Vol. 13: Why is abortion still an issue?

The unintended consequences of The Pill.

In 1967, when I was the young editor of a small-town daily newspaper in eastern Indiana, a local physician shared a curious observation with me: The size of the families in his practice, as well as the number of births at the county hospital, had decreased markedly in just the previous three or four years. So had the number of battered housewives he treated. The proportion of Caesarean births at the hospital— often accompanied by the mother’s demand for a tubal ligation— had also dwindled, from 20% in the 1940s to barely five per cent in 1966. All these declines, the doctor speculated, could be attributed to the arrival since 1960 of oral contraceptives— that is, birth control pills.

         Before The Pill came along, this doctor theorized, a mother who didn’t want more children would be reluctant to satisfy her husband’s sexual demands— but if she refused, she might get slapped around. Such a mother, upon giving birth, might ask the doctor to tie her tubes, thereby liberating her to satisfy her husband in the future without fear of pregnancy.

         Even the divorce rate seemed to be declining, the doctor said, probably for the same reason: “Before the introduction of The Pill, for many women the only way to escape perpetual pregnancy was divorce or separation.”

         The future implication seemed clear: By rendering birth control exponentially easier than, say, the use of condoms or diaphragms, The Pill would eliminate a whole raft of social problems. Unwanted pregnancies would decline. Married couples could determine the size of their families. Wives would be liberated from the fear of assault by their sex-hungry husbands, not to mention the fear of perpetual pregnancy. Abortion would dwindle into irrelevancy.

Phonographs and manual typewriters

         These glowing expectations largely came to pass, except for the abortion piece. After the Supreme Court protected abortion with its Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, the number of legal abortions performed in the U.S. rose from about 750,000 that year to a peak of about 1.5 million in 1990. By 2020 that number had declined to 930,000 or 620,000, depending on whose source you cite (the Guttmacher Institute or the Centers for Disease Control). Yet since the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade with its Dobbs decision last year, abortion has become what the New York Times calls “a driving issue in America, coming up again and again everywhere policy is decided: in legislatures, courts, the Oval Office, and voting booths.”  

         I will leave it to others to argue about the wisdom of the Dobbs decision. I will also leave it to priests, ministers, rabbis, and imams to argue about when life begins, since to my mind that is really a matter of religious and philosophical belief rather than science. My purpose here is simply to express my mystification:

         Having observed firsthand the social revolution triggered by The Pill in one county-seat Indiana town within six years of its arrival, and having witnessed the development of much more accessible and effective forms of birth control over the subsequent half-century, I can’t help wondering: Why is abortion even an issue today? Why hasn’t the right to an abortion been relegated to the realm of meaningless modern rights— like, say, the right to own a manual typewriter, or a phonograph, or a mimeograph machine, or a portable radio?

Who’s doing it?

         You would think the hundreds of thousands of women seeking abortions today would fall into four legitimate categories:

• Victims of rape and incest.

• Women whose doctors have determined that the pregnancy might jeopardize the life or health of the mother or the fetus or both.

• Couples whose birth control has failed for some reason.

• Adolescents whose synapses haven’t yet grown together sufficiently to grasp the relationship between actions and consequences.                   

       Yet according to the Centers for Disease Control, teens aged 13 to 19 accounted for only 8% of women who had abortions in 2020. On the other hand, 42% of women who had abortions in 2020 were repeaters. Ten per cent had had two previous abortions; 8% had had three or more. These statistics suggest that some women are using abortion as a form of birth control— perhaps because they’re unaware of preventive forms of birth control.

       So what happened over the past 60 years? The best answer, I suggest, was provided years ago by the late University of Pennsylvania sociology professor E. Digby Baltzell: “Beware the unintended consequences of virtuous acts.”

Sexual revolution

         In this case, the unintended consequence of The Pill, beginning in the late 1960s, was a sexual revolution that liberated millions of Americans from the old belief that sex outside of marriage was immoral and unhealthy. That revolution triggered a reaction by social and religious conservatives not only against birth control and abortion but even against the whole notion of sex education, in the belief that sex education (like birth control) would remove the fear of unwanted pregnancy as the most effective deterrent to sex outside of marriage. But curtailing birth control and sex education failed to curtail extramarital sex; it simply elevated the role of abortion as the solution to unwanted pregnancy. (As of 2020, 86% of women seeking abortions were unmarried.)

         So here we are. The abortion drug mifepristone, approved by the Food and Drug Administration 23 years ago— and which renders abortion a heck of a lot easier and more accessible than surgical abortion— is now fighting for survival in appeals courts after a Texas judge invalidated the drug this month. An 11-point liberal victory in a pivotal Wisconsin Supreme Court election this month was fueled by the abortion issue. And just last week, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida signed a bill outlawing abortion after six weeks’ gestation, which might as well have outlawed abortion altogether.

         But it’s not just abortion that states are banning in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. They’re also attacking the teaching of birth control in public schools and the funding of organizations like Planned Parenthood that disseminate educational information about sex. In the age of the Internet, abortion opponents might as well try passing laws to hold back the tides.       

         To conservatives who oppose abortion, I say: You may very well be right to contend that sexual promiscuity is psychologically unhealthy for individuals as well as society as a whole. But fear of hellfire and damnation, not to mention laws and courts, no longer work in the face of the inevitable advances of science and technology. So if you sincerely believe life begins at conception, and that therefore abortion is murder, wouldn’t you encourage birth control and sex education as tools to prevent unwanted pregnancies? And on the larger issue of sexual behavior, might there be some better way to get your message across?

         Hint: Abraham Lincoln said it more than 160 years ago: “I destroy my enemy when I make him my friend.” So why not try persuasion?