Abortion Gang

Columbia University has really come through for me. Their coordinator is incredible. I had a physical less than 3 weeks ago, and they already have a few matches for me. Now, it’s a waiting game to see which couple, if any, choose to use me as their donor.

After my physical, which was simple, clean, easy and informative, I had to sit around and wait to be matched. The Columbia coordinator took my information and my hand-written profile (it must be hand-written by the potential donor for legal reasons… fraud and all that. You get the picture) and showed it to potential recipients. Once there was an indication of interest by a family (or, in my case 2 families), the coordinator contacted me to make sure that I would be available for the next 8-10 weeks, depending on the speed with which the recipients make their decision regarding which donor they would like to use.

The next step, once someone definitively chooses me, is to go through the battery of genetic and mental health testing. I can tell you that I’m not looking forward to these tests, since I have almost no idea what will be involved. But, lucky for me, my coordinator is great, and I never enter the room with another professional without being briefed by her. (I can’t stress enough how amazing this woman is!).

I’m super excited to start the process! Wish me luck!

Lots of people are talking about the decision on the part of HHS that all forms of contraception be covered for all insured men and women for “free” as basic preventive services under health reform. This decision came not a minute too soon. Recently I found myself having to call in a prior authorization for birth control for one of my patients. At first I figured it was just that the insurance didn’t pay for the birth control patch, Ortho-Evra, but did pay for other methods. However, it turned out to be more complicated. The entire conversation took a half hour and went more or less as follows:

Me: This is Dr. Pro Choice. I’m calling to get a prior authorization for ortho-evra for my patient.

Customer Service Associate: OK, let me look into that for you…(5 minutes of terrible muzak later) I’m showing we don’t cover that medication.

Me: Right, that’s why I’m calling. Can you tell me why you don’t cover that medication?

CSA: Let me look into that for you… (5 minutes of even worse muzak later) We don’t cover any contraceptive methods.

Me: What? Are you sure?

CSA: Yes Ma’am, this plan that your patient signed up for does not cover contraceptive methods.

Me: (after a moment of disbelief) So how can I get this for my patient? She can’t afford it on her own. She has Medicaid.

CSA: You can make an application.

Me: Great, let’s do that.

CSA: What is the diagnosis?

Me: Diagnosis?

CSA: Yes, what is the diagnosis?

Me: (long pause) Female?

CSA: That is not an accepted diagnosis

Me: Human? Able to get pregnant? Sexually active?

CSA: Those are not accepted either.

Me: Umm, OK, menorrhagia [not the real reason but a ‘real’ diagnosis].

[1 minute on hold]

CSA: Your request has been approved.

I wish I could say I made this up, but it happened just a few weeks before this decision came from HHS. There IS no diagnosis code justifying contraception as a way to avoid pregnancy, because diagnosis codes are built around illness. Avoiding pregnancy usually isn’t about already being sick, it’s about preventing something from happening. So birth control clearly belongs in the list of preventive services.

I fear politics will get in the way of the HHS ruling that all contraceptive services be covered free of charge under all insurers starting next year, but if not, women with private or public insurance will not have to pay for their birth control. This is a huge step for all women, and a small step for doctors like me who will no longer have to have conversations such as the one above.

A guest post from Gretchen Sisson.

Last week’s New York Times Magazine featured an article “The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy” about the reduction of multiples pregnancies – that is, the selective abortion of one or more fetuses to reduce twins to singletons. Given the risks associated with higher order multiples births (triplets or more), it’s a fairly accepted procedure to reduce to twins. However, the focus of this article was reducing to one, even when the chance of having healthy twins is high.

As a medical procedure, selective reduction is different than abortion; it does not involve the evacuation of the uterus. However, the discussion around reduction has interesting overlaps with the discussion around abortion given that a) they both involve the death of a fetus and b) they both place a burden on the woman seeking the procedure to justify why she is doing it.

The article describes two doctors whose positions on reduction have shifted. The first, Dr. Evans first opposed twin reductions:

Two years later, as demand for twin reductions climbed, Evans published another journal article, arguing that reduction to singletons “crosses the line between doing a procedure for a medical indication versus one for a social indication.” He urged his colleagues to resist becoming “technicians to our patients’ desires.”

While the article goes on to say that Dr. Evans now endorses the practice of twin reductions, other providers remain adamantly opposed. One sonographer says:

“I told him [the doctor] I just wasn’t comfortable doing a termination of a healthy baby for social reasons, and that if we were going to do a lot of these elective reductions, I thought he should bring in someone else who was more comfortable. From the beginning, I had wrestled with the whole idea of doing reductions, because I was raised in the church. And after a lot of soul searching, I had decided there were truly good medical reasons to reducing higher-order multiples to twins. But I had a hard time reconciling doing reductions two to one. So I said to Dr. Wapner, ‘Is this really the business we want to be in?’ ”

I struggle with these doctors’ perspectives on reduction for several reasons. The first is that, while the article claims that at Dr. Wapner’s medical office “every one of them — the sonographer, the genetic counselors, the schedulers — supported abortion rights” their stance places the burden on the women to have “good” reasons, here defined as medical reasons, for wanting a reduction. “Social” reasons (finances, only wanting to have one child at this time, etc.) are, in their opinion, not good enough.

And, I’m sorry, but that’s not good enough for me. That’s not trusting women to make their own choices about the number and timing of their children. Many of the women in the article who choose to reduce twins are desperate to have only one baby: they consider aborting the entire pregnancy because they can’t obtain or can’t afford a safe reduction, and, as desired as these pregnancies are, they would rather have no children than two. Another woman carrying triplets says she “felt like the pregnancy was a monster” and eventually paid $6,500 for a reduction. She describes leaving the doctor’s office:

“I went out on that street with my mother and jumped up and down saying: ‘I’m pregnant! I’m pregnant!’ And then I went and bought baby clothes for the first time.”

Forcing a woman to carry twins when she is not emotionally, financially, or physically prepared to raise two children is no better than forcing a woman to carry a singleton pregnancy when she wants no children. It is a simple matter of choice.

The second reason I struggle with providers’ reluctance to do twin reductions is that they are often part of the reason women are pregnant with twins in the first place.

For part of my doctoral dissertation, I interviewed couples that were struggling with infertility. They visited doctors who could not explain why they were not getting pregnant, and could then not explain why their treatments were failing. Medicine offers few concrete answers to infertility, and in vitro fertilization will sometimes not work at all, or can work too well and end with a multiple pregnancy. (I spoke with one couple who had no healthy fertilizations one month, and 29 fertilizations the next – but no successful transfers from test tube to uterus. The doctor could not explain to them why this happened. Stories like this are common.) So much of fertility treatment remains, in the words of the women I interviewed, an “art rather than a science,” “a matter of luck”, or “just like rolling a dice.”

Furthermore, because of the high cost of fertility treatments, some couples will make decisions that seem counterintuitive: desperate for one baby, they’ll transfer two or three embryos in the hopes that at least one will implant, simply because they can’t afford another IVF cycle. Then they end up with triplets and find they aren’t prepared for multiples, and can’t find a doctor that will help them reduce to the one child for whom they are desperate.

Pregnancy reduction is only one of the more obvious areas where infertility treatment intersects with traditional, abortion-focused considerations of reproductive rights. The pursuit of pregnancy when faced with biological challenges (and the consequent financial and logistical barriers) should be as much as part of a broader “choice” framework as the avoidance of pregnancy. I’d like to challenge pro-choicers to include considerations infertility and access to safe, affordable, and respectful assisted reproductive technologies in their paradigm for reproductive justice.

Gretchen Sisson recently completed her doctorate in sociology, writing her dissertation on the “right” to parenthood: who has it, why some don’t, and how society enforces its ideal of an acceptable pursuit of parenthood. To examine these questions, she spoke with couples pursuing infertility treatments, teen parents and teen pregnancy prevention advocates, and birthparents who have placed infants for adoption.

Steph’s post here at Abortion Gang back in November, prompted by the closing of the 30-year-old Cedar River Clinic in Yakima, asserted that “we need to value independent clinics.” That got me thinking – how exactly and actually do we as repro justice activists go about “valuing” independent women’s clinics? And is valuing indie women’s clinics in some tangible way enough to keep the rest of our indie women’s clinics from going the way of the dodo?

Let me start with some analogizing. It’s a terrible analogy for a dozen reasons, but I think it’s a good analogy for a few particular reasons, so bear with me: Planned Parenthood is to Starbucks as any given independent women’s clinic is to your independent corner coffee joint.

Now it’s not inherently bad for there to be a Starbucks of reproductive healthcare providers. The fact that nearly everyone short of my mom (and maybe even she does) thinks of Planned Parenthood as the go-to for reproductive services means that at least there IS an obvious choice – which seems good for choice and thus inherently good for women. As the 800-pound gorilla in the room of reproductive healthcare, Planned Parenthood is positioned organizationally, resource-wise, and politically as a force with which to be reckoned, rather than a single ignorable voice in the wilderness.

Indie women’s clinics, on the other hand, get to be the mavericks (can we please have that word back now?) of reproductive healthcare. Because they operate independently rather than under the auspices and directives of a larger parent entity, indie clinics can highlight, focus on, or be particularly stellar on individual facets of patient care and operations in ways that Planned Parenthood often can’t or won’t.

Where the women’s clinic to coffee shop analogy falls off of course is that all repro healthcare clinics, unlike their coffee-shop counterparts, have to grapple with factors borne out of an atmosphere of increasing hostility towards reproductive healthcare issues and politics. This drastically impacts their ability to establish and increase their respective visibility within the community, and to cross-promote their particular character and range of products and services.

For example – any coffee shop is pretty obviously a coffee shop; they tend to be in visible, highly trafficked areas, often capitalizing on the presence of adjacent shops and businesses, and wouldn’t likely set up shop in a completely deserted, hard-to-access or other area that left them functionally invisible. However many women’s clinics either by dictum of building owners and/or trying to keep a low profile to avoid unwanted attention end up understating their presence such that even folks who set out to get there have trouble finding it.

Also contrasting with coffee shops, women’s clinics often have a hell of a time leasing space. It’s probably not surprising to learn that building and business owners frequently just flat out refuse to lease to an organization that provides abortions services. So rather than being able to cherry pick an ideally visible and accessible location, women’s clinics are often relegated to whatever non-ideal location they’re able to procure – including locations that are some combination of unsecured, not accessible via public transit, or difficult to find, drive to, or park near.

Other factors to consider include the ability to court customers for an entire range of offered products, and to bring back repeat customers. A coffee shop would never survive if their clientele were only comprised of folks who dropped in once or a few times then never again, nor would they thrive if most customers only ever bought a cup of black coffee. Women’s clinics face the challenge of promoting themselves to the masses as not only a place for quality abortion care, but the range of other repro health services they offer as well. Couple that with the tendency for most possessed-of-healthcare adult women to seek out their primary health care providers for run-of-the-mill birth control, STI testing, gynecological exams, or other repro/sexual health needs, and women’s clinics have a sizeable hole where there should be a lucrative demographic.

Then there’s the factor of word-of mouth. If there’s a great coffee shop you happen to find – what’s the first thing you do? You mention it to your friends. So what about word of mouth for abortion services, STI testing, birth-control and gynecological exams? Probably not something most women will tweet about or check into on Foursquare, or likely to mention in casual conversation even to good friends.

Which brings us back to indie women’s clinics versus Planned Parenthood. An indie coffee shop survives not only because they have a product that’s competitive with (and likely exceeds) that of the Starbucks, but because they’re effectively able to capitalize on factors like location, visibility and word of mouth in conjunction with their charm and quality products to generate loyalty and repeat business. Where independent women’s clinics should be able to continue to survive, if not thrive, capitalizing on those same elements of the indie business model, they instead continue to experience more and more barriers to their existence and operations that indie businesses simply don’t have to struggle against.

It’s those factors which I assert are inching independent women’s clinics closer to extinction in a way that Planned Parenthood will likely be able to largely withstand. Individual Planned Parenthood clinics may likewise suffer from some of the above factors – but Planned Parenthood as an entity, like Starbucks, will survive if for no other reason than merit of its brand recognition, reach and strength-in-numbers. As one who feels that choice within the realm of reproductive healthcare is nearly as important as the right to reproductive choice itself, I worry that we may already be past the point where no amount of “valuing” done by us well-meaning repro justice activists will matter to the survival of indie women’s clinics.

Columbia University Medical Center has been a godsend in my egg donation quest. They have a delightful coordinator who is communicative and they have great policies that actually allow a donor to remain anonymous. They’re awesome.

I’ve been working with them for several weeks now, going through the same process as before (all the same paperwork), but this time, I didn’t need to submit a picture, because, get this, the recipients will never actually see what I look like. Love! This is how the process can remain anonymous. The other company requested not one, but TEN, pictures of me. Which meant that they were showing them to recipients, and making the process less than anonymous. Hypothetically, these people could somehow run across my information online (I DO have a Facebook account, because, who doesn’t, really?…) and remember my photos and figure out that I’m me. They would be breaking all sorts of laws, but it’s totally possible, and it could even happen accidentally.

Anyway, so Columbia is awesome and simply snapped a photo of me for their records while I was in the office. They assured me it would never be shown to the recipients and thus, actual anonymity is secured.

More about Columbia being awesome: I didn’t have to wait until the 3rd day after my period to have my physical. They just did it when they could fit me in and when it worked in my schedule, and they could figure out how fertile I was during my last period from that. Stellar. So, I found out I ovulated out of my right ovary during my last cycle, and my left ovary already has 15+ active follicles (she couldn’t see ALL of them, just most). The doctor said that this was perfect for my age, and that I was an excellent candidate. They didn’t even give me any issues about a recent sports-related injury that I sustained, even though I was on crutches. They made a note, of course, but assured me that this would not effect my desirability, primarily because sports injuries are not genetic and there is no need to share that information with potential recipients.

Long story short, Columbia > Private Egg Donation Company. If you’re thinking about going through this process and you have the choice of a university supervised program or a private company, please use the university program. You will undoubtedly have a much better experience.

This post is part of the Birth Control Blog Carnival sponsored by the National Women’s Law Center and Planned Parenthood.

Birth control should be free for women. We’ve all heard that every dollar spent on family planning saves four. Economically, it is a no brainer. Politically, it becomes a bit more complicated as, heaven forbid, a politician endorses happy and safe sex lives. Personally, I would like stop spending 35 bucks a month on pills. That money could easily be reallocated to Chinese food or shoes, still fueling our ailing economy. The problem is there are many other players between me and my pink round pill pack. In fact, there are so many that I’m not going to list them all here (think insurers, pharmaceutical firms, pharmacists, pharmacies, etc). So how can we make birth control free?

Just on Tuesday an advisory panel from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) recommended eight women’s health preventive services be added to the government mandated list of services provided and paid for by health insurance companies at no cost to patients. Included in the list was the following: “a fuller range of contraceptive education, counseling, methods, and services so that women can better avoid unwanted pregnancies and space their pregnancies to promote optimal birth outcomes.”

So now birth control will be “free” (if by free you mean still paying an arm and a leg to health insurers who will end-up economically benefiting from paying for your said “free” birth control)? Right? Well, not quite. IOM made the recommendation to yet another government body, Health and Human Services (HHS). The big kahuna if you will. Now HHS needs to decide if these recommendations will actually be included on the no cost consumer list.

All said this is probably not going to change overnight. If it does, Chinese takeout for all! But in the interim, as a public health nerd, I have to ponder if free birth control is even a good idea. Hear me out.

I want you to imagine two shopping bags. One full of free swag from an event you paid to attend, the other a brand new purchase of totally your own choosing. Think about the contents of each, number of items, colors, shapes, perhaps even smells. Okay. Now you only get to keep one, which one do you take?

The purchased one, right? Unless of course your free swag bag is from the Oscars, I imagine it contains flyers, shampoo samples, and, if you’re lucky, a few granola bars. I cannot imagine getting a new pair of shoes or hot General Tso’s chicken for free, and I’m pretty sure neither can you. That’s the problem. Although birth control should be free for women and society would benefit on a multitude of levels from it being so, women might not take the same stock in their birth control if it’s handed to them. It might not seem as valuable, and then possibly effective, or useful, and that is exactly what we want to try and avoid.

Not convinced? Neither am I. Most women, most of the time, don’t want babies. I watched a documentary this week where a woman walked three hours in the blistering African sun just to see if contraception had arrived at her “local” clinic. Women everywhere really want this stuff. They will go to great lengths to get it whether it is walking miles or listening to Michael Bolton on hold for three hours. What really sold me on women’s value of even free birth control was asking friends this question: what is the best part about going to the gyno? I know, I know, it is all awful. I too have seen the Vagina Monologues 12 times. But there is one good thing. Free samples! Everyone uses those free birth control samples and they get so excited. It’s a little surprise win for suffering the fate of the duck lips. Everyone who I talked to, in my very limited and skewed but loving sample, agreed that they actually use them. That in fact they end up using them more correctly and consistently because they are just sitting around their apartment and there is no need to go to the pharmacy once a month (but that is another battle altogether).

So women use free birth control. We’ve seen it in action. Maybe getting it for “free” from insurers would *gasp* encourage women to use birth control more consistently and correctly. Maybe that could make for happier, healthier families, women and sex lives. Maybe.

Although women get abortions for many reasons, the majority of women choosing abortion do so because they got pregnant when they didn’t want to be. It stands to reason that at the time of the abortion is a perfect time to help women start using highly effective contraceptives. One of the most effective methods, the IUD, is an ideal choice for women without plans to become pregnant in the short-term because once inserted it is effective for 7-12 years (depending on which IUD is chosen) and requires no ongoing maintenance, unlike other methods which require visits to clinics and remembering to take a pill daily, change a patch or ring, or get a shot every 3 months. All of this ongoing maintenance requires time and money.

So the IUD offers women a simple, long-term, easily reversible contraception that is as effective as tubal ligation (having one’s tubes “tied”). It is also the most cost-effective method available (when used long-term; the costs over the first few years are higher than other methods). So what’s the hold-up? Why do only 5.5% of Americans use IUDs?

Women do not get the most effective contraceptive care for the same reasons that many Americans don’t get the most effective health care in general. We have a system built on a fee-for-service model that relies on short-term membership in private insurance plans, which disincentivizes investment in preventive, cost-effective care that has up-front costs. We have a system that bills per service rather than for caring for a patient. We have a system in which pharmaceutical and device companies raise their prices significantly with impunity. (We also have a culture that systematically misinforms teens and adults alike about sex and contraception, but you can read about that here, here, and here).

Many women with private insurance find that their insurance does not cover one of the most effective, and the most cost-effective, methods available. The IUD itself can cost over $800, with the insertion fee from the physician easily bringing the cost to $1200 or more. Because many young people will change from insurer to insurer as they change jobs, the companies generally do not want to invest that kind of money into pregnancy prevention for their members. What makes sense for the individual, or even our society as a whole, often does not make sense for a profit-driven insurance company.

Billing is another barrier. Unfortunately, all clinics providing reproductive health care must pay attention to their bottom line. They can’t provide the vital services they offer if they don’t stay afloat. So unnecessary requirements, such as lack of reimbursement from insurance companies for IUD insertion done on the same day as an abortion, substantially hamper access for women. The result has often been that women have to wait until their follow-up appointment to get their IUD inserted, meaning they have to go through another procedure (when the IUD could easily have been inserted in less than 1 minute if done immediately after the abortion) and also have to make it to a follow-up appointment, which means more time off from work, more money for child care and transportation, and often more money for the visit to the clinic.

Barriers within the medical system also get in the way; some physicians believe that inserting an IUD immediately after abortion is more likely to cause complications and more likely to self-expulse (or fall out).

Because of these barriers, many women who want to use an IUD for contraception after an abortion are leaving without one. Although they are given follow-up appointments and theoretically should as a result have good access to IUDs, the fact is that many women are slipping through the cracks.

Fortunately, a new study shows that IUD insertion immediately after an abortion is safe and effective, and most importantly prevents repeat unintended pregnancy. 575 women who wanted an IUD after their abortion were randomly assigned to two groups: one group that had the IUD inserted immediately while the other was given a follow-up appointment for the IUD two to six weeks after the abortion. Not surprisingly based on prior studies, the group that had the IUD inserted immediately after the abortion had a slightly higher expulsion rate (5% vs. 2.7%) than the delayed insertion group. Though this might sound like an argument against immediate insertion of IUDs after abortion, what’s actually important is how the individual woman is affected. Despite this higher expulsion rate, NONE of the women in the immediate insertion group were pregnant within six months, as opposed to FIVE in the delayed insertion group. All of those pregnancies occurred among the 29% of women who never managed to get their IUD after their abortion.

Bottom line: immediate IUD insertion after abortion is safe, effective, saves money, and most importantly, prevents unintended pregnancy! I hope that policy-makers and doctors will take note of this study and take action to break down the medical, policy, insurance, and financial barriers that keep women from getting the best care possible.

A guest post by Peg Johnston, an independent abortion provider in New York State and member of the Abortion Care Network.

It’s official, the antis have found a way to use public funds to wage their campaign against abortion providers. (Or ANOTHER way, I should say, since funding for their propaganda centers and abstinence education is sizeable, but this is more direct.) Their first target, ironically, is Whole Woman’s Health, arguably one of the best clinics in the U.S. Not surprisingly, the state they have manipulated is Texas, one of the worst states in which to offer women abortion services. Says Amy Hagstrom Miller, CEO of Whole Woman’s Health, “I feel like I live in another country where abortion is illegal.”

Here’s how it works: the anti-abortion folks make complaints to various state agencies, anonymously of course, triggering an inspection –many inspections. If you work in a hospital or nursing home or any medical setting you know that a 100% perfect inspection is a rarity. There are always little nitpicky things that you could get caught on, none of which have anything to do with quality patient care. But a spontaneous inspection is its own form of harassment. And in these times more importantly, the state of Texas is nearly bankrupt; the taxpayers should be fighting mad about state agencies wasting time and money on an anti-abortion fool’s errand. But of course, this is Texas we’re talking about.

So, when this story comes to your attention, don’t for a minute think that the abortion clinic is doing something shady. They are not. In the light of the hideous conditions revealed by the investigation of Philadelphia based Dr. Kermit Gosnell, you might understandably be suspicious. The difference there is that the state of Pennsylvania failed to inspect. Had they kept up with regular scheduled inspections women might have been protected from Gosnell’s illegal and substandard practices.

The weight of state scrutiny is considerable but in places like Texas it can also be capricious. Not only is it burdensome, but when the state suddenly shows up it can make you feel like you’re doing something wrong—particularly when anti abortion websites try to make something over a labeling error or other non-patient care issue.

Always remember that the anti-abortion extremists are trying to stigmatize abortion providers. Don’t assume abortion providers are doing bad things. And if this state sponsored harassment of abortion providers comes to your state, call your representative to protest the waste of state funds. Abortion providers are all for inspections—exactly what any medical facility can expect, and not more. But the taxpayers should not be paying for the state to do the bidding of the anti-abortion movement.

Marcy Darnovsky of the Center for Genetics and Society calls it a “game changer.” Malcolm Ritter says it’s time to consider the “ethics” behind it.  Josephine Johnston of Hastings Center says it is a “burden” to parents.

What is it?  Pre-natal genetic testing. This already exists, to predict gender and other things, but in the future, the author warns, parents could simply have the mother’s blood drawn  and a number of genetic markers of the fetus can be gleaned. Parents would in theory be able to pick and choose their fetus’ blood type, gender, eye color, sexuality, and discard a fetus that has a higher risk of, say, contracting cancer.

Even though the likelihood of the procedure becoming wildly known, accepted, and available is years off, author Malcolm Ritter of the Associated Press considers the moral, legal and ethical pitfalls behind abortion of a pregnancy after a parent finds out from the genetic test that her child has a high likelihood of being gay, or contracting breast cancer later in life, or will be left handed, or have one blue eye and one brown eye.

He calls these reasons for abortion “non-medical,” and warns that parents would routinely abort a pregnancy due to genetic predictors of illness or sexuality when–not if–pre-natal genetic blood tests become wildly available.

Marcy Darnovsky suggests that parents will now decide what fetus will or will not be good enough to be born. “This really changes the experience of what it will be like to be pregnant and have a child,” she says. “I keep coming up with the word game-changer.”

Whether genetic testing to predict cancer and sexuality is going to change the experience of being pregnant, I don’t know. Neither do I know if the prospect of wide genetic testing in such a non-invasive way is indeed going to be a game-changer. Because when I read articles like this, I immediately think of the warnings in grade school, “take one try of marijuana and you’ve opened the flood gates to every other sordid drug in the world. You’re on a one way trip to misery if you try it.”  Because it’s these type of scare-tactic articles, shrouded in shadowy science fiction disguised as medical knowledge, that effectively argue, “this is what will happen since abortion is legal.”

Even though talking about genetic testing is important, and does indeed suggest a number of legal, ethical and moral questions, the fact that abortion is lumped into the discussion, as if it too deserves to be morally, legally, and ethically scrutinized (as if it’s possible for abortion to be scrutinized any more) is unfortunate and draws from me the most cynical of reactions. Namely, that this is another scare story, one that is used to embolden the anti-choice groups and legislators.

(more…)

Today, the Public Religion Research Institute released a report titled, What the Millennial Generation Tells Us about the Future of the Abortion Debate and the Culture Wars. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but here are a few highlights from their executive summary:

• A solid majority of Americans say abortion should be legal in all (19%) or most (37%) cases, compared to 4-in-10 who say it should be illegal in all (14%) or most (26%) cases. 
• Nearly 6-in-10 (58%) Americans say that at least some health care professionals in their communities should provide legal abortions.
• The binary “pro-choice”/“pro-life” labels do not reflect the complexity of Americans’ views on abortion.
• The decoupling of attitudes on abortion and same-sex marriage suggests that these topics, which served in the past as the heart of the “values” agenda, are no longer necessarily linked in the minds of Americans.  
• Millennials are less supportive of legal abortion than their demographic profile would suggest.
  
• On the issue of abortion, Americans hold complex and sometimes contradictory views, and grasping this complexity is critical for understanding the dynamics of the debate.
• Among Americans who attend church at least once or twice a month, majorities report hearing their clergy talk about the issue of abortion (54%) or homosexuality (51%) in church.
• More than 7-in-10 (72%) religious Americans believe it is possible to disagree with the teachings of their religion on the issue of abortion and still be considered a person of good standing in their faith.

Follow @ChoiceUSA and @Amplifytweets as they livetweet the discussion happening on this data right now!