I’ve been reading discussion of the new study by the Guttmacher Institute that was published in Lancet. The study found that the legality of abortion didn’t correspond with abortion rates. Instead it corresponded with whether the abortions were safe.
"The data also suggested that the best way to reduce abortion rates was not to make abortion illegal but to make contraception more widely available, said Sharon Camp, chief executive of the Guttmacher Institute."
Via YglesiasI saw that Ross Douthat argues:
"[W]e don’t have is any evidence that increasing government funding for sex ed and birth control in a rich country like the United States, has an appreciable impact on the rate of unintended pregnancy, and thus abortion. I’ve seen suggests that it doesn’t."
Two of his pieces of evidence suggest that most sex-ed programs, lime abstinence-only programs, don’t really work. He had only one source that subsidizing birth control and that source mentioned that these programs increased contraceptive "we might increase the number of students using birth control regularly by 22%" (and that’s percent, and sadly not percentage point)." The source, Jane Galt, found this underwhelming and figured it was an outlier study, but unless she’s got a meta-study of her own or can find methodology flaws, that’s hardly a killer argument. In my book, 22% is appreciable assuming you’ve got a fair sample size (I do wish these articles would throw out p-values or r^2s).
That said, she’s on more solid ground with the AGIstudy when she points out that liberal states do seem to have higher abortion rates, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re all subsidizing birth control. More importantly, I can buy the argument that non-monetary factors may often have a greater influence in explaining why people don’t use birth control. I think that’s a great argument for R&D to increase convenience though. Also, none of that data covered emergency contraception, which only recently became available over-the-counter (a terrific way of increasing the convenience of usage).
So Douthat seems to have a fair amount of support (without seeing argument from the opposition) on the limitations of sex-ed programs. His case on birth control isn’t really there though. Subsidized access might not be enough, but on its own it seems to help.
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