David Frum (Surprisingly?) Gets it Right on Abortion

Perhaps because he was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush, I don’t often expect to agree with David Frum.

However, in his latest piece over at CNN.com, he “gets real” about abortion and I think gets it right.  As most activists for protecting access to safe and legal abortion as an issue of women’s health know, and have been pointing out for years, Frum states:

If you’re serious about reducing abortion, the most important issue is not which abortions to ban. The most important issue is how will you support women to have the babies they want.

As a general rule, societies that do the most to support mothers and child-bearing have the fewest abortions. Societies that do the least to support mothers and child-bearing have more abortions.

Frum goes on to give examples about maternal health policies and practices from Germany as a prime example of a nation with socialized medicine and generous health benefits, and one of the world’s lowest abortion rates.  And, he points out:

Even here in the United States, where parental benefits are much less generous, abortion responds to economic conditions. In the prosperous 1990s, abortion rates declined rapidly. In the less prosperous ’00s, abortion rates declined more slowly. When the economy plunged into crisis in 2008, abortion rates abruptly rose again.

I’ve noted here on this blog how Bryce Covert highlighted this economic reality over at The Nation earlier this year.  Frum continues:

These trends should not surprise anyone. Women choose abortion for one overwhelming reason: economic insecurity. The large majority of women who chose abortion in 2008, 57%, reported a disruptive event in their lives in the previous 12 months: most often, the loss of a job or home.

Of the women who choose abortion, 58% are in their 20s. Some 61% of them already have a child. Almost 70% of them are poor or near poor.

Three-quarters say they cannot afford another child.

It is important to note, in contrast to what anti-choicers and blog trolls will say, that this is not a cavalier decision a woman makes, and not one that paves the way for killing children if you lose your job.  Only Pat Robertson would jump to that nonsensical conclusion.

Frum gives examples from the Netherlands and why immigrant women’s abortion rates have been rising:

They chose abortion because they had become sexually active within male-dominated immigrant subcultures in which access to birth control was restricted, in which female sexuality was tightly policed, in which girls who become pregnant outside marriage are disgraced and in which the costs and obligations of childbearing loaded almost entirely on women alone.

Thus, globally:

Abortion is a product of poverty and maternal distress.

Not only can we do something to alleviate these things, we have in living memory in this country a keen understanding of what life was like when abortion was not safe and legal:

 A woman who enjoys the most emotional and financial security and who has chosen the timing of her pregnancy will not choose abortion, even when abortion laws are liberal. A woman who is dominated, who is poor and who fears bearing the child is likely to find an abortion, even where abortion is restricted, as it was across the United States before 1965.

Regardless of political persuasion, if we do in fact get real about abortion and reproductive justice, rather than getting hyperbolic, we can all get it right.

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