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A Demand-Side Pro-Life Movement

Lauren

Ed Deluzain, a pro-life Catholic blogger, argues for a demand-side approach to the pro-life movement:

Short of a constitutional amendment banning abortion, and no administration, Republican or Democrat, has seriously pursued that. Abortion is a right. It’s not based on a law. It’s based on the Constitution.

The only thing at our disposal, short of an amendement, is to attack the demand side. We can make some changes there. We can bolster welfare programs so that another child won’t cripple a family, even if that family is African American and poor. We can set up day care centers beyond what we already offer so single mothers can work. We can help every family attain adequate housing. We can provide appropriate sex education and contraception education to kids who need it. We can do a host of things to attack the demand side of abortion, but we don’t.

via Noli Irritare Leones

30 thoughts on A Demand-Side Pro-Life Movement

  5. Here’s another one for you:

    http://www.vote-smart.org/issue_keyvote_detail.php?vote_id=3489

    A common-sense senate amendment that would have funded family planning services and teen pregnancy education and banned insurance discrimination against women. If you look at the vote it attracted pro-life Democrats and pro-choice Republicans, but it failed, unfortunately.
    I’m opposed to abortions except in extreme cases, but given the power, I wouldn’t ban abortions. I think that as a country, our government has done such a heinous job with preventing unwanted pregnancies and even making the country a better place for unwanted children, that some women don’t really have any other option except for abortion. Many women have abortions because they simply can’t afford the expenses a baby entails – prenatal (and afterwards) health care, family leave, even basic needs such as food and clothing – and are not psychologically prepared for motherhood. Even if the woman decides to give the baby up for adoption, the foster-care and adoption systems can be pretty messy.

    I would, however, seriously consider chewing off one of my fingers if there were no abortions because every child was a wanted one.

  6. Even if they are African Americans???? WTF!?!

    Actually, I agree with what he says. I’ve commented all over the blogs that a woman who wants her baby, but feels she abort it (for reasons that are none of our business) is as repressed as the woman who can’t get an abortion, and must have a child that…fill in with any excuse…doesn’t matter…none of my business.

    More choices for women are wonderful.

  8. Yup. Don’t make abortion illegal – make it unnecessary.

    But then women wouldn’t be punished for having sex and being uppity.

    And, sadly, abetted by the Republican Party, that is, at core, what the Pro-Life movement is about these days.

    Fear, and no one left to have beneath you.

  9. Indeed, it’s an important message, and one that pro-life progressives have been making (without being heard) for years. Read Jim Wallis. Read Tony Campolo. Read the aforementioned Glenn Stassen.

  12. Of course they don’t do these things. That’s not because these things were hard to think of. It’s because the only abortions that these moves will prevent are the very ones the wingers have no problem with–poor women, racial minorities, etc.

    Nothing they can do will stop well-off white women from aborting, except for making it illegal. And even that won’t stop it. The goal is not to stop it, but to make illegal and therefore difficult for women to obtain without male assistance. The poor are a mere casulty of this battle.

    I’d bet $20 that if there was an enforceable law that stated that women cannot abort without the explicit permission of the man who got them pregnant, all this fuss would end immeditately.

  13. Ah sharks. Lynn picked up this approach from me! (We’ve discussed it often enough!)

    Seriously, I’ve told more than a few pro-lifers that if they really meant it, they’d stop shouting at the women who walked into abortion clinics and make it possible for them to exist as single mothers.

    There is at least one order of nuns which has actually gotten the message and helps single mothers manage a household with their kids. Their objective? To give the mothers a viable alternative to abortion which doesn’t call for them to hand over their child to some fundamentalist bearing a rod.

    Abortion will exist with or without laws against it. What my wife (and I) have proposed is the only compassionate way to face the issue. Otherwise you return it to the days of the backroom butchers. I suppose, then, many who scream the loudest now will just look the other way.

  14. Of course they don’t do these things. That’s not because these things were hard to think of. It’s because the only abortions that these moves will prevent are the very ones the wingers have no problem with–poor women, racial minorities, etc.

    I think that’s a tad unfair. The people making the “demand-side” argument are not the people making policy in the Bush administration. Anti-abortion people aren’t a monolith, and left-leaning anti-choicers have almost as little power as left-leaning pro-choice folks.

    I do think that it’s naive to think that “demand-side” reforms will ever completely get rid of abortion. But since neither will outlawing abortion, it seems like as good an approach as any if you’re opposed to abortion.

  15. I love this!! I am opposed to abortion, but don’t favor outlawing it, even though I used to. I have changed my opinion in the last few months for a few reasons, but the biggest reason was this: Women who truly want an abortion will always have one, whether it is legal or illegal. Changing the laws will never change that. All it will change is whether or not that woman is able to do so safely. While I don’t like abortion and probably never will, I can’t see where an illegal, possibly poorly performed abortion where we lose both baby and mother, or the mother loses her uterus, or ends up with some scary infection that she’s afraid to get treated is preferable to a safe, legal abortion where we only lose the baby/fetus.
    So, for someone like me, who is absolutely opposed to abortion, but extremely uncomfortable with illegal abortions and equally uncomfortable telling another woman she must submit to ten months of pregnancy (and the next time I hear anyone describe pregnancy as a small inconvienence gets my foot up their rear, because I’ve been pregnant three times and it so much more than that!) , the dilemma remains… how do you reduce abortions while respecting women’s sovereignty and safety? The answer is just what this article lays out: You make contraception easily accessible and affordable, you provide help to women who want to keep their babies, but just can’t see how they possibly could, given their circumstances, you provide comprehensive sex education so that people understand how their bodies work and how best to prevent pregnancy. As a mother with a little girl, I work to educate my daughter on how her body works, and emphasize that she can talk to me about anything, and I will support her and I will love her . This, and this alone, will help bring our abortion rate down. Which is a good thing, I think, for both sides. Pro-life advocates (or at least those of who actually care about both mother and baby) will be happy because less abortions are being performed and Pro-Choice advocates can be happy because women have more choices and less unwanted pregnancies.

  16. Actually, women who can’t afford abortions don’t have them, and then do will have the unwanted children–who then grow up under poor circumstances, sujbect to neglect and abuse. There are some states in the South where there is only one providing clinic in the whole state.

    Women need to be able to decide when circumstances are good enough for them to be able to raise children well. Otherwise, one is not being pro-life–as in pro actual life–but merely being pro-birth.

  17. http://www.alternet.org/rights/21056/

    Here’s an interesting article about Mississippi, which is the state that has one abortion clinic. And very high rates of teen pregnancy and child poverty as well as few legal and economic protections for women. Oh and isn’t this pro-life – one of the highest rates of infant mortality in the country, in some districts 3x the national average, which in itself is not much compared to other developed countries. As pro-life as we profess to be, our infant mortality rate is much higher than other wealthy countries – Japan, Singapore, Sweden, the UK, France, Germany, Taiwan, etc. (http://www.photius.com/wfb1999/rankings/infant_mortality_0.html)
    I’m opposed to abortion, but I think that it is tragic and reprehensible that our government leaves many women, especially poor women, in a terrible place if they should have an unplanned pregnancy. No sex-ed or birth control to prevent it, no good health insurance to take care of it, no child care, no family leave, an abysmal minimum wage, possibly getting kicked off welfare (the “family cap”) and a broken foster care system if they do have the baby. In conditions like these, I couldn’t condemn anyone for having an abortion.

  18. There are many, many people in the pro-life movement who would gladly support funding for universal child care in exchange for a universal ban on abortion. I’d take that deal in a heartbeat. I think it would be a terrific middle ground solution to the culture war.

    As for Julie’s comment that women will always have abortions, that is true — there will always be abortion just as there will always be child abuse, for example — but it is certainly not a reason to support legalization. Beyond the obvious point that it does not make sense to legalize something that is wrong, the law serves an important teaching function. Many people who have doubts about abortion will be more likely to accept it if the law says it is o.k. Two, as a practical matter there will be far fewer abortions if it is illegal. The abortion rate skyrocketed after Roe. It is obvious that this is no coincidence.

    People who say “I’m personally opposed but it should be legal” should examine why they take the illogical position of supporting the legalization of something they think is wrong. I know of no other issue for which this contradictory position is so widely taken. Interestingly, however, the “I’m personally opposed but it should be kept legal” was a widely held position with regard to slavery before the Civil War. Before the war this was Lincoln’s position with regard to slavery in the South, for example, and those who believed that all slavery should be abolished — the
    abolitionists — were considered religious extremists (much as pro-lifers are protrayed by liberals today).

  19. No one is for abortion, especially those who end up feeling they have no other choice. They’re too poor, weak, alone, impulsive, or un-educated. Some are, tragically, all the above, while a few are none. One thing they all are, that is female. For most of these women, abortion is an emotional roller coaster and a difficult choice that will affect them for the rest of their lives. For better or for worse. But they’ve been exercising this choice since the dawn of birth and, except for fighting a few witchunts along the way, they’ve managed to live with their decisions. Now, with medical, scientific, economic and cultural enlightenment forging a new path, women around the world should eventually be liberated from forced chidbearing, and free to plan for the children they will want and love. What better way have we to improve our lot on this lonely planet ?
    We can virtually eliminate the need for abortions already, and most of us would love to see that happen. But we can never eliminate a woman’s right to privately choose whether or not to have a child. We will gradually move away from shame and punishment, in the form of forced chidbearing, as a patriarchal response to a woman’s sexuality. We men will eventually get over our fears of full gender equality.

  20. Pingback: Random Ravings - Pro-life: A different Perspective

  21. Julie: I’ve never felt comfortable with abortion. But then, I also don’t feel comfortable with Electro-convulsive therapy. I won’t ridicule those who undertake either procedure. Both are a damned tough choice and the results don’t always turn out as we want them to turn out.

    A good platform for the Democrats or a truly leftist political party on the topic might begin: “We are reviled by abortion and want to lessen its incidence. For this reason we promote sex education, birth control, and sufficient support for single mothers.”

    At the very least, that might force the wRong to begin including those items in their agenda….

    The issue is not just the unborn child, it’s also the born mother. And many mothers just don’t want to give up their child to a stranger who might molest them or mangle their minds with backward-looking religion and hateful, misogynist values.

  22. The liberal prescription for lowering the rate of abortion — contraception — is a proven failure.

    As counterintuitive as it may seem, contraception does not decrease, but rather increases, the number of abortions. It does so by (1) greatly increasing the frequency of sex in situations where the couple is not commited to raising any child they might create; and (2) creating an attitude that there is a right to have sex without consequence (i.e., to have sex without the responsibility for creating a child) — people who have this attitude are predisposed to abortion when the contraception fails, as all contraception sometimes does. Another possible reason is that it creates competition among women to offer sex without responsibility to men. The latter explanation was given by a left leaning University of Chicago professor.

    If you don’t believe that contraception leads to abortion, consider what has occurred since the introduction of the pill in 1960. When the pill was first being sold, everyone thought it would decrease demand for abortion. Instead, the opposite has occurred — as contraception became more widespread, so did abortion.

    The only explanations I’ve ever heard as to why abortion has increased along with the availability of contraception is something along the lines of “well, contraception is not available enough” or “people don’t know about contraception” (aka “we need more ‘sex education'”). These “explanations” are absurd on their face. Contraception is sold in every drugstore in America. I doubt that there is a grown person alive in America who had not heard about the near miraculous saving power of the condom.

  23. Joel Sax writes: “The issue is not just the unborn child, it’s also the born mother. And many mothers just don’t want to give up their child to a stranger who might molest them or mangle their minds with backward-looking religion and hateful, misogynist values.”

    As to the “born mother” — I agree. We need to address abortion by providing more support for pregnant women and by insisting that fathers take responsibility for the life they have created.

    It is of course understandable that a woman might not want to give up her child for adoption (although it does not follow that killing the child is a better option). However, to characterize adoption as “giv[ing] up their child to a stranger who might molest them or mangle their minds with backward-looking religion and hateful, misogynist values” reflects ignorance about adoption. Most adoptions in America today are open adoptions, in which the mother can choose the family (from the many available families) based on, among other things, the family’s religion and other values.

  24. Dan – people had sex anyway in the pre-contraception era. It’s just that some women ended up with eighteen kids. Women in the medieval era and Puritan New England got pregnant out of wedlock. IMHO, it’s the change in sexual mores and attitudes rather than the availability of contraception that has increased the occurence of casual sex. More sophisticated methods of birth control – the pill, injections, etc – are expensive and when millions of people don’t have health insurance and when insurance companies can discriminate against women to avoid paying for birth control, a lot of women can’t afford them. Yes condoms are cheap, but women can’t exactly force men to wear them if they don’t want to. I’m also truly tired of everyone putting the burden of sexual responsibility on women. Yeah, I know that women are the ones who get pregnant and bear the consequences. But it’s always lets teach teenage girls to be moral and responsible this, well what about teenage boys? If both sexes were more sexually continent wouldn’t that be better (and fairer)?
    You say that most grown people know about birth control – well, what about all the kids who are getting abstinence-only education who won’t know their options even when they’re grown up and married?

  25. Kate, I agree 1,000% that males bear equal responsibilty for sexual morality and should be taught that sex is an incredibly meaningful act that a man should engage in only with his wife.

    As to the mythical “kids who are getting abstinence-only education who won’t know their options even when they’re grown up and married” (do you seriously believe that there is a single such person?), our society for many centuries did well without adopting policies that pushed contraception. Yes, there were out of wedlock pregnancies, but they were very rare compared to today. In the 1950s for example, when contraception was not so widely available, only 1 in 25 births were out of wedlock; today, after 40 years of pushing contraception, it’s 1 in 3. As to regulating fertility within marriage, you probably don’t know it but natural family planning is very effective; moreover, no is calling for legal prohibition of contraception within marriage. (Personally I believe a large family is a blessing, not a curse; but I won’t try to convince to share this sentiment.)

  26. Dan – I forgot to mention that in the medieval times when women got pregnant out of wedlock they got married before they gave birth. So out of wedlock *conception*/pregnancy was common, actually going the whole nine months without a shotgun wedding, like in the 1950s, was not. I really do think that the main reason is a change in morality – now it is considered acceptable for middle/upper class women to have children out of wedlock, but in the 40s, that’s why Ingrid Bergman had to leave the US. I live in a fairly liberal suburb so we got non-abstinence education and my parents are very liberal (I didn’t turn out that way as much) so I, and most of my peers, know about birth control, but I can’t speak for teens everywhere across the country. If you read Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs (she is a liberal feminist who rails against our sex-soaked culture, it’s absolutely illuminating) she rightly says it’s frightening that kids are bombarded with raunch culture but it is federally mandated that they receive minimal sex education.

    A large family is a blessing if you can afford the daycare (or the cost of the mother not working and staying at home), the food, the minivan, the big house, the health insurance, the driving insurance and the college tuition, if the woman feels like going through pregnancy/childbirth many times over and if the parents both have enough patience to deal with 12 kids. I’ve said already I’m opposed to abortion, so that’s why I’m going to adopt a few kids when I’m older (that and I’ve never felt the need to contribute to overpopulation).

  27. Kate:

    You write: Ariel Levy “rightly says it’s frightening that kids are bombarded with raunch culture but it is federally mandated that they receive minimal sex education.” I agree with the first part — it’s frightening that kids are bombarded with raunch culture — but sharply disagree with the suggestion that more “sex education” of the secular sort (i.e., how to put your condom on correctly, etc.) is needed. To me it is painfully obvious that it contributes to the problem if the schools tell kids how to use contraception, where to go if you “need” an abortion, etc. Children should be told the truth: sex within marriage is a beautiful and wonderful thing but a highly dangerous thing — both to physical and spiritual health — outside of marriage.

    The Catholic Church and some liberal feminists share common ground in believing that our sex soaked modern culture objectifies and degrades women. I’ve never understood how women were conned into buying into the sexual revolution. In this regard, I highly recommend “The Women of Roe v. Wade” by Mary Ann Glendon (a Harvard Law School professor who represented the Vatican at the U.N.’s international conference on women, held in China in the 1990s). You can find it at the website for “First Things” and elsewhere I believe on the internet.

    A large family is not without its burden but is an unbelievable blessing if approached with joy and an open heart. As Mother Theresa put it, “having too many children is like having too many flowers.” I realize of course that we are not all saints like she was — but it is what we should strive for. Whenever the subject of large families is raised, I always think of a cousin of my father’s. She is 91 now and has lived her whole life in a Catholic country that was impoverished for most of her life. She has 9 now grown children who she raised in poverty greater than any poverty that is found anywhere in the U.S. today. She once told me what makes for a happy life: “you get married, and have a child; the child brings joy; then you have another child, and there is more joy; and then there comes another child, and the joy grow, the joy grows.”

    I know this doesn’t resonate with modern American women, or at least not with many of them. But it nevertheless reflects a profound truth that joy is found in love, and not in material things or the pursuit of self. This is also where modern feminism and Catholicism separate ways. The sort of self denial and love that the Church so values is anathema to modern feminism.

  28. The liberal prescription for lowering the rate of abortion — contraception — is a proven failure.

    I’m sorry, where has this been proven a failure? When we look at countries where women have the greatest access to contraception, and where they are well-educated about sex and how to use that contraception, we see the lowest abortion rates (think the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium). On the contrary, where contaceptives and sexual health education are less available — and, interestingly, in countries where sexuality in general is demonized — we see higher rates.

    If you don’t believe that contraception leads to abortion, consider what has occurred since the introduction of the pill in 1960. When the pill was first being sold, everyone thought it would decrease demand for abortion. Instead, the opposite has occurred — as contraception became more widespread, so did abortion.

    It’s a wee bit more complicated than that, Dan. First, abortion rates became tracked more throughly after the procedure started gaining legality in some states. Before it was legal, it was difficult to track the number of abortions women were having — and few groups were even interested in doing so. The teen pregnancy rate has dropped considerably since the advent of the pill; also consider that both the legal right to abortion and the wider availability of the birth control pill came along with a lot of social upheaval that finally allowed women to experience sex and sexuality more on their own terms, and changed the way this country throught about sex. You’ll have a hard time blaming that on one specific type of contraception, when contraception itself has existed for centuries.

  29. A large family is not without its burden but is an unbelievable blessing if approached with joy and an open heart. As Mother Theresa put it, “having too many children is like having too many flowers.” I realize of course that we are not all saints like she was — but it is what we should strive for. Whenever the subject of large families is raised, I always think of a cousin of my father’s. She is 91 now and has lived her whole life in a Catholic country that was impoverished for most of her life. She has 9 now grown children who she raised in poverty greater than any poverty that is found anywhere in the U.S. today. She once told me what makes for a happy life: “you get married, and have a child; the child brings joy; then you have another child, and there is more joy; and then there comes another child, and the joy grow, the joy grows.”

    You know, it’s interesting how pro-lifers, when confronted with the issue of affording children today, always have to bring up a 91-year-old aunt, a great-grandfather who immigrated in 1920, or something similar, in order to prove their point.

    And you know what? It proves nothing. The cost of living 80 years ago was completely different. The range of jobs and average salary was completely different. People were more willing to “go without” because there was less to go “with,” so to speak. Less technology, fewer luxury items, etc. You cannot compare a 91-year-old’s youth to a youth today and then tell the modern youth that they’re selfish for living differently.

    Maybe you believe that we need to go back to those values, but that’s much harder to do in a society where the cultural framework is so different.

    Also, many of us don’t want to intentionally put children in poverty, or live in a boxcar (some Catholic on another site boasted about how her grandfather raised a bazillion kids that way), or go without food and health insurance. We don’t see that as loving, especially when it can be easily avoided by controlling the size of our families to begin with.

    If pro-life means being okay with a child growing up in abject poverty, while making no effort to do anything about it, then count me in the deep end of the pro-choice pool.

  30. “There are many, many people in the pro-life movement who would gladly support funding for universal child care in exchange for a universal ban on abortion. I’d take that deal in a heartbeat. I think it would be a terrific middle ground solution to the culture war.”

    That is great, but why is it a trade? If universal child care will prevent thousands of abortions, pro-life people should not feel it is a trade for anything. It should be a giveaway to you. The fact that Congress has the power to enact measures that would likely reduce demand for abortion but doesn’t do so should be an extremely troubling oversight for genuine pro-lifers. It calls into question the sincerity of your so called “pro life” representatives in Congress and the “pro-life” special interest groups that support them unquestioningly.

    On a separate note: One thing to keep in mind is that advances in medical procedure did make abortion steadily safer throughout the last century, so one reason why demand for abortion climbed is simply that it became more practicable.

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