"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." To the blogger, this implied that abortion is rare.
Hmm--what kind of logic is that? At 2 percent per year, over the 29 year span cited, this would imply that the probability of a given woman having an abortion in her lifetime would be
An even better perspective on the frequency of abortion is to simply compare annual abortion rates and birth rates. In 2008, the latest year I found both numbers for, there were 4.2 million births in the U.S. How many abortions? According to the Guttmacher Institute, (and several right-to-life pages give similar numbers), 1.2 million. That implies that 1.2/5.2=22% of all pregnancies are aborted. That's 2 out of 9, almost 1 in 4.
An informal survey of my generally well-informed and well-educated friends, on both sides of the issue of whether or not abortion should be legal, finds that 100% of them are appalled by these numbers.
All agree: abortion is much too common in our society. It is anything but rare.
I think Betteridge's Law applies here: to any headline that asks a question, the answer is 'no'.
ReplyDelete-- John Roberts