Ross Douthat makes some important observations about abortion in red states vs. blue states in today’s New York Times. He writes:
“Liberals sometimes argue that their preferred approach to family life reduces the need for abortion. In reality, it may depend on abortion to succeed. The teen pregnancy rate in blue Connecticut, for instance, is roughly identical to the teen pregnancy rate in red Montana. But in Connecticut, those pregnancies are half as likely to be carried to term. Over all, the abortion rate is twice as high in New York as in Texas and three times as high in Massachusetts as in Utah.
“So it isn’t just contraception that delays childbearing in liberal states, and it isn’t just a foolish devotion to abstinence education that leads to teen births and hasty marriages in conservative America. It’s also a matter of how plausible an option abortion seems, both morally and practically, depending on who and where you are.”
Read the rest here.
3 Comments
Donald Johnson
Insightful but sad.
Kelly
And accurate. As the author points out, the book was not a hatchet job, but a good sutdy of red vs. blue family patterns.
One works (blue), with less divorce, less out of wedlock births,less poverty, etc., but has higher abortion rates.
The other does not work well, had a lot more early marriage, a lot more divorces, more broken families, etc. but a lower abortion rate…and more poverty.
I hope a lot of people read the article. It’s food for thought.
It was facts like these that made me able to work past the guilt I had been trained to have over supporting abortion rights due to all of the ‘social damage’ it supposedly does.
Watch a lot of young women, single, with kids at 17 trying (and usualy failing) to make it in the south, and the ‘blue state’ pattern looks better, more economically sensible, and less destructive by the minute.
No place is paradise on this
earth, but, the stats on everything from poverty to divorce (and the damage it causes) in the red states (like theone I live in) speak for themselves.
We are not going to go back to a society that frowns on divorce (to popular, even in the conservative denominations) or out of wedlock births. And the family structures and denominations are not finanacially able to pick up the costs. So, what other (realistic) options, other than the “blue state” model are there?
Brian Krieger
I probably should have left this well alone, but killing the innocent to assuage guilt is simply abhorrent. My heart just breaks when I read that. So much of scripture is written to protect the innocent and to make our bellies fat we destroy the most innocent of us all. Goodness. Beware those who call darkness light.