One of the big elephants in a room of conservative and progressive Christians is the pro-life pro-choice debate. It is a classic wedge issue which has been used to manipulate voters and identify whether you are part of the “we” camp or the “them” camp.
I don’t think that the issue will ever be settled to everyone’s satisfaction. That’s because choosing to define conception as the moment when life and the full rights of personhood begin also simultaneously restricts the rights of women to control their own bodies and lives. Instead we have to look to issues of women’s health that we can all agree on and look for areas of compromise there that give us a way to move forward.
I think that we CAN all agree that, if possible, abortion should be a medical procedure of last resort. No woman wants to have an abortion.
History already proves that you don’t reduce abortions by making them illegal. You simply force women to take much larger medical risks.
The most practical way to dramatically reduce abortions is to dramatically reduce unwanted pregnancies. But here’s where policy appears to run headlong into ideology. Many of those who object to abortion on demand also object to education on safe sexual practices as well as easy access to contraceptive medication and devices. They argue that abstinence and Christian values should be the exclusive focus of sex education.
I’ve got no problem with abstinence education. I believe that those couples who wait until marriage to consummate their relationship receive a special blessing. I think that every child that is interested in learning more about these blessings should hear about them at home, in church, and in school.
Abstinence education alone, however, just doesn’t work. The CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey attributes only 20% of the drop in teen pregnancies to abstinence and 80% to access to effective birth control methods. A recent study from Columbia University supports these facts and questions federal funding of abstinence programs that don’t also discuss contraception. Yet the Bush administration recently appointed Dr. Eric Keroack to head the nation’s family planning program. Dr. Keroack was the head of what the Chicago Sun Times calls “an extremist group” which opposes birth control of any sort. He is now responsible for $283M in Public Health Service Title X funds earmarked to underwrite contraceptive services to women who need them.
If you are curious about what the results of an “abstinence-only“ approach might be, you need look no further than Africa. AIDS infection rates, deaths from illegal abortions, and the number orphaned or abandoned children have skyrocketed there over the past six years as a direct result of the US funding cuts to family planning clinics dispensing condoms and performing abortions. Those cuts were the direct result of the Bush administration replacing international public health policy experts with ideological extremists like Dr. Keroack.
So here’s my take on it. We as a country have to decide what is really important. If dramatically reducing the number of abortions is really important, then we have to take the steps in education (including abstinence) AND easy availability of contraceptives that will dramatically reduce unprotected intercourse. Those parents who don’t want their kids to participate in those classes or have access to those resources can opt out, just as they can today.
Abstinence may be appealing from a purity of purpose point of view, but the results that we are already seeing in Africa suggest that as public policy it is terribly wrong.