Anti-abortion rights groups have had varied responses to a report released by the Guttmacher Institute yesterday. The report shows that there has been a decrease in abortions among all subgroups of women, with the exception of women with low incomes. Among the more interesting responses is a claim by Life News that the report validates a campaign launched by anti-abortion groups targeting African-American women.
According to Life News, the fact that rates of abortions among African-African women decreased “validates the work pro-life groups have done to reach out to the black community.”
Life News is referring to billboard campaigns funded by Texas-based Heroic Media, which were aimed at African-American women. The billboards featured a message that read, “the most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb.” These billboards made their way all over the country, including New York City and Jacksonville.
Campaigns were subsequently launched by pro-choice activists against the billboards. Eventually the groups succeeded in having the billboards brought down. MTV also recently distanced itself from the group after Heroic Media claimed that their “spring Northeast marketing campaign would include television ads on MTV and BET.”
The Guttmacher Institute reported that abortion rates “decreased 18% among African American women” recently, which is “the largest decline among the four racial and ethnic groups examined.”
The recent federal budget deal included a 5.5 percent cut in funding for Title X, a 40-year-old federal program that helps low-income women get birth control and other services (but not abortions) at family planning clinics.
And a number of states, including Indiana, Kansas, Wisconsin and Tennessee, have either passed or are considering measures to cut state funding for family planning services — on the basis that some clinics also perform abortions.
While the largest proportion of public funding for family planning comes from Medicaid (71%), not Title X (12%) or state funds (13%), Reuters reports, women's health advocates say these sources are still important.
According to Adam Sonfield, a senior public policy associate at Guttmacher, without publicly funded family planning programs, the costs of unplanned pregnancy would be 60% higher than they are currently.
The Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), according to their own 2008-2009 annual report, showed over $1 billion in revenues, including $363.3 million in “Government Grants & Contracts” (an increase from $165 million in 1998). At a time when the overall number of abortions has decreased, PPFA reports performing 332,278 abortions for the period covered in the 2009 report – accounting for more than 27% of all abortions performed annually in the United States.
O’Bannon noted: “The abortion industry likes to argue that high abortion rates are due to insufficient government funding for ‘family planning,’ but the record seems at odds with that assertion. As abortion industry giant Planned Parenthood has received hundreds of millions of tax dollars each year, abortions at their facilities have steadily increased at rates that very nearly match their increases in government funding.”
“Ultimately, the report says less about pro-life laws and more about the aggressiveness of the abortion industry that, funded by tax dollars in many states, exploited poorer women during the recession and profited from their misery. If more women choose life for their unborn children as a result of pro-life legislative initiatives, the abortion industry knows that it will adversely impact their financial bottom line,” O’Bannon concluded.
The study also found that teen abortion rates declined 22%, from 14.6 per 1,000 in 2000 to 11.3 per 1,000 in 2008 among those aged 15–17. This age-group accounted for a small proportion of abortions (6%).
The research also validates the work pro-life groups have done to reach out to the black community, because of the tremendously high abortion rates in that ethnic group. Abortion rates decreased 18% among African American women in the same period, the largest decline among the four racial and ethnic groups examined by Guttmacher. Notwithstanding this decline, the abortion rate among African American women is still higher than the rate for both Hispanic and non-Hispanic white women: 40.2 per 1,000, compared with 28.7 and 11.5, respectively.
The study also shows abortion continues to become commonplace in the United States as it estimates that 10 percent of all women of reproductive age will have an abortion by age 20, one-quarter by age 30 and nearly one-third by age 45. Fortunately, the proportion of women estimated to have an abortion in their lifetime (by age 45) has been declining, from 43% in 1992 to 30% in 2008, as the overall abortion rate has declined.
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