In this edition:
Do restrictions reduce rates?
Spotlight: Hope Story
African Americans and abortion
The border
In other news
Off-topic
You might have noticed that it’s been a while since I sent an edition. Weekends are a prime time to work on it, and travel has claimed some of my recent weekends. The goal is still to send the newsletter every other Monday, but I should own at this point that it’s going to be hit or miss on that pace depending on the circumstances.
I can’t play catch up on all that’s happened since my last edition, and trying to do so would be redundant for many readers. However, I do note a couple of items below in the “in other news” section.
Do abortion restrictions work? A recent piece reports on evidence that excluding abortion from Medicaid funding, at least, can lower rates. The piece is on a study that looked at the effect of this restriction on Louisiana’s abortion rate. “Existing estimates,” the study’s top line results section states, “suggest 10% of Louisiana pregnancies end in abortion. If Medicaid covered abortion, this would increase to 14% [95% CI 12, 16]. 29% [95% CI 19, 41] of Medicaid eligible pregnant women who would have an abortion with Medicaid coverage, instead give birth.” This conclusion harmonizes with much of what previous research into this Medicaid restriction has reportedly found. (And it is a reminder, of course, that pro-lifers should pair material assistance for pregnant women with restrictions)
Not all restrictions may work so well. According to a recent piece in the Greenville News, the number of abortions performed in South Carolina was 47 percent lower in 2018 than it was in 1998. Yet, the overall rate of South Carolina women undergoing abortions was about the same in 2017 as in 1998—11 abortions per 1,000 women. The explanation given is that women undergo out-of-state abortions. The piece quotes Ashley Lidow of the Women’s Rights and Empowerment Network: “Any sort of abortion restrictions isn’t going to reduce abortions. It’s going to drive people to access care in other places, or choose to terminate (their pregnancy) on their own.”
There’s reportedly evidence that Medicaid funding is not alone in its ability to reduce overall resident abortion rates, not just abortions performed in state. But it may be that abortion rate declines in states with more restrictions can be at least partly attributed to out-of-state abortions. It’s a reminder that even if Roe v. Wade were overturned, there may be some limits to a purely intrastate abortion restrictions.
On Twitter, Leah Libresco Sargeant mentioned an organization that she’s supported called Hope Story. Here’s how Hope Story describes itself:
We help medical professionals deliver hopefully stories to their patients. We help parents raising children with Down syndrome leverage their unique story to bring hope to parents whose child has received a Down syndrome diagnosis. We connect parents whose child has received a new Down syndrome diagnosis to parents who have a child with Down syndrome so that they can receive, encouragement, support, and hope.
You can read here a summary account of a speech that Rick Smith, the organization’s founder, gave at the 2019 March for Life. Upwards of 67 percent of fetuses diagnosed with Down’s Syndrome are aborted in the United States. If you would like to donate to Hope Story, you can do so here.
The NYT has published at least two pieces this summer examining public opinion on abortion. One has a special focus on Pennsylvania and the other looks at African Americans and abortion. Both report on the reality that many Americans have more mixed views on abortion than either party does. This is not an especially groundbreaking observation, but the second piece advances an account of how racial realities in particular can influence some African American views. It also records the following initiatives:
The Church of God in Christ, a predominantly black Pentecostal denomination with more than six million members nationwide, is in the process of building a $20 million pregnancy center in Memphis. Four years ago, the church, which opposes abortion, began a campaign to educate its members on the impact of abortion on black communities and to encourage preventive actions like fostering or adopting children.
The Seymour Institute for Black Church and Policy Studies, a Boston-based think tank, is planning to start a campaign this summer with billboards and advertisements in black media outlets and on social media that speak out against abortion — and against capital punishment and mass incarceration.
A valuable contribution pro-life journalists could make would be telling the stories of African American-led efforts such as these.
This newsletter is, at the moment anyway, focused primarily on abortion. By design, for reasons of scope and focus, it is not a consistent ethic of life newsletter. However, I will relax this norm to mention the crisis at the border. If you’d like a better grasp on some of the basic context, here is Dara Lind’s piece on it for Vox (made perhaps slightly out of date by the aid package subsequently passed by Congress). It seems that individual donations of, e.g. toothbrushes, might be rejected, possibly because of legal restrictions on donations. But if you are looking to donate, one option might be Catholic Charities, here.
In other news:
Last month, Cleveland Clinic announced it had successfully performed an in utero on a fetus for spina bifida. At the time of the operation, the fetus was not yet 23 weeks old, and could have been aborted in, for example, New York. This news recalls the recurrent pro-life hope that medical advances will heighten the contradictions.
In Alabama, a woman was charged for the death of her fetus due to a gunshot wound she sustained while in a fight with another woman. The charge was subsequently dropped, but the initial charge is a reminder to pro-lifers to be vigilant about how pro-life laws or rhetoric can be put to bad uses in the hands of misguided, incompetent, or untrustworthy allies. The handing down and subsequent reversal of a court order in the U.K. mandating that a disabled woman undergo an abortion against her wishes, on the other hand, is a warning in the other direction.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, Inc and Justice Thomas’s concurrence in that decision was another notable story from this newsletter’s hiatus. I will likely be mentioning that in the future newsletters that touch on the Court and abortion. How much weight you give to what the judges did in this case may help shape your view of the likely future positioning of the Court on any abortion rulings.
Vox profiled the Democratic primary challenge Marie Newman is running against Rep. Dan Lipinski in Chicago. Lipinski is considered sufficiently pro-life that Emily’s List and NARAL are backing Newman’s primary challenge. A complaint often made against pro-lifers is that their political behavior suggests they only care about the baby in the womb. Those who would like to see pro-lifers vote differently can make a good first step by condemning any attempt to primary pro-life Democrats.
Off-topic:
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