Posted by
Brian
at
12:44 AM
Now whose fault might that be?
NEW YORK - In American pop culture, the face of abortion is often a frightened teenager, nervously choosing to terminate an unexpected pregnancy. The numbers tell a far more complex story in which financial stress can play a pivotal role.
Hmmm. I don't know why, for the life of me, that the general population might have a misconception about just who is getting abortions and why? Could it be that the loudest people in opposition to abortion might be the slightest bit dishonest when it comes to their arguments? Maybe?
I mean, I know that the anti-choice folks are all "good christian people"
But let me set the snark aside for a moment. If the abortion clinics aren't full to bursting with teen sluts who are using abortion as birth control, who is it filling those clinics?
Half of the roughly 1.2 million U.S. women who have abortions each year are 25 or older. Only about 17 percent are teens. About 60 percent have given birth to least one child prior to getting an abortion.Bolding mine. Oh, so you mean that women might be looking at their financial situations and deciding that it might be better to use their resources on the children they already have rather than spreading themselves even more thin? How selfish of them.
A disproportionately high number are black or Hispanic. And regardless of race, high abortion rates are linked to hard times.
Okay, I guess I didn't set the snark aside. But I can't help it. It's a target rich environment for a snark-shooter.
What bothers me, what makes me load up the snark-gun and fire willy-nilly, is that this story will get buried, and even if it doesn't, anti-choice groups won't suddenly be driven to argue honestly and work to reduce abortions through education and access to birth control. They'll continue to obfuscate the issue and try to get legislation passed based on those stereotypes that fit their argument best--that every woman who gets an abortion is a slut who can't be bothered to use birth control and just wants consequence-free sex, as though getting an abortion is something women do on the weekends instead of going to the spa.
Labels: abortion rights, anti-choice douchelords