I’ll admit it. I’m pro-life.
Like most people, I believe the government should try, as a general goal, to minimize the amount of premature dying that goes on in our society.
For folks like Lila Rose, a second-year history student and the president of Live Action, an on-campus activist group dedicated, as she said, to “protecting the lives of the innocent,” this belief has turned into something of an anti-abortion crusade.
While many have scant sympathy for her view of exactly when life begins, let us ““ for the moment ““ give her the benefit of the doubt.
Counting everyone equally from conception to senescence, what is the best way to minimize the proportion of people who die prematurely?
As it turns out, new studies show that Live Action’s strategy of exhorting government to restrict access to abortion may not be the best way to go about it.
In a paper published Friday in the Lancet Medical Journal, scientists from the World Health Organization in Geneva and the Guttmacher Institute in New York reported that there is no difference between the abortion rates in countries where abortion is legal and where it is illegal.
“Highly restrictive abortion laws,” the authors write, “are not associated with low abortion incidence.”
Indeed, both the highest and lowest abortion rates were seen in regions where abortion is almost uniformly legal under a wide range of circumstances.”
Since the analysis doesn’t control for other factors that could influence abortion rates, such as women’s involvement in the workforce, it’s hard to interpret a causal relationship between legalization of abortion and abortion rates from their data.
Nevertheless, the study casts doubt on the notion that prohibiting abortion will drastically change abortion rates.
Two other studies, one by Wellesley economist Phillip Levine and another by The New York Times last year, also found that parental notification laws in the United States, which require minors to notify their parents before getting the procedure and which are also pushed by Rose’s group, have little, if any, effect on abortion rates.
Anecdotally, The New York Times reported that parents were actually more likely to encourage their children to get abortions once notified.
Thus, it doesn’t look like Live Action is really on the best path to achieve its end. But it could get back on track.
The Lancet paper argues that the best way to decrease abortion is to decrease demand. That is, give women the birth control they demand so they don’t get pregnant in the first place.
A 50 percent drop in the abortion rate in Eastern Europe, the authors argue, was driven primarily by the expansion of access to contraception that came with the fall of the Soviet Union.
Levine says the evidence he’s seen also supports this claim.
“There is strong evidence that if you make contraception widely available, you will see a decrease in unwanted (births),” he said.
The Lancet authors also cite the case of Africa, where a high abortion rate of 29 per 1000 women aged 15-44 ““ compared to a rate of 21 per 1000 in North America ““ coexists with a massive unmet demand for contraception.
Levine does indeed find ““ as Rose is quick to point out ““ that if abortion were outlawed in the United States, there would probably be a modest decrease in the abortion rate. He finds that there was roughly a 10 percent decrease in unwanted births when abortion was legalized in the U.S. in the 1970s.
Due to deficiencies in the data, though, it is uncertain what proportion of this decrease was due to increased abortion rates.
Today, however, he said in an e-mail, “Abortion is unlikely to be outlawed nationwide. Even if Roe v. Wade were overturned, many states would maintain its legal status, so the fertility impact would probably be considerably less than (10 percent).”
What this suggests is that pro-life activists are likely to get a better return for their activist energy, that is, a larger decrease in worldwide abortion rates, by advocating for contraception around the world as opposed to abortion restrictions in the U.S.
Since spreading contraception and family planning to the developing world is also far less controversial than restricting abortion is, it would be far easier for Live Action to affect abortion rates by pushing for these alternatives.
Look, abortion is bad, regardless of where you stand on the issue, and we ought to minimize it. In so doing, however, we should let reality guide us.
Also, while we’re at it, let’s ban the death penalty and get some universal health care. Those are two pretty easy ways to minimize death and create, as President Bush once called it, “a culture of life.”
E-mail Reed at treed@media.ucla.edu. General comments can be sent to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.