Incertus

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"* who are just trying to save lives, but they wouldn't engage in rationalizing bad behavior in order to achieve some "greater good," would they? (Side note: Amanda, as you might expect, has a terrific piece right now on abortion as a 1st Amendment issue, and part of what she discusses is that abortion wasn't so much a religious issue back when Roe v Wade was decided--good stuff.) I mean, real Christians wouldn't actually argue that it's okay to lie in order to change the laws, would they? I don't seem to recall Jesus saying it was okay to resort to falsehood to get converts, but hey, I could have missed it.

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.

A disproportionately high number are black or Hispanic. And regardless of race, high abortion rates are linked to hard times.

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.

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.

*The scare quotes are meant to distinguish between those people who really are good people and are simultaneously Christians, and the people who perpetuate stereotypes of women in order to control when and where and with whom they are allowed to have sex.