Pro-abortion researchers sure have good friends in the
mainstream media.
The latest example surrounds the Alan Guttmacher Institute’s
report released last week announcing, John Edwards-style, that there are “Two
Americas for Women,” due to “a widening reproductive health gap
between poor women and higher-income women.” Guttmacher’s study
found, in part:
From the 1980s to the mid-1990s, women of all income
groups became more likely to use contraceptives and less likely to
experience unintended pregnancies. But since 1994, unplanned
pregnancy rates among poor women have increased by 29 percent,
while rates among higher-income women have decreased by 20 percent.
Today, a poor woman is four times as likely to experience an
unplanned pregnancy as a higher-income woman.
I’m not here to quibble about the data or the findings. It’s the
reasoning, the rationale, and the definitions behind them that are
the problem. The weakness in abortion advocates’ argument is that
they frequently employ the passive voice as a rhetorical means to
argue for the necessity of contraception and abortion-on-demand,
often at public expense for lower-income folks.
Note the above quote, for example: women are actively capable of
“us(ing) contraceptives,” but they passively “experience unintended
pregnancies.” By this logic, undesired conception can equally
overcome a fertile female as can cancer — it can’t be helped.
Their intended message, of course, is that the only vehicle to
prevent unwanted impregnation is contraception.
Guttmacher president and CEO Sharon L. Camp is also blind to the
active/passive disconnect:
“Behind almost every abortion in the United States is
an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy. Abortion is not an isolated
event in a woman’s life. It is a last resort for a woman who is
faced with a crisis pregnancy she did not want or plan
for.”
Implied is the idea that “active” prevention is only accomplishable
after the unavoidable decision to have sex. Intercourse happens to
women, according to this belief system, and without contraception,
so can pregnancy. There is time to roll on the condom, but not time
to forego the act.
But everyone knows that is a lie and it kills the credibility of
those who propagate it. If abortion/contraception advocates were
honest about their condescending views, they would say what they
really think: poor women are only smart enough to prevent pregnancy
with birth control, but they are too stupid — or too primitive —
to abstain.
Mainstream media outlets naturally advance this perspective, and
the New York Times story about the
Guttmacher study was one example. Its lead:
Contraception use has declined strikingly over the last
decade, particularly among poor women, making them more likely to
get pregnant unintentionally and to have abortions, according to a
report released yesterday by the Guttmacher Institute.
It strains their credibility when reporters parrot the claim that
poor women who don’t use contraception are
made “more
likely” to become pregnant and are forced into abortions. It’s as
though Guttmacher planted its seed with the
Times and
conceived its dream article.
How could a truly objective reporter have fixed this paragraph?
By changing the phrase “particularly among poor women” to
“particularly among poor women who are sexually active.” Or by
changing “making them more likely…” to “leading them to decide to
end their pregnancies through abortion….” But such differences
are lost on most reporters in mainstream journalism.
Even Guttmacher’s people would agree that at some point between
the time a man and woman meet, and the time they consider
consummating their relationship (regardless of how long that is),
an “active” choice must be made. Abstinence advocates recommend
that pregnancy prevention (the “active” decision) be implemented
through the avoidance of sex. But “family planning” activists like
Guttmacher’s believe that choices about sex — whether it be
abstinence or engagement — be left to the urges of the individual,
who should then be entitled to publicly-funded contraception, if he
or she is poor. Then they will be spared (they hope) from the
passively experienced “unwanted pregnancy.”
Abstinence advocates and abortion opponents would do well to
undermine the pro-choicers’ laughable “unwanted” and “unplanned”
pregnancy emphasis. Since the beginning of time sex has been
desirable but conception less so, but until recently most people
seemed to understand the link between the two.
There’s no reason everybody else should have to pay for the sex
poor people want and the pregnancies they don’t want.
