posted
A friend pointed out this article to me recently. Without giving my opinion on the matter (which would probably be incoherent at best right now), what do the rest of you think?
For those of you who are pro-choice, is this encouraging?
For those of you who are pro-life, is this surprising?
For either side - does this article give us enough info to be balanced and fair?
An aside: Does anyone know what kind of stats they keep for abortions? Do they track the difference between abortions for immediate health reasons vs. lifestyle reasons? (Or some other indicator of the reason an abortion was sought?)
Posts: 353 | Registered: Sep 2003
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posted
I only have an answer to your question to pro-choice people. It is in no way encouraging. I do not like abortions. I think there are some situations where they are a reasonable option and I think it should always be a womans choice to carry a child to term. I actually find it very sad. I wish that more women would make more of an effort to prevent unwanted pregnancys instead of terminating them.
Posts: 1015 | Registered: Aug 2004
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quote:For those of you who are pro-choice, is this encouraging?
No. I find it disgusting.
I am pro-choice because I believe that the back-alley, coat hanger jobs will be done if the law makes doctor administered abortions illegal.
This statistic breaks my heart and almost makes me believe that if a woman thought her own life may be at risk by having an abortion, she may think twice about having unprotected sex.
I don't think that there is such thing as a win when it comes to legislating life in a free will society.
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posted
I find that statistic not only vile, but also frightening because it shows just how careless people can be today.
Posts: 106 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote: Keeping in mind that the real statistic (when comparing apples to apples, instead of to oranges) is 40 out of 100
*nitpick* The statistic 74 for every 100 is equivalent to 74/174 which equals 42.5 %. So the difference when comparing apples to apples is only a 2.5% difference.
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If you get the "Satan is a Nerd" shirt, you can get the "Hades Doesn't Know Diddly About Dungeons and Dragons" for free. Posts: 2425 | Registered: Jan 2002
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posted
I see abortions as fine, as long as they are done before the half-way mark of the pregnancy, best if the first trimester. I see the fetus in the beginning as potential Human life, not a baby...but getting past the first or second trimester the fetus becomes too much like a baby and having an abortion becomes more and more morally uncertain.
I am also totally for women's right to choose. Birth control was and is one of the foundations of women's rights. The fact that they can choose not to be laid up with children if they don't want to be gave and gives them political freedom... to get jobs or do other things besides mothering. Because you ain't gonna stop the sex drive. People are going to have sex no matter what you do. Just look at the African AIDS crisis.
And abortion is also good for the children. Because if you are poor/destitute or are an unfit parent, it is criminal to raise a child that will be abused or will suffer unduely. To think about the big picture we already have six billion people on the planet. How long can the Earth's reasourses hold out against our population explosion? New York city is the US's most densly packed city. How many people can fit on that island? Anyway, the article states that the numbers are inflated because New York is a liberal city so there is a huge exodus from the outside coming in to get abortions safely and without harassment.
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quote:Birth control was and is one of the foundations of women's rights.
Ugh. My whole being rejects the idea that abortion should be looked at as merely another form of birth control.
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posted
I believe abortion should be legal, although it is not an option I would choose myself except in some very specific, never-going-to-happen circumstances. But I find it horrifying and saddening when it becomes, as these statistics seem to show it being, a form of birth control.
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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posted
I think it's scary that we could have half again more children if there was no abortion. Naturally I wish that people would practice safer sex, and I wish abortion didn't have to be an option. Hopefully in the future as birth control becomes more prevalent and more effective, we won't have to have it.
Posts: 4816 | Registered: Apr 2003
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quote: Because if you are poor/destitute or are an unfit parent, it is criminal to raise a child that will be abused or will suffer unduely.
I would be very curious to see statistics on the socio-economic statuses of people who get abortions. I've heard your argument frequently but from my purely anecdotal experiences it seems that the poor tend to have children whether they want them or not. The upper and middle classes are less likely to do this. I think if you're well off, you're more likely to want to maintain your current lifestyle and get an abortion than if you're poor and having babies that you'll struggle to feed is part of the norm.
Posts: 1947 | Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
I agree that abortion should not be done as birth control, it should be a last resort. People should use contraceptives or the morning after pill...although some would say that the morning after pill is a form of abortion...but since it prevents pregnancy or terminates the egg so early on I hardly consider it abortion.
Posts: 4953 | Registered: Jan 2004
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posted
It's the lack of responsibility in choosing actions to begin with that really saddens me here.
Birth control isn't 100% foolproof. As I can attest. But when the numbers are so high, I have to feel that many people who should be using it, aren't.
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posted
Not that I don't trust a news service to report something accurately, but here's the study, and the summation by the article appears to be accurate.
Those numbers just seem weird to me. I am curious why they are so high.
Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
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quote: Keeping in mind that the real statistic (when comparing apples to apples, instead of to oranges) is 40 out of 100
*nitpick* The statistic 74 for every 100 is equivalent to 74/174 which equals 42.5 %. So the difference when comparing apples to apples is only a 2.5% difference.
*nitpick*
Actually, no. You're forgetting something.
74 abortions per 100 births does not mean that there were only 174 pregnancies. Many pregnancies end in something that is neither an abortion nor a birth, such as a miscarriage (look up the statistics for how often miscarriage occurs, and you might be surprised).
You cannot extrapolate the actual percentage of aborted pregnancies from this data.
Posts: 1592 | Registered: Jan 2001
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quote:I am pro-choice because I believe that the back-alley, coat hanger jobs will be done if the law makes doctor administered abortions illegal.
I can understand and sympathize with some pro-choice folks' reasons for their opinion (though I disagree).
However, this is the one justification that just drives me crazy.
Making something legal entirely because a segment of the population threatens to willingly harm themselves if we don't do what they want ... it just strikes me as very similar to giving in to a terrorist's demands.
And what if we were to definitively discover that, statistically, pedophiles would rarely or never resort to murdering children if their sexual proclivities were made legal? Would that mean that child molestation should be decriminalized? And afterwards, would you say, "You can't stop people from molesting children if they really want to do it, and isn't this SO much better than all the kidnap-murders we'd be having if it weren't legal?" And you'd come up with some shocking statistics about all the unreported kidnap-murders that were covered up back before the legalization of man-boy love ... and you see where I'm going with this.
Either it's wrong and harmful to an individual protected by society, and it should be illegal, or it's NOT wrong, and legally, it should be just fine. This whole, "It's wrong, but at least with the laws the way they are, people aren't resorting to doing WORSE things" just does not fly with me.
It also just strikes me as patronizing. Like we're protecting people from themselves. We predict that people might willingly make a harmful choice unless we give them what they want, and so we GIVE THEM WHAT THEY WANT? Would you respect that kind of attitude if it came from a parent? "Well, she said she'd hold her breath until she turned blue if I didn't buy her a new Barbie, so I just HAD to do it ..."
What happened to telling people, "This is right, and this is wrong," then expecting them to adhere to it? If we frame our laws around the assumption that human beings cannot be expected — or even asked — to obey the law, and rather are more like an implacable force that cannot be ruled or instructed, but must be gingerly appeased like an angry god, then aren't we just encouraging our society to dip further and further into lawlessness?
Posts: 1907 | Registered: Feb 2000
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quote:The new Vital Statistics report released by the city Department of Health this month shows there were 124,100 live births, 11,700 spontaneous abortions and 91,700 induced abortions in the city in 2004.
quote:Making something legal entirely because a segment of the population threatens to willingly harm themselves if we don't do what they want ... it just strikes me as very similar to giving in to a terrorist's demands.
I understand how you feel about this one. But try this. Instead of looking at it like some kind of auto-terrorism, imagine it as though you're helping out, say, a scared, desperate, fourteen-year-old who beleives (and possibly rightly) that her parents will disown her for getting pregnant. She doesn't want to have an abortion, much less one involving a coat hager, but as she sees it, this is all that's left to her. It's one of the things legalized abortion is trying to prevent: to protect people, so they aren't driven to such lengths of desperation.
That said, yes people abuse the privelege far too often. You'd think simple economics would work it out for them; a condom is less expensive (on many levels) than an abortion. But people continue to amaze.
I heard a politician say something, in a rare and all-too-brief flare of intelligence, that sums up my feelings on the matter.
Abortions should be safe, legal, and rare.
Posts: 2907 | Registered: Nov 2005
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posted
Are miscarriages what they mean by unplanned abortions? If 40% of babies are dying because someone wanted them to, and another 34% are just dying, it seems a little odd that we spend so much time on the abortions.
Wouldn't it make more sense for us as a nation to spend more time preventing miscarriages? That's a lot of dead babies someone intended to keep.
Posts: 2283 | Registered: Dec 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Juxtapose: Abortions should be safe, legal, and rare.
Yes. Thankfully, the rate of abortions in the US has been on a general trend down for the last decade or so. (For national abortion data, the best we have available is the CDC's annual reports through the MMWR Surveillance Summaries on abortion.)
Of course it isn't surprising that the ratio of childbirth to voluntary abortion is somewhat artificially elevated in the country's largest city. [As is mentioned in the article, it is becoming more difficult to get an abortion in certain geographic regions, so I'm not surprised that we see high rates in a city such as NYC. Also, many people living in the city proper are young urban professionals, more likely with decreasing rates of childbirth than with increasing abortion rates -- the scale can be tipped by either losing some from one side or gaining on the other.] That is, I'm glad that I don't this is indicative of a larger trend of increasing numbers of abortions.
If it is, I am definitely saddened and concerned.
Posts: 14017 | Registered: May 2000
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quote:Originally posted by AvidReader: Are miscarriages what they mean by unplanned abortions? If 40% of babies are dying because someone wanted them to, and another 34% are just dying, it seems a little odd that we spend so much time on the abortions.
Wouldn't it make more sense for us as a nation to spend more time preventing miscarriages? That's a lot of dead babies someone intended to keep.
Yes. "Spontaneous abortion" is the medical term for "miscarriage." And I agree with you about this issue being of similar weight and concern as voluntary abortions. When I think of lost life, I think of so much grieving for spontaneous abortions, too.
Posts: 14017 | Registered: May 2000
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posted
Re: 40%...I don't know if you can trust that figure for number of spontaneous abortions. It may only be the ones that resulted in a trip to the doctor. I've heard estimates several orders of magnitude higher.
As for comparing apples to apples, abortion statistics are routinely reported both ways: - # abortions: # live births - # abortions/total(# abortions + # live births)
You just have to be careful which set of numbers you are using at any given point. Clearly, 74:100 encourages us mentally to think, Whoa! 74%!!! But as we've seen, the actual percentage or ratio is much lower.
According to the article, NYC has a 40% rate of abortions to total pregnancies, whereas the national average is 24%. They claim NYC is still the highest per-preganancy abortion locale in the US.
I suspect that if you looked only at large urbanized areas, NYC wouldn't look all that different from the rest of the country.
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posted
I honestly never have understoof why pro-choice people would be bothered by a high rate of elective abortion.
Posts: 326 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Irregardless: I honestly never have understoof why pro-choice people would be bothered by a high rate of elective abortion.
I am bothered by a high rate of elective abortion for many reasons, including (but not limited to, and not in rank-order) the following: it increases divisiveness in an already polarized society, it puts women at greater risk of harm than adequate birth control methods would have (although still less risk of harm than carrying to term), and I suspect it reflects one outcome of a long string of what I would consider bad decisions.
Posts: 14017 | Registered: May 2000
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quote:Re: 40%...I don't know if you can trust that figure for number of spontaneous abortions. It may only be the ones that resulted in a trip to the doctor. I've heard estimates several orders of magnitude higher.
How can 40% be wrong by several orders of magnitude?
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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If people are using birth control properly, and it's availabe, and they're being educated about its use, it would seem to me that there shouldn't be a high rate of abortions because most people should really only be getting pregnant when they want to. At least, that's a big reason why I think the 40% ratio is weird, if not regrettable.
However, I thought that NYC was pretty proactive with sex ed and making birth control available? So, again, why the large number? The suggestion that it's because of out-of-staters coming into NYC simply isn't borne out by the study. As was mentioned in the article, they represent less than 2%.
I also don't buy the idea that a lot of women are using abortion as birth control over other methods. Abortion isn't some day at the park. Other methods are easier on the woman both mentally and physically.
Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
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quote:I honestly never have understoof why pro-choice people would be bothered by a high rate of elective abortion.
I've come to realize that the vast majority of those who are pro-choice don't like abortion and would prefer it not to happen.
Posts: 221 | Registered: Mar 2003
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quote:How can 40% be wrong by several orders of magnitude?
There are so many spontaneous abortions, they even outnumber the number of conceptions. *grin
Actually, I bet Bob was speaking of orders of magnitude in terms of actual numbers, not just percentage rates. That is, more like 400,000 total than 40,000 total (to pull a figure out of a hat, for illustrative purposes only).
Posts: 14017 | Registered: May 2000
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posted
Yeah, that phrasing is a bit odd. I was using "re:40%..." to let people know I was talking about the numbers side of this discussion, not the "do you like abortions" side of the discussion.
Then, I went on to say that I didn't trust the figure given for spontaneous abortions, which is not 40%, but 11,700. I've heard numbers of spontaneous abortions that are in the ballpark of the number of live births (i.e., nearly 1/2 of fertilizations end without actual implantation or pregnancy). I don't have time to look that up now, but I think there's a specific definition of "spontaneous abortion" that should be presented along with whatever number people are reporting.
Sorry for the confusion.
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quote:And abortion is also good for the children. Because if you are poor/destitute or are an unfit parent, it is criminal to raise a child that will be abused or will suffer unduely.
As someone who was born to poor, unfit parents, and who was abused as a child in more than one way, I reject your implication that I would have been better off aborted. I happen to kinda like the life I have now.
Posts: 13680 | Registered: Mar 2002
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posted
Well, I can imagine a true anarchist personally opposing abortion but being unwilling to have a government in order to stop it. But among the 99.9% of people who'd agree that government has a legitimate purpose in forcibly protecting human rights, there should really be only two polar positions. Either elective abortion is the premeditated murder of innocent children, or it's simply a medical procedure involving the removal of some superfluous tissue. If the former, it's utterly vile and ought to be banned. If the latter, it's morally no different from a haircut and all this hand-wringing over its prevalence makes no sense.
Posts: 326 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:Wouldn't it make more sense for us as a nation to spend more time preventing miscarriages?
If someone were to demonstrate that it is not possible to make abortions illegal while also funding research into miscarriage I might consider this argument. As it is, the two are not mutually exclusive. Sure, one can make the argument that diverting resources from abortion prevention to miscarriage would save more lives. Beyond the empirical proof difficulty - after all, this might not be true - there is a consistency issue. Few people who make that argument, on either side of the political divide, really mean it. Otherwise we'd spend nothing on museums, theaters, or internet forums until we had managed to solve every single problem worse than inadequate cultural outlet and lack of bandwidth.
quote:That's a lot of dead babies someone intended to keep.
So should we do away with suicide prevention hotlines and depression screening until traffic accidents are down to zero?
Further, the availability of legal abortion may possibly make many people mentally minimize the level of harm caused by a miscarriage by devaluing the life of unborn children. For a large segment of the population (pretty much not including the mothers), the harm being mourned is that of the mothers' loss and, at most, the "potential" for human life.
Finally, unless one is strictly results-oriented in ones morality, it is possible to consider an abortion a greater moral evil than a miscarriage, even though the loss of human life is the same.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Storm Saxon: However, I thought that NYC was pretty proactive with sex ed and making birth control available? So, again, why the large number? The suggestion that it's because of out-of-staters coming into NYC simply isn't borne out by the study. As was mentioned in the article, they represent less than 2%.
I also don't buy the idea that a lot of women are using abortion as birth control over other methods. Abortion isn't some day at the park. Other methods are easier on the woman both mentally and physically.
That's one of the reasons I suspect that the ratio may be just as affected by decreased childbirth-in-city rates as increased voluntary-abortion-in-city rates. (It's a ratio, so of course the balance can be affected by an increase or decrease in either side.)
I'm thinking it's likely that if you want to have a child and have the option of doing it elsewhere than in an overcrowded, serving-all-who-come-to-the-door inner city hospital, you will. I bet the birthing centers and such are out in the suburbs.
Posts: 14017 | Registered: May 2000
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quote:Originally posted by Irregardless: .... there should really be only two polar positions. Either elective abortion is the premeditated murder of innocent children, or it's simply a medical procedure involving the removal of some superfluous tissue. If the former, it's utterly vile and ought to be banned. If the latter, it's morally no different from a haircut and all this hand-wringing over its prevalence makes no sense.
I see larger ramifications and implications of this rate for society as a whole.
I mean, one may not think that any other reason than loss of potential life should trump, but surely we can agree that this number (abortion rate) can be a proxy measure of other things that can be wrong? And surely we can agree that abortion doesn't just affect those immediately involved, no?
Posts: 14017 | Registered: May 2000
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quote: That's one of the reasons I suspect that the ratio may be just as affected by decreased childbirth in-city-rates as increased voluntary-abortion-in-city rates. (It's a ratio, so of course the balance can be affected by an increase or decrease in either side.)
I'm thinking it's likely that if you want to have a child and have the option of doing it elsewhere than in an overcrowded, servng-all-who-come-to-the-door inner city hospital. I bet the birthing centers and such are out in the suburbs.
Ah, this clears things up. I was confuzzled as to your statement in your last post about this. For some reason, it just wouldn't parse for me.
So, you're saying more people elect to go out of city for births, but elect to stay for abortions? Sounds possible. I wouldn't be suprised if there was a follow-up study, or article, on the heels of this one that examines this percentage more in-depth.
Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
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posted
(BTW, just for clarity's sake -- and Dagonee and I have puzzled around with this together before, so I'm pretty sure he understands where I'm coming from -- I don't think we should stop trying to prevent abortions until we've solved the problem of miscarriages. I'm at a stage where I'm just trying to get my head around the different sorts of emotions and inductive conclusions that result from each of them.
That is, I'm still struggling to figure out why and how we (in general) feel and act the way we do about each. This likely reflects more my own confused mind than trouble anywhere else. I say that sincerely.)
Posts: 14017 | Registered: May 2000
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quote:Originally posted by Storm Saxon: Ah, this clears things up. I was confuzzled as to your statement in your last post about this. For some reason, it just wouldn't parse for me.
Probably because I wrote it. *grin
quote:So, you're saying more people elect to go out of city for births, but elect to stay for abortions? Sounds possible. I wouldn't be suprised if there was a follow-up study, or article, on the heels of this one that examines this percentage more in-depth. [/qb]
I'm just saying that it's a possible interpretation. I'm sure someone else will run it up the evidential flagpole and see if the numbers salute.
(Betcha that butchered analogy made you even confuzzleder. )
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