One more contribution to the health care debate in the United States introduces a surprising possibility: Universal health care tends to cut the abortion rate. How so? Britain’s former Catholic archbishop, Basil Cardinal Hume explains:
“If that frightened, unemployed 19-year-old knows that she and her child will have access to medical care whenever it’s needed,” Hume explained, “she’s more likely to carry the baby to term. Isn’t it obvious?” . . . For various reasons, then, expanding health-care coverage reduces the rate of abortion. All the other industrialized democracies figured that out years ago.
Is this connection plausible? Read the entire article and see for yourself. (Hat tip to David Neff.)
March 15th, 2010 | 10:39 am | #1
My experience in this area of abortion research is that these statistical claims–or at least the inferences based on them–are rarely what they appear to be. When people like Reid use terms like “obvious” for their view, and “illogical” for those who disagree, but provide nothing but “the numbers,” you can bet the house on the fact that you don’t have the whole story.
Consider just this. In all the countries listed by Reid, they are all nations that have some of the lowest birth-rates in the Western World. But according to Reid they have fewer abortions as well. What’s going on? Is there a wave of celibacy in Denmark? No. What is going on is a shared understanding of the future and its generations as not worth perpetuating. It is practical nihilism, for it does not think its culture and traditions worthy of being being preserved, developed, and shared with a wider group citizens than is present. This means, for one thing, that the present generation of Europeans in their 50s and 60s will not have enough future workers to sustain their own health care needs when they are elderly. So, as we have seen in the Netherlands, involuntary, non-voluntary, and voluntary euthanasia become the great cost-containers. Yes, the Netherlands probably has fewer abortions than it did 30 years ago, but only because it has fewer women that can have the abortions and those women are fully contracepted so their lives and the lives of their male partners are not disrupted by the ultimate party crashers, children.
A culture that has fewer abortions because, in the words of John Lennon, they have “nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too,” is a sad, dying, empty culture. This is why the Aztecs have eliminated child-sacrifice; they have eliminated themselves.
Bishop Hume, and Mr. Reid, seem to think being prolife is just about having fewer abortions. But it’s not. It’s about loving children, life, and the importance of passing on one’s heritage to one’s legacy. Europe, sadly, embraces none of these virtues.
March 15th, 2010 | 10:59 am | #2
Well said, Dr. Beckwith.
March 15th, 2010 | 11:11 am | #3
That deserves an “every child is the image of God” Ba-ba-booyah for Dr. Beckwith.
March 15th, 2010 | 12:16 pm | #4
A standing ovation for my fellow Manhattan Declaration signee, Dr. Francis Beckwith!!!
Ba-ba-booyah for Dr. Beckwith indeed!
March 15th, 2010 | 12:32 pm | #5
The article by Reid linked to data from the UN at http://data.un.org/ , and lists the abortion rates for six countries:
Canada: 15.2
Denmark: 14.3
Germany: 7.8
Japan: 12.3
UK: 17.0
USA: 20.8
That’s the number of abortions per 1,000 women. But as Dr. Beckwith points out, the numbers can be deceiving: if American women are conceiving more often, even though they may be aborting at a lower abortions-per-pregnancy rate, the abortions-per-1000-women rate will be higher.
Imagine, for the sake of numerical argument, that American women have 15 pregnancies over their lives, and 2 of them end in abortion. Now, imagine that German women have only 2 pregnancies on average, but 1 ends in abortion. The abortion rate for Americans will be much higher (2 abortions per woman compared to 1 in Germany), even though 50% of German pregnancies end in abortion, compared to 13% for Americans.
It would be helpful to know what percentage of pregnancies end in abortion for these countries. I’ve tried looking for these statistics on the same UNdata page, but I haven’t found them. Even that number should be taken with a grain of salt, due to different levels of contraceptive use. But does anyone know where these numbers can be found?
Secondly, I’ve heard a different rationale for lower fertility rates besides “practical Nihilism”: higher education levels, and growing numbers of women in the workforce. According to this theory, women end up delaying having children in order to get Master’s Degrees and Doctorates and avoid not falling behind professionally.
This is a more disturbing explanation, because a cultural fight in favor of “loving children, life, and the importance of passing on one’s heritage to one’s legacy” is one I think Christians are more likely to win than a fight against higher education and professionally independent women.
March 15th, 2010 | 2:32 pm | #6
Whatever the statistics, a culture that loves children and life, and wishes to pass on its legacy to future generations, will ensure that those future generations get proper medical care, even if their parents are young or poor. How it does this is a matter of prudence. It may do this through government-run healthcare paid for by taxes, as in Great Britain. Or it may do this with a market for healthcare services similar to the market for other professional services, some healthcare paid for by taxes, and private donations of money and healthcare services, as the American collection of systems work out. However a modern Western culture decides to pay for healthcare for its youngest members, it must confront the realities that medical care is expensive, that pregnancy and childbirth require time off from work, and that infants bring myriad additional expenses upon their parents. Where abortion is legal and available, these monetary concerns are going to be factors in pregnant mothers’ decision whether to undergo abortion. If, because it loves children and life and wishes to pass on its legacy to future generations, a culture wants pregnant mothers to decide not to undergo abortion, it must address their monetary concerns.
March 15th, 2010 | 2:49 pm | #7
[...] Beckwith responds at the Evangel blog: [...]
March 15th, 2010 | 3:07 pm | #8
In addition to Beckwith’s takedown, Michael New hits it from the statistical angle:
http://healthcare.nationalreview.com/post/?q=M2M4NjIyMzM2NWE3ZDUyMGViNmI0MDlmNmRlNmVhNzY=
Best,
Matt
March 15th, 2010 | 4:17 pm | #9
“If that frightened, unemployed 19-year-old knows that she and her child will have access to medical care whenever it’s needed,” Hume explained, “she’s more likely to carry the baby to term. Isn’t it obvious?”
This is plainly ridiculous. First, universal coverage does not at all imply universal medical care. There are boatloads of people in Canada coming to the U.S. to get medical care. There are boatloads of people in Britain pulling their own teeth because they can’t get an appointment with a dentist. Second, the number of girls who abort because they are afraid of medical problems is next to nothing. Ninety some per cent of the time, they abort because they are afraid to have a child. We can argue about the best way to treat these girls in a bad situation. But indulging in patent absurdities, like the Cardinal is doing, doesn’t help the discussion in any way.
March 15th, 2010 | 9:54 pm | #10
“Whatever the statistics, a culture that loves children and life, and wishes to pass on its legacy to future generations, will ensure that those future generations get proper medical care, even if their parents are young or poor.”
That’s right. That’s why I’m against Obamacare. Just as I don’t believe that socialized supermarkets get you better or more groceries (ask any 1980s Moscow shopper), universal government-run health care doesn’t get you better medical care. Sure, everyone is insured, but only in the same way flooding the currency with more paper money makes everyone a millionaire. It’s a promise the government can indeed easily keep, but at the expense of passive aggressive theft.
March 16th, 2010 | 6:20 am | #11
I do not have the reflexive opposition to the welfare state that some writing on this blog do. I agree that Reid has made a weak case, especially given the evident flaws that Archbishop Chaput points out in the current proposal. Nevertheless, the reality of such huge numbers of uninsured in the US needs to be addressed in some fashion. It would certainly be helpful if the opponents of Obama’s plan would come up with a positive alternative.
Rather than government undertaking to provide medical services directly, I would personally favour some form of mixed system providing for co-operation between government and the private sector, possibly along the lines of the voucher system supported by the advocates of school choice.
Here in Canada we have universal health care operated by each province. When our daughter was in hospital for 10 weeks following her premature birth, we were grateful not to be saddled with a huge mortgage-sized debt afterwards as a consequence.
Yet I am the first to admit that there are flaws in the current system. Overuse creates shortages, as would be expected. This results in delays in elective surgical procedures. A decade ago we drove to New York for an MRI for which we would have had to wait six months in Ontario. So, yes, there are problems with our current setup.
Short of the above-mentioned voucher system, I personally think that a modest user’s fee should be levied on doctor’s visits, which is not the case at present. This would help to infuse needed money into the system and it would serve in some measure to alleviate the problem of overuse of medical services.
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