the course of their sexual lives when not trying to get pregnant and used the method with the very lowest failure rate, the intrauterine contraception or IUC. With 61 million women of reproductive age and a desire for an average of two children per woman, the number of unintended pregnancies would still be greater than 200,000 per year.

The Netherlands provides an example of what might be more realistic and possible. With one of the lowest abortion rates in the world at 8.4 per 1,000 women, there are still over 34,000 abortions per year—not meeting the incidence rate for “rare” given the population of only 16 million. While held up as a model for family planning and sexuality education, abortion happens routinely in the Netherlands. And U.S.-based pro-life groups remain loudly opposed to abortion in Netherlands.

So.. yeah, we should be careful how we use it when talking about abortion. It's unrealistic.