Education and Access

From the article Abortions declining greatly across most of US, Changes in laws do not appear to affect trend, in Monday’s Globe :

Abortions have declined in states where new laws make it harder to have them — but they’ve also waned in states where abortion rights are protected, an Associated Press survey finds. Nearly everywhere, in red states and blue, abortions are down since 2010.
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Several of the states that have been most aggressive in passing antiabortion laws — including Indiana, Missouri, Ohio, and Oklahoma — have seen their abortion numbers drop by more than 15 percent since 2010. But more liberal states such as New York, Washington, and Oregon also had declines of that magnitude, even as they maintained unrestricted access to abortion.
~snip~
… five of the six states with the biggest declines — Hawaii at 30 percent, New Mexico at 24 percent, Nevada at 22 percent, and Rhode Island and Connecticut — have passed no recent laws to restrict abortion.

Judy Tabar, prez and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Southern New England, says that restrictive anti-choice laws aren’t needed in order to reduce the number of abortions. The Affordable Care Act contains provisions that gives us vagina Americans access to real, functional birth control withOUT having to proffer a co-pay.

‘‘When birth control is affordable, women are more likely to choose the most effective method,’’ says Ms. Tabar, citing IUDs and hormonal implants. 

We do NOT need to be in endless Duggar-ish (sans all the big buckos) pregger-hood. No, we do not.

Where have abortion rates greatly risen? The red states of Louisiana and Michigan. Both have passed laws to further restrict abortion.

Where’s that most scarlet of red states, Texas, in all this? Passing 20 week bans and NOT providing doctors with info on important medical exceptions to the law. Sarah Guler suffered for it. How many other women have/will?

Turning doctors into criminals or, at minimum lawsuit magnets, helps no one. Making heartbroken women and their mates into vile, reprehensible, miscreanic, hell spawn-ish baby killers is, to say the very least, unhelpful, monstrously cruel and, tragically, all too human.

No one wakes up in the morning thinking "gosh, this pregnancy is SO annoying and SUCH an inconvenience—I think I'll have an abortion and then maybe a nice Cosmo with the girls over lunch."

How to reduce the need for abortion? Not with barbarous, slut-shaming and heinously punitive, dangerous laws and behavior, that’s for damn sure. Education is a good start. Real education not the bullshit Abstinence Only shit (masquerading badly as "education), that W. introduced.

A foundation stone of the Bush Administration's social agenda, these programs receive $176 million a year in federal funding annually, with millions more coming from state and local matching grants.

This ridiculously expensive program was a grand mas failure of course. States with Abstinence Only “Education” have the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country.

In 2008, the Washington Post reported on a University of Washington study which found that teenagers who received comprehensive sex education were 60% less likely to get pregnant than someone who received abstinence-only education. A 2007 federal report found that abstinence-only programs have had "no impacts on rates of sexual abstinence," reported ThinkProgress.

“It appears that efforts to ensure teens can access the information and contraceptive services they need to prevent unwanted pregnancies are paying off,” study leader Kathryn Kost said in a statement. 

Education and access to real, effective birth control works. There will always be a need for abortion. If I'd gotten up the spout, I would've had no other real choice. I was lucky. Not everyone is.

Period. End of story. Boom!