LIFE ISSUES NO. 2830

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

(Fewer Abortions in U.S.)

I’ve heard that the number of abortions in the United States has gone down.  Is this true?  Yes, I’m very happy to tell you it is true.  Prior to legalization, there really were very few abortions in the United States.  We know, for instance, that the year before Roe v. Wade, which made abortion legal, there were only 39 women who died in the entire United States from illegal abortions, 25 more from legal abortions, and these were mostly in New York and California, which had legalized abortion several years before the Supreme Court made it national.  The first year after Roe, we had 700,000 abortions.  That quickly climbed to 1,500,000 and plateaued there for almost 20 years.  In the last four years, it’s dropped to about 1,300,000. 

Why do you think there’s been a drop?  Well, I’ve been talking about the very experience of abortion itself.  It has been a very complete turn off for an awful lot of people, and they are now advising the next generation not to make the same mistake.  That’s one of the reasons.

Give me another reason?  I think all of you listening have had a part in this.  For three decades now we’ve been teaching the facts of fetal development and explaining what abortion really is. In recent years, in pregnancy help centers, we’ve increasingly had ultrasound, and this has served as a major mind-changer for abortion-minded women.

Is it just certain types of abortions, or all kinds of abortions?  The impact of partial-birth abortion has certainly had an effect.

What do you mean by that?  Well, when I was president of the National Right to Life from 1980 through 1991, the press constantly reported that abortion was only legal for three months.  Try as we might, we were unsuccessful in getting any major secular medium to admit that abortion was legal after three months.  But then came partial-birth abortion and, with it, a lot of publicity.  And this demonstrated that abortion is legal until birth.  This has had a significant impact on reducing the number of people who would allow abortion without restrictions.

And then there was the selling of baby body parts.  That didn’t get as much publicity in the secular media, but it was out there—and this outrageous thing turned more people off. 

Finally, more recently we’ve had the intense public controversy about cloning and stem cells.  Obviously, we haven’t changed everybody’s minds, but this has been an in-depth educational training experience.  It has taken the first week of life, previously met with one colossal yawn, and peaked the interest of people here and abroad.  We have solidly proven that human life begins at the first-cell stage.  If people are opposed to killing babies in their first week of life, I’m sure those same people would be opposed to killing older babies who still live inside of their mother.

So here you have some reasons why abortions have been declining.

[05/10/02]