Against Abortion?
Then you had better be for the use—and wide availability—of effective contraception.
Today’s New York Times reports that the percentage of women not using contraception has been steadily rising. The headline should be tattooed on the heads of conservative Republicans who think that keeping contraception out of the hands of women is somehow pro-life: Use of Contraception Drops, Slowing Decline of Abortion Rate.
The rate of unintended pregnancies, which had declined 18 percent from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, has leveled off since about 1994…. While the abortion rate fell an average of 3.4 percent annually in the early 1990s, it declined an average of just 0.8 percent from 2000 to 2002.
If the Republican war on contraception—including Plan B, the morning after pill—doesn’t end soon, and abstinence “educators” continue to encourage American teenagers to view birth control as ineffective (and teenagers who obtain it as sinful), the abortion rate will soon be rising. Nice work, sexphobes.
While in other countries, like Germany, where contraception is widely available and encouraged, the abortion rate is dramatically less than ours. Republicans are stupid.