I wish I were as optimistic as Hillary and Harry.
Their argument isn’t new: If we want to prevent abortions — and we all do — we need to have better sex education; better access to contraceptives; and general social and economic equality for women. It isn’t difficult. But, as they point out, the so-called “pro-life” forces in this country aren’t really interested in compromise:
Ironically, those advocating the loudest for an outright ban on abortion are too often the same people who oppose prevention initiatives and instead support making contraception less accessible, particularly for low-income women who are more likely to have unplanned pregnancies.
For example, a recent analysis by the non-partisan Guttmacher Institute revealed that South Dakota is one of the most difficult states for low-income women to obtain contraceptives.
Unfortunately, the same hypocrisy applies when it comes to funding programs that support women who choose to carry their pregnancies to term. President Bush and the Republican majority in Congress have promoted budget cuts for a wide range of programs that would provide critical supports for low-income pregnant women and their children. This includes cuts to maternal and child health programs, child care programs, the Community Services Block Grant and the Healthy Start program.
Moderate pro-lifers and pro-choicers can come easily together around these points. I don’t buy the idea that abortion is always a “tragic” choice, but I do think it’s fairly clear that almost all women would avoid having an abortion if they could. They wouldn’t get pregnant when they didn’t want to be. They wouldn’t be raped. They wouldn’t have fetuses with severe abnormalities. They wouldn’t have health- and life-threatening pregnancies. Abortion isn’t universally avoidable, but we can certainly decrease the abortion rate substantially. And it would make sense to look to countries with the lowest abortion rates (see Belgium, Norway, etc) and see how they did it (hint: really good sex education, universal healthcare, access to contraception, sex-positive attitudes).
I really like to think that all these things could bring pro-choicers and pro-lifers together. The problem, though, is that too many of the mainstream “pro-life” organizations are so extremist that they simply aren’t willing to compromise. They believe that there is a single proper way to live your life, and that if you deviate from that by having sex before marriage, or using contraception, or having sex for pleasure (as opposed to for baby-making), or by choosing to be child-free, or by wanting to limit your family size, you’ve committed some sort of grave anti-life offense. Now, your average person who identifies as pro-life doesn’t think any of these things. They most likely dislike abortion and want to see it happen less frequently. Unfortunately, though, the groups that are speaking for them seek to limit abortion by restricting it, instead of decreasing the need for it.
I hope that Hillary and Harry are right, and that pro-choice and pro-life groups can come together around pregnancy-prevention and well-baby measures that both decrease the abortion rate and make giving birth more of a possibility for low-income women. But I won’t be holding my breath.
Similar Posts:
- A Pro-Life Policy I Can Support by Jill September 24, 2006
- Women of Color More Likely to Have Unintended Pregnancies by Jill May 12, 2006
- I guess women’s lives aren’t included in that whole “pro-life” thing by Jill October 13, 2007
- It’s the Birth Control, Stupid by Jill June 28, 2006
- This Is Why Elizabeth Hasselbeck’s Little Meltdown Matters by zuzu August 4, 2006
Call me naive, but. I really think that the pro-life folk who are stinking up the news lately are getting a hugely disproportionate say in policy and national dialogue on these issues. While the Republicans embraced the far-right conservative Christians for their votes and volunteer time, and have been rewarding them with unfair say in how things go, I have a hard time believing that most Americans would not get behind this legislation. Most people use birth control, most people think it’s okay for other people to use birth control, and they’re going to get pretty upset if the crackpots get too much of their way. I think abortion is an easier win for the crackpots – it’s a lot more easily dismissed and demonized than a practice that every heterosexual in the country is familiar with, and probably deals with on most of the days of their adult life. The abortion bans are pushing too far as it is – taking real steps to eliminate birth control will create an exponentially larger pushback in public opinion, I imagine.
My thinking of this move is that Reid and Clinton aren’t actually trying to affect policy with this move; they’re trying to change the nature of the abortion debate itself, in order to moderate the Democratic Party’s image. The best way to make yourself look like a moderate and the people who oppose you like extremist is to offer a compromise that contains concessions the other side can’t accept. So they put this out there, the fundies reject it, and the Democrats get to say, “Look, we’re trying to solve the problem, but the far-right isn’t interested in solutions, they just want to use the issue.” or even “This shows that the Republican Party isn’t pro-life, it’s just anti-woman.”
I think this approach could be broadly popular. There isn’t strong support for either a pure pro- or anti-choice position, which for the former would entail things like no parental notification for minors, federal funding for poor women, and unrestricted third trimester abortions, and for the latter would entail South Dakota and worse. So both sides need to find a way to reach the middle: the substantial part of the population that’s ambivalent about abortion. They feel it’s icky, but they don’t want it outlawed entirely. The Republican plan has been to capture these voters by appealing at the margins, the ickier parts of abortion, like parental notification (“what if it were your daughter!”) or “partial-birth” while winking at the base that this is just a taste until they get their judges. But to get the judges they have to pretend like they don’t really want to make abortion illegal. (That’s what Bush’s “culture of life” hooha was all about. It’s vague enough that a Republican-leaning voter who’s ambivalent about abortion and the diehard wingnut slutpunisher can project their abortion position onto him.
The Reid-Clinton plan is a similar nod to the ambivalent voters from the other direction. It sends the message that they believe that abortion is a problem, and offers a solution short of criminalization. It’s also a great way for a pro-choice Democrat in a red state to talk about abortion without having to distance him or herself from the national party. It’s heartening to see that Democratic leaders are awakening to the fact that abortion is a wedge issue that can work for us.
Hi Jill,
Why is that some states (such as New York and California) who have been rated highly by organizations like the Alan Guttmacher Institute regarding “access” to contraceptives and have “sex-positive attitudes” and have sex education also happen to have the highest abortion rates in the United States? If those things reduce abortion then why hasn’t that happened in New York and Cali?
Unlike South Dakota, which I guess doesn’t hand out contraceptives to poor people, where one of the lowest abortion rates in the nation exists. To assert that free contraceptives, sex education and “sex-positive attitudes” in the United States will lower abortion is an assertion that seems to go against the facts.
It should also be noted that countries with lower abortion rates than the U.S. also usually have different abortion policies with regards to legality and the time in which abortion is and became legal. This fact is usually glossed over by pro-choice bloggers.
You claim prolifers aren’t willing to compromise but pro-choice groups oppose every single prolife law including laws which merely give women the option (if they want) of viewing their ultrasound if an abortionist performs one. Talk about not willing to compromise.
I hope prolifers and pro-choicers can compromise on a variety of issues (such as providing resources for women who choose to continue their pregnancies) as well but I take offense when someone uses the issue of compromise to take cheap shots at prolife groups.
This is tangential to your post, and I apologize in advance if I derail the thread, but I feel compelled to comment on one of your statements.
I’m a feminist and I’m pro – choice. I will defend any woman’s choice for an abortion even if I disagree with it. That being said, I take issue with the following statement,
“They wouldn’t have fetuses with severe abnormalities.”
Define severe abnormalities? Do you mean Down’s Syndrome? Cystic Fibrosis? Spina Bifida? All conditions women are tested for in utero in time for them to make the critical abort or not abort decision. Why, oh why are we still using the argument of – we wouldn’t want to have deformed babies, so we should allow abortion? Again, I respect a woman’s right to abort a “defective fetus,” though it gives me chills to write that phrase. It’s filled with ableism and implicit hate and fear toward people with disabilities. I don’t agree with that choice, but I respect that it is hers to make and I understand it may not be an easy one to make, however, I really hope that we can move beyond this particular argument for abortion. How would you feel if I said we should allow abortion because women wouldn’t choose to have (male/female) babies? Sex selected abortion is hateful on a number of levels – so is disabled selected abortion.
Abortion of “defective” fetuses is about trying to rid the world of “defects” – which is not possible because people will still get old, suffer illnesses, or be involved in accidents which will create them. In the words of Nancy Mairs, “it will not rid the world of disabled people, but it will serve to further marginalize those who are already here.” That kind of logic says – and again, I am paraphrasing Mairs here – that we would have chosen not to let you exist if we could have. As if to say that people with defects and abnormalities (depending on your definition of “severe”) are not also productive and important members of society.
I am a woman with a genetic disability. I thought long and hard about the decision to procreate given the 50% chance of passing my disease onto my offspring. I decided to have a child – and hope in the future to have at least one more. I made that decision primarily because, to me, choosing NOT to have children for solely that reason was a level of self hatred I was not willing to participate in. I have a disabling physical disease – it sucks at times, but ultimately I am who I am partly because of my condition – it is not all of who I am, but it is a part of who I am, and I’m a pretty good person. Saying to myself, I shouldn’t have children because I might give them this disease is like saying I probably should not exist.
Again, I know I digressed, but I am really bothered by the blatent ableism in abortion discussions that use “defective fetuses” as a compelling reason for abortion. I support women who make that choice regardless of their reasoning, but I think it’s time we moved beyond that particular argument.
Jivin J,
i’m not jill, but i think more abortions are performed in NY and CA because women from other areas travel there to have their abortions. SD has a low number of abortions becasue there’s only ONE clinic in the whole state that performs the procedure, and they have to fly in doctors from MN to do them (and only a few days a month, i think).
and pro-choicers oppose LEGALLY MANDATED sonograms. it’s just like the abortion itself, women can make thier OWN CHOICES, without imput from the government or wingnut fundamentalists.
get it?
Access affects usage rates, dear boy. New York and California have decent access to abortion (which is taken advantage of by people in states that don’t, by the by, increasing the total numbers of abortions). South Dakota has just outlawed abortions, and had only one clinic anyhow, so of course its abortion rates are lower than New York or California — they’ve made it near-impossible to obtain legal abortions.
Of course, I suspect you’ve pulled some figures out of your ass, or if you haven’t, you’re ignoring others, such as the rate of unwanted pregnancies, teen births, etc.
Kate-
In including “fetuses with severe abnormalities” on that list wasn’t to imply that women should have abortions under particular circumstances. It was recognizing the reality that abortions occur when women are in situations that, by their own estimation, are less than ideal. This can mean unintended pregnancy. It can mean a threat to their health. It can mean a severely deformed fetus. It can mean a threat to their life. It can mean a recent economic tragedy, or a change in circumstance that made a previously wanted pregnancy an unwanted one.
I wrote all of those things without value judgments, and without trying to infer that would should have abortions in those situations. I personally don’t think it’s my place to criticize a woman’s choice to have an abortion for any reason, and I also don’t think it’s my place to criticize her choice to give birth for any reason.
When I wrote the post, I was specifically thinking of fetal abnormalities like anencephaly, where the fetus has a brain stem but no brain and will not live outside of the woman’s body; situations where the fetus dies inside the uterus; and other fetal defects incompatible with life. That said, I still believe that a woman should have the right to terminate any pregnancy, regardless of whether or not I’d make the same choice.
That said, you bring up many good points about ableism, and I think those are worth noting. Like sex-selective abortions, I’d be lying if I said that aborting potentially disabled fetuses doesn’t make me uncomfortable. But, again like sex-selective abortions, I think the solution is to focus on why these people are so under-valued, and what kind of social mechanisms we can put in place to make sure that all human beings are valued equally. Which is what I think you’re saying as well. I’m just trying to say that I didn’t intend to imply that I think disabled fetuses should be aborted, or that women with potential genetic defects shouldn’t give birth. I just think that choice should be left up to the pregnant woman, and we as a society should work to make this world a more receptive place to all people — but particularly those who routinely face discrimination.
Jivin-
As other commenters have said, the fact that women travel to NY and California because they can’t get abortions elsewhere significantly increases the abortion rate in those states. South Dakota has a single abortion clinic, and providers fly in from other states to perform abortions a few times a month. Of course their abortion rate is low.
And no, I don’t think NY and California have sex-positive cultures. Are some areas of NY and California probably better than other states? Sure. But as Americans, we do have a shared culture, and part of that culture involves deep conflicts about sex.
Additionally, just because more women in NY and CA choose abortion doesn’t mean that those states have higher rates of unintended pregnancy. It’s also worth noting where the abortions are concentrated, and how that relates to poverty.
New Jersey, I believe, has one of the higher abortion rates in the country. It also has welfare laws which penalize recipients for having additional children, which is a fairly substantial incentive for abortion. That’s an issue that I think pro-lifers and pro-choicers could join forces in battling. Unfortunately, many mainstream pro-life groups are tied up with the “personal responsibility” Republican Party, which generally opposes welfare or any type of social aid.
That isn’t a criticism of individual well-meaning pro-lifers. I think I was quite clear in the post that a vocal minority tends to speak for a much more moderate body when it comes to pro-life politics. We see it in mainstream pro-life organizations. We see it on blogs like Dawn Eden’s, where she and her internet pals rail against birth control and non-procreative sex. I think that’s really unfortunate, because it gives the impression that all pro-lifers agree with the extremists.
I love you guys, and this is going to sound critical, but I’m going to say it anyway. I’m getting a little annoyed with feminists suddenly discovering a deep and abiding passion for disability issues immediately after being called on ablist language in abortion debates. If you wanted to focus on questioning why “these people” are undervalued, you would. You have a blog, which is to say a platform to talk about whatever the hell you want, and I don’t think you’ve ever mentioned it outside a discussion of aborting “fetuses with severe abnormalities.” I’m not saying that you have to talk about disability issues. I’m just saying that it annoys me that you claim to care when it’s convenient and then forget about it the second the discussion has moved on.
I have a fairly postmodern outlook on things. I think there is room on both the left and the right on this issue to reconsider assumptions underlying their positions. I tend to avoid any advocacy in this area because I find both sides to be dogmatic and inflexible, caring more about emotionally demonizing the opposition than in rational dialogue, when the real world is a much more fluid place than the world of ideas and ideology. I doubt there is any room for compromise unless “moderate” pro-lifers and pro-choicers are able to get over wariness that any middle ground involves some sort of trick or the beginning of a decline down a slippery slope.
Many people are ambivalent about abortion. A decent portion of America sees abortion as an evil. Some see it as the lesser of two evils for a woman in a difficult situation, others see it as a greater evil than a woman keeping the baby in a difficult situation.
Part of the problem here is the desire for “sex-positive” policies. I think the goal should instead be “sex-neutral.” I don’t think that sex is this inherently wonderful thing and the world would be a better place if people would just have more of it. I think that sex is something that can potentially be beautiful and potentially be destructive and that some people make mistakes in sexual matters. While what goes on in the bedroom should generally lay off limits from the law, it is still a valid topic for social criticism, just as government shouldn’t dictate that people not drive SUVs or not eat meat or not become Scientologists, but we should be free to criticize those choices if we think they are bad ideas. (Of the three examples, I agree with one, disagree with another, and think the third depends on the situation.)
If abortion is something that should be decreased, it seems reasonable to assume that abortions occur in part because of unfortunate circumstances and sometimes because mistakes were made (not necessarily on the part of the woman). It seems to me that there is sometimes a Bush-like unwillingness to discuss these mistakes, to even admit the possibility of mistakes. There exist some people in this country who are having sex who shouldn’t be having sex and putting on a condom doesn’t erradicate the mistaken nature of the sex. Having less, or even no, sex is not utterly impossible and not inherently detrimental to happiness. Like you said, there is no single proper way to live your life.
Not completely true, but close enough, per the search function. And you kind of are, but that’s not an unfair demand to make. It’s not like “female” and “disabled” are mutually exclusive categories, after all.
No, I’m really not, and I don’t like having words put in my mouth. I’m asking you not to say “the solution to this problem is….” if you’re not willing to do anything to work on the stuff that comes after the dot dot dot. You’re being just as dismissive as if you’d said “I really don’t care about that problem,” but you don’t have the courage to admit that you don’t care very much. Or maybe you just think the rest of us are too stupid to realize that’s what you’re saying. It’s not the indifference that bugs me. It’s the disingenuousness.
Sally, I think you’re getting at something. Given that my nephew has a disability (autism spectrum disorder), it’s not like I don’t have someone, my sister, who can point me to resources on disability issues, especially as they relate to education. I’ve certainly listened as she’s vented about her awful, awful experience with a school principal who just didn’t believe that autism existed and thought that T was just being difficult. This is something that touches my own family.
The indifference itself doesn’t bug you? I don’t understand why not.
You’re saying that one way to demonstrate an actual commitment to disability issues would be to pay attention to them at times when they’re not convenient to a political position on abortion that isn’t held for the sake of disabled women. One very conspicuous absence of focus has been on this blog we have. Therefore, we really should blog about disability issues, and we do have a moral obligation to blog about disability issues. Otherwise, we really don’t care about this problem, as you said.
Mm-hm. Schizophrenia, MS, assorted mobility issues, and autoimmune problems.
Sally’s comment is not so very different from those by people who’ve pointed out we haven’t done a lot on issues relevant to feminists of color.
It would be a lot easier if we could do this full-time and didn’t have pesky jobs.
Exactly.
Oh, and depression. I probably left that one out because I’m having trouble thinking of people I know who haven’t been affected.
Hah! It’d be a lot easier to do this blog thing if we didn’t have a damn blog. I used to read and comment on dozens of blogs every day. Now it’s down to, like, three. And I still haven’t internalized the whole first-you-read-then-you-write-about-it thing.
Oh, good, I’m not alone.
Perhaps we’re going to have to be more aggressive in soliciting ideas. Right now, I’m generally riffing off things I read in the paper on the way to work or on the three blogs I get to other than this one. But if someone sends me something, I will generally give it attention.
Though I suspect Jill just doesn’t sleep. Or takes Ritalin or something.
I think I have to be more attentive to potential posts as they come up, rather than dithering. For example: that Alix Dobkin essay? Her conception of the transsexual-medical complex is profoundly ableist, and there’s a freaking awesome fisking of it that I’d love to comment on here.
zuzu, piny: have you guys thought about having an e-mail address that you could give out to some of your more regular commenters to send you good links as they browse around online? (I’m trying to think of some way to approach it that would enable you to avoid a lot of spam and trolls.)
Also, have you guys been indoctrinated in the ways of RSS aggregators?
It’s law school, man. Keeps me up day and night.
If zuzu and piny don’t want to share their email addresses, you’re welcome to email me and just ask me to forward it onto one or both of them.
Oh, like I DON’T KNOW ABOUT LAW SCHOOL, MISSY!
Just wait until you start practicing. Mark my words.
Jill: couldn’t there be a way to contact the three of you directly? A suggestions@feministe.com sort of thing?
Hmm… I will see what I can do!
Decide what you guys want and I’ll set an email address up for you.
I would love to see you blog on women coping with raising children with disabilities.
Something like 80% of marriages where there is a child with autism fail. I suspect other disabilities have similar statistics. This means that most children with disabilities are being raised by single mothers which makes this a highly feminist issue. And the so-called system in place to help us is extremely flawed.
I’d love to see feminists get behind this. Because you guys rock when it comes to stirring up attention to worthy causes that affect women.
You may not have meant to be ableist, but you were. Like I said, I stand by a woman’s decision to abort a “defective” fetus, even though I don’t agree with it – I just wanted to point out the ableism inherent in your choice of language. This sort of ableism is common among feminist groups. Largely, probably because (based on the discussion above) no one has really forced you think think about issues surrounding disability and ableism. It’s usually left out of the intersectional analyses.
Just as an aside – if you’re interested in guest posting or something, I’d be happy to chime in a few times with feminist disability stuff – I’m a sociologist – my areas are gender and disability.
Well, cripes, Kat, not like you don’t know my email. Feed me, Seymour!
The big thing I’m always a bit worried about is pontificating on issues that I am not all that informed about, only to have those who are mock me. Which can happen when you just kind of riff off a news article that seems to someone unschooled in the issue to be comprehensive, but apparently isn’t.
Yeah, I guess it does. But it doesn’t bug me quite as much as being told that I’m harping or a secret anti-choicer or (bizarrely) fat-phobic (since I refused to admit that discrimination against disabled people is really just a front for discrimination against fat people and because I objected when someone said that a discriminatory measure “wouldn’t work”, even though it would “work” against me.) I prefer indifference to hostility, so I try to be careful not to imply that people should be paying attention to disability.
That sounds like whining, and it’s really not about this blog. But I’m still smarting a bit from past battles.
I imagine that pretty much everyone has someone in their family who is disabled. Some may not realize it, because they think of them as “old,” not “disabled.” But yeah, these are issues that affect almost everyone in one way or another. And if they don’t now, they will.
But I do totally understand about time constraints and about not wanting to speak out of turn.
I think these criticisms are fair. And Sally, Kate, and whoever else is reading this but not saying anything, I also think it’s entirely fair to imply (or outright say) that people should be paying more attention to disability issues. They should. We should. I should.
Do I have a good justification for why I don’t? No. Sure, I’m busy, but I managed to post at least five different items today. I think what happens, at least with me, is that I tend to scan the same sources (the NY Times, the LA Times, Salon, Slate, etc), notice anything having to do with feminism, and write about it. Disability issues don’t get covered nearly as often as they should in mainstream news sources. Bloggers like me are often not very good about digging around for news/information outside of their narrow field of interest (not trying to argue that disability issues are “outside” of feminist issues; I just tend to focus more on reproductive rights and law more than anything else, and seek out stories on those topics). And like Zuzu said, we often hesitate to write about things that we feel less-than-expert on, since everything we put up is fairly widely read and immediately picked apart.
But let me be clear that these are not excuses. I’m not trying to justify the lack of focus, I’m just trying to explain it, and further state that I’ve been remiss in not writing about it more. I will be better in the future, and I’m glad you all have pointed this out.
Right now, my problem is sort of this:
I’m hoping to a bunch of really elaborate, really confusing posts about transition, surgery, body image, identity, etc. So I’m _trying_ to untangle all of those knots, but I somehow end up allowing myself to divert attention into posts that are not terribly interesting or difficult, while using this project as an excuse to put off other types of challenging stuff.
Anyway. I have an idea. It’s contrary and passive aggressive, just like me.
Why don’t we trade?
Say for the next week, we’ll assign blog topics to each other: one topic per day. The point is to choose articles, topics, and ideas we think we should be blogging about or haven’t gotten around to blogging about. This way, we’ll be able to shove all our anxiety and work onto someone else, and get some fresh material in return. And we’ll have tasks, not just vague intentions. Then, after we read our fellow blogger’s take on the topic, we can go off in comments, where I think we might feel less blogger-blocked anyway.
If it works, we can make it a regular feature.
I’m sure. And most people have been disabled at some point or another, however temporarily. In my family, we have ailments that tend to manifest in middle age or later–although there are other problems that crop up earlier. I grew up associating aging with disability, but I wasn’t able to pretend that my relatives were “just” getting older.
Meh. If I’ve got time for Law and Order, I’ve got time to be a responsible blogger. And like your comments indicate, it’s not like silence isn’t a statement of its own. Plus, like you pointed out, we haven’t been completely silent on the subject of disability.
For anyone who wants a “one-stop-shop” link that will point you to many bloggers with a disability who blog on disability issues – and able-bodied bloggers who blog on them as well – Blogging Against Disablism Day
Also, something that people often forget when bringing disability into discussions of abortion is that women with disabilities also have/want to have children as well, and there is a lot of prejudice and discrimination that either prevents us from having kids (many women with developmental disabilities have been unwillingly sterilised) and puts us at great risk of having children taken from us for no other reason than society’s assumption of our incompetence due to our disability.
People often forget that many women with disabilities are also caregivers, of children and of their own parents, and instead insist on seeing us only as recipients of care and `drains on the public purse’ (not quoting anyone here of course, that’s just an example of one of the reasons some people want us aborted or euthanised).
All of what I’ve said also applies to men with disabilities, I just focus on women with disabilities because I am one and I work in that area and so it’s what I know most about personally.
It’d be interesting to look at some of the intersections between the medicalization of pregnancy and the idea of mothers as patients with pathological conditions, and the treatment of people living with disabilities as you described in the first paragraph. And the potential enforcement of a pre and peri natal standard of care against “special” needs for mothers living with disabilities. And then there are alternative parenting routes like adoption.
And, to riff off of what Dobkin said, I’d bet there are problems with access to “natural” childbirth and assorted other options; disabled mothers probably face a lot of assumptions as to how they can give birth even when they are recognized as prospective parents.
To take this back up to a comment way the heck up there, the other reason there are more abortions in New York and California is that NY and Cali have more people. Add that, plus the number of women coming in from different states, and yes, you’ll get a lot of abortions.
Question: Is there many NGO organisations in america trying to cover the care the government is not providing? I wonder how fast would the government change their policy if the people who donated to the 2 political partys donated to those organisations.
Jill,
Look at the recent CDC statistics – one column has to do with the abortion rate for residents of New York (which means the people have to live in the state.) So no, the high rate of abortion for the residents of New York has absolutely nothing to do with women coming from other states.
http://jivinjehoshaphat.blogspot.com/2006/04/access.html
Aren’t New York and California as “sex-positive” as any other state? Or do you just think the U.S. isn’t “sex-positive” enough in general?
Isn’t New York City fairly “sex-positive?” The abortion ratio for the residents of New York is quite high
http://www.health.state.ny.us/nysdoh/vital_statistics/2003/table23.htm
Higher than the abortion ratios the the abortion ratios for all the other counties in New York by residence
http://www.health.state.ny.us/nysdoh/vital_statistics/2003/table22.htm
According to the CDC, New Jersey’s abortion rate for residents (19 per 1,000 women 15-44) is higher than the U.S. average of 16 (without California) but nowhere near the abortion rate for the residents of New York state which was 30 per 1,000 women ….
Kristen,
The ultrasounds weren’t legally mandated. If the abortionist performs one (which is standard practice) then the women is given the option of viewing that ultrasound. So much for pro-’choice.’