…doesn’t reduce the number of abortions.

Restricting the availability of legal abortion does not appear to reduce the number of women trying to end unwanted pregnancies, a major report suggests. The Guttmacher Institute’s survey found abortion occurs at roughly equal rates in regions where it is legal and regions where it is highly restricted.

Banning abortion only makes abortions more dangerous and kills women—which is what many opponents of abortion are after, really. They want people who have sex to be punished. Seventy-thousand woman die every year as a result of unsafe abortions in countries where abortion is illegal. So let’s just say it, shall we? American opponents of reproductive freedom—people who seek to ban abortion—are trying to kill American women. The end.

Guess what does reduce the number of abortions? Improved access to contraception.

225 replies on “Banning Abortion…”

  6. Dan, your rational approach here completely fails to take into account the fact that the opponents of abortion believe in a magical soul that makes them right and you wrong, because – surely you’re aware – two-celled zygotes have souls, but fags don’t. I’m pretty sure women don’t, either, in that particular cosmology, so there’s no conflict in passing laws that kill them! See how that works?

  7. It’s all about control and hatred of women by the extremists who call themselves religious but who hate Christ’s teachings.

  9. @5 – Actually, I think #3 is trying to preempt criticism of Dan’s post. See, it is presenting a potential criticism- that the study is clearly “crappy” – and then refuting that critique by asserting that calling the study “crappy” doesn’t make it “crappy.”

    He’s issuing a challenge to the naysayers: back up your criticism with evidence. Or at least that’s how I’ll interpret it.

  10. Does outlawing murder end murder?
    Does outlawing Gay bashing end Gay bashing?
    Should we legalize murder and Gay bashing?

    Admit it-
    people who want to outlaw murder and Gay bashing don’t care about reducing murder and Gay bashing; they just want to punish people who murder and Gay bash.

  11. How are those who seek to protect the lives of the yet to be born “opponents of reproductive freedom”? The fact that a pregnancy exist is evidence of your “reproductive freedom”. Abortion is about trying to shirk responsibility for choices already made.

  15. And so life comes to imitate sarcasm: thank you, @3, 10, and 11 for aptly demonstrating my point that fear, misconception, and tribal ideology will always trump facts.

  16. 14
    We will gladly allow abortions in the 0.03% of cases resulting from rape if you join us in protecting the other 99.97% of the 800,000 babies a year slaughtered for convenience.

  20. In a democracy legalized abortion makes every citizen an accomplice to the slaughter. If abortion is illegal and people chooses to break the law and kill their children the onus rests only on them.

  21. The majority of sensible americans don’t “seek to ban” abortions when the life of the mother is at risk but we recognize the sanctity of life and what we do want is to restrict extreme procedures like partial birth abortions and the like. Unlike Savage most people want to see abortions carried out rarely by adults and under well extreme circumstances. Not something promoted alongside contraceptives like Savage wants. It always surprises me and it really shouldn’t that those who are the most vociferous about the promotion of abortion are those who have renounced or see no need to having a reproductive future and want women to follow suit. Makes you wonder.

  23. It always amazes me how the people who make the most noise about wanting to ban abortion and claim it’s because they care so much about the “babies” lose all interest in the life or health of any of those babies the moment they are born.

  24. Loveschild (21) you are an idiot.

    I am the parent of two and an abortion activist and provider. If you don’t like abortion, don’t have one. If you don’t want other people to have them, support access to inexpensive, effective contraception for all age groups. The point of the Guttmacher Institute study (which replicates the findings of countless other studies, you idiot @ #3) is that most effective tactic in limiting abortion is to make contraception widely available. If you really hate abortion, do what works to limit it.

  26. Ugh, so much anti-choice trollage.

    What should the punishment be for a woman who has an abortion? How much jail time should she do?

    And don’t say “none” because if I hire someone to kill my husband, I do time. If Abortion = Murder, then hiring someone to commit that murder is just as much a felony as any other hire job to commit adult murder.

    So how much time should one in four american women be forced to get for having an abortion?

    While we’re at it, I would like to remind you that in the days before abortion was legal, women who had back-alley abortions that went wrong were routinely denied medical care until they confessed that they’d had an abortion and ratted out the doctor or boyfriend. And no matter how good and Godly and life-worshipping you think you’ve raised her, anti-choicers: that could be your daughter, scared, alone and dying of a perforated uterus while being yelled at by a police officer in her last moments.

    Pro-life my ass.

  28. You stupid bitch.

    Aw, you’re not even going to pretend to respect women when you’re telling us what we can and cannot do with our bodies?

  29. “Pro-life” folks care about a fetus up until the time it is born, at which point they promptly stop giving a shit.

    If they were really “pro-life”, they’d be against anything and everything that threatens human life. And yet, most pro-lifers are pro-war, pro-gun, pro-death penalty, and generally pro-everything that makes it easier for human life to be destroyed. So are they really pro-life? Hell no. I have yet to meet a person who is holistically and completely “pro-life”. So far all I’ve met are hypocrites.

  30. I’ve yet to have an anti-choicer actually answer the “how much time should she get” question honestly. Although there’s enough misogyny in these Mars Hill trolls we might just see a full display. Exciting!

  31. 24
    Ah-
    COUNTLESS “studies” by abortion proponents-
    all reaching the same conclusion.
    Irrefutable!

    And the ever lame but ever popular
    “don’t have one” non-response.

    I haver a counter offer,
    abortion provider parent-
    if you don’t want to see abortion outlawed
    don’t work to outlaw it.

  33. call’em like we see’em

    You’re absolutely right, you shit-smeared asshole who can only achieve climax by furiously masturbating to thoughts of naughty sluts getting punished for having forbidden sex.

  34. @28
    No one is telling you what you can and cannot do with your bodies.
    There’s never yet been the body of a woman who had an abortion chopped up and dumped in the trash outside a clinic.
    We would appreciate it, however, if you refrained from chemically burning and dismembering the bodies of innocent children.

  36. I tend to value the living, breathing women who will be slaughtered as a result of your desire to outlaw abortion as opposed to the little bundle of tissues.

    I know, we don’t really matter.

  37. If they just lined up the people who support the death penalty and had them not post about abortion or choice or pro-life ever again, it would be way quiet on the Internets, and a lot less hypocritical

  38. 16, facts and citations, please. “Convenience?” In 22 years of terminating pregnancies, I have yet to come across one woman who took her decision lightly. On the other hand, I have had lots of women with serious medical problems whose contraception failed them, abused women who couldn’t get to their doctors for BC pills, women carrying fetuses with anomalies that could not be treated.

  40. 31, your post makes no sense.

    You care about babies? Take care of WOMEN, and you take care of babies. Make sure women have safe homes, enough to eat, protection from assault, access to health care and contraception, and the abortion rate goes down, the neonatal mortality rate goes down, and everybody wins. You want to save babies? Save women and the world gets safer for babies.

    That’s just being practical. But you aren’t interested in that, are you?

  43. My grandmother was a state policewoman in the 1940s-60s (abortion and birth control were illegal then). What she saw—child abuse, domestic violence, backstreet abortions—turned her into a huge supporter of Planned Parenthood. When she died at age 90, that’s where she wanted her money to go.

  45. Abstinence education reduces Abortion.

    States that accepted Abstinence Only Federal funds saw the rate of abortions per 100,000 girls under 15 fall from 20 in 2001 to 15 in 2005. The rate for girls 15-19 fell from 55 to 44.

    States that refused Abstinence Only Federal funds had much higher rates of abortion and insignificant drops. The rate of abortions per 100,000 girls under 15 was 21 in 2001 and 20 in 2005. The rate for girls 15-19 was 69 in 2001 and 66 in 2005.

  46. My 85 year old mother is a fine upstanding Catholic lady who is also pro-choice. She is morally opposed to abortion, but she also knows that women sometimes have to make the best choice from a selection of bad choices, and sometimes that’s abortion.

    Personally, I knew two girls in high school back in the 80’s in our Bibley little town who “lost their babies” by enducing miscarriages (God only knows what that really involved) and another girl who had two legal abortions at her parent’s insistence, because they hated her boyrfriend (to their credit, they had a point – he was a dreadful person). Luckily, they were wealthy and well-connected. If they hadn’t been, and had still been that determined, who knows what would have happened to that girl.

    All outlawing abortion would do is tidy up the statistics, and sweep everything under the rug. Unfortunately, that’s more than enough for some of the “pro-life” crowd.

  48. Women give at least 3 reasons for choosing abortion: 3/4 say that having a baby would interfere with work, school or other responsibilities; almost 3/4 say they cannot afford a child; and 1/2 say they do not want to be a single parent or are having problems with their husband or partner.

  49. I once met a 2 year old who was addicted to coffee. And instead of giving her juice in a coffee cup they thought it was cute that she drank theirs. Some people aren’t fit to be parents…I commend those who know that from the start and realize their choices can harm an actual child. It has nothing to do with convenience, but a realization of not having the means to support a child, or even have a healthy pregnancy to opt for adoption. In most abortion cases that I know of from friends, it was not a choice taken lightly and it was always in the best interest of the child.

  50. Induced abortions usually result from unintended pregnancies, which often occur despite the use of contraception (CDC).
    54% of women having abortions used a contraceptive method during the month they became pregnant. Among those women, 76% of pill users and 49% of condom users reported using the methods inconsistently, while 13% of pill users and 14% of condom users reported correct use (AGI).

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