Unsafe, Deadly & Legal
Janice Shaw Crouse on Abortion 30 Years After Roe v. Wade
One of the most important abortion mantras is “make abortion safe, legal, and rare.” It is legal, but it is not necessarily safe, and it is certainly not rare. The United States has the highest legal abortion rate among Western nations. Over one million children are aborted in the United States every year.
It is not rare among American women. Since Roe v. Wade made abortion legal in the United States in 1973, over 40 million abortions have been performed. In 1973, out of 46.8 million women of childbearing age (ages 14–44), there were 745,000 abortions. By 1996, with 60.4 million women of childbearing age (ages 15–44), there were 1,366,000 abortions.
Abortion is not rare even among teenagers. The United States has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the world. Four in ten young women become pregnant at least once before they reach the age of 20—nearly one million a year. In 1997, 1.7 percent of younger teens (ages 15–17) and 4.3 percent of older teens (age 18 or 19) obtained an abortion.
Abortion is not rare among women who are not married. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the abortion rate for unmarried women is four times greater than that of married women. Six million American women become pregnant every year—almost half of them are unmarried. Of those three million unmarried pregnant women, almost half have an abortion and almost half become single mothers. Very few of them marry the father of their child or give up the child for adoption.
Most of the unmarried women are living with the man who fathered their child, yet they do not even consider marriage and never consider giving the child up for adoption to a couple on the long list of infertile couples desperate to have a child. Ironically, young women today are told that marrying because you “have to” or giving up a child for adoption is “cruel.” It is not considered cruel to abort the child they do not want.
Indeed, in some circles, abortion is considered a “brave” and “courageous” action because nothing could be worse for a child than being “unwanted.” And, of course, it is argued in the same circles that nothing could be worse for a woman than to be saddled with a child that is “unwanted.”
No Choice at All?
Actually, something is much worse—discovering that a man is willing to have sex with you but is unwilling to marry you, even when that sex results in a pregnancy. The truth behind the data is that abortion is overwhelmingly a choice of unmarried, rather than married, pregnant women. Over and over, crisis pregnancy center personnel hear unmarried women say that their “boyfriend” or “partner” is making them have an abortion. Choosing to have the baby is not an option the women believe is available to them when a boyfriend or lover is pressuring them to have an abortion. Often the man tells the woman he has gotten pregnant that if she does not “get rid of the baby,” he is “out of here.”
Increasingly, abortion is less a desperate teen’s impulsive “solution” than a twenty-something’s calculated “choice” between a man she wants and the baby he refuses to accept. In 1996, women ages 20 to 24 had over 400,000 abortions, about one-third of the total performed that year. These women are, of course, supposed to be responsible, mature, and informed. Yet their behavior has a high likelihood of producing pregnancy, and the men they are involved with are poor candidates for marriage and even worse candidates for fatherhood. Even so, a lifestyle of casual sex is commonplace, and the rate of cohabitation is continuing to rise dramatically.
Though the median age for a woman’s first marriage is now the mid-twenties (it was 21 in 1973 and 24.8 in 1996), contrary to the feminist myth, women don’t have as many choices as they have been led to expect. Among cohabiting or sexually involved couples, the man determines if and when the couple gets married; a couple does not get married until the man is ready, regardless of how much the woman might desire marriage. Even when confronted with a pregnancy, too many men are unwilling to make a commitment or take responsibility. In this respect, too, trends have changed dramatically. In 1960, 60 percent of unmarried pregnant women married the father of their baby before the baby was born, in 1994, only 23 percent did.
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more on abortion from the online archives
24.1—January/February 2011
How Planned Parenthood's Founder Played the Christians, and Won by Allan C. Carlson
27.2—March/April 2014
on C. S. Lewis & the New State Paganism by W. E. Knickerbocker
30.3—May/June 2017
on the Misuse of Property Rights to Justify Slavery & Abortion by Robert Hart
more from the online archives
31.4—July/August 2018
Life & Love Are Real Despite Theatrical Illusions by Anthony Esolen
28.6—Nov/Dec 2015
on the Deepest Longings of the Restless & the Lonely by William Graddy
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