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Advertising Pregnancy Help Reduces Abortion Numbers
by Chris Humphrey
The release in November 2017 by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) of the report "Abortion Surveillance—United States, 2014" has heartened pro-life Americans: the numbers and rates of abortion and the ratios of abortions to live births have fallen over 20 percent from 2005 to 2014. Why?
The authors of the report can't really put a finger on the reason. They list the factors that they think (on the basis of other studies) have some bearing on the number of abortions, including access to contraception and abortionists; state regulations, such as waiting periods, parental involvement laws, and restrictions on abortion providers; greater acceptance of childbearing out of wedlock; changes in the population's ethnic composition; and changes in the economy. Then they observe that the percentage of pregnancies that are unintended has gone down from 51 percent in 2008 to 45 percent in the period 2011–2013, after a slight increase from 2001 to 2008. The use of the more effective, longer-term contraceptives is not broad enough, they say, to be solely responsible, and the authors offer no other possible explanation. They conclude with the kind of advice you expect from bureaucrats with a narrow, amoral focus: if we help people avoid unintended pregnancies, we will have fewer abortions; contraceptives, properly used, do this, so we should promote their use.
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