Bans are effective, but so is widening abortion access elsewhere.
Bans are effective, but so is widening abortion access elsewhere.
I t has been 18 months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Given that it takes only nine months to gestate a baby, that’s more than enough time to decipher what effect the decision has had on the American birth rate. Whichever your side in the abortion debate, it’s a mixed bag.
National Review’s Ari Blaff reported on a new study by economists at the Institute of Labor Economics who found that, in each state in which abortion was banned, there were significantly more births than we’d expect in the first six months of this year. The total amount is 32,000. Consider them as individuals, not statistics, and let that sink in.
It’s difficult to respond to the safe arrival of a baby as anything other than good news without sounding unhinged. But the birth of thousands of babies is apparently different. This increase in “unintended births” is bad news, the study’s authors suggest, as these children will “exacerbate economic inequality.” Others will doubtless say it’s bad for climate change.
Assume that it’s true that the existence of one group of people (in this case, “unintended” children) negatively affects the material conditions of another group (in this case, lower-income pregnant women). What should be done about this? One approach, a humane one, might be to try to help these women in distress by improving their material conditions. Another approach, a brutal one, is to kill these children in the womb.
The fact that there are 32,000 human beings now in their first year of life who otherwise would have been violently killed is not only a victory for pro-lifers, but for humanity.
The study demonstrates that women are less likely to have abortions when there are practical impediments to doing so. Until relatively recently, abortion regulation required you to be physically present at a clinic, at least for a first appointment in the case of chemical abortions. It seems that having to travel out of state, even to a bordering state where abortion is legal, can be enough of a deterrence. After Roe was overruled, the study’s authors note that in the 14 states that banned abortion, “23 percent of U.S. women of reproductive age have experienced an increase in driving distance to the nearest abortion facility, from an average of 43 miles one-way before Dobbs to 330 miles at present.”
The state in which abortion decreased the most was Texas. This can in part be explained by its geography, with the state’s longer driving distances. But there’s more to it than that. As Margot Sanger-Katz observes on the New York Times podcast, The Daily, in states such as Texas where officials made it clear they would “vigorously enforce the law,” women who would otherwise have had an abortion may have been reluctant to do so out of fear of getting in “trouble.”
In the 1960s, the argument for abortion was that women are going to have them anyway, so they might as well be safe. But what these numbers demonstrate is that, on the contrary, abortion bans work. Many, if not most, women given the choice between an illegal abortion and no abortion will choose the latter.
Now for the bad news. Sanger-Katz also noted that, nationwide, the abortion rate had increased by about 0.2 percent. This can partly be explained by the increase in abortions in states bordering those where abortion is outlawed. However, again that’s only part of the story.
In December 2021, with the Dobbs decision on the horizon, the Biden administration permanently loosened FDA regulations on how mifepristone — the drug used in chemical abortions — is dispensed. Previously a woman could take the drug only under medical supervision. After the rule change, however, women could be prescribed the abortion pill by telemedicine, receive it in the mail, and take it at home.
This increased abortions in a similar way that the internet increased porn usage. In previous generations, accessing pornography meant finding an “adult” store, going there in person, and interacting with a human being. But since the advent of the internet, you can access pornography from the comfort and anonymity of your own home. In a similar way, you can get an abortion without much effort at all. It’s no surprise, then, that chemical abortions now account for more than half of all abortions in the United States.
But this still doesn’t really answer why demand has surged. Take California, for instance, which isn’t an abortion border state and yet, according to the pro-abortion group the Guttmacher Institute, has seen a 16 percent increase in abortion since 2020.
Here we see, as we saw in Texas, that the law is a teacher, only this time on the flip side. Since the Dobbs decision, California has passed a slew of laws dedicated to expanding abortion access, which is already widely available. Evidently, it’s worked.
However sincere the pre-Roe slogan “safe, legal, and rare” was or was not, the truth is that legal and rare cannot co-exist. Where abortion is liberalized, it will increase. And where it is banned, more lives will be saved.