Wednesday, June 02, 2004
A few additional thoughts on the abortion issue in general. With abortion, much as with affirmative action, a media-sexy, horribly divisive political battle rages to the exclusion of the root cause: in the case of affirmative action, inequality of opportunity in primary and secondary schools; in the case of abortion, too many people having unsafe sex.
The easiest statistic I can preface my comments with is that ~50% of all pregnancies are unintended, and ~50% of all unintended pregnancies result in abortions. Both sides generally stipulate to those facts. This essay will treat secondarily for the moment sexually transmitted diseases, but whenever I speak of contraceptives' benefit to the public health, STDs are just as prominent as unintended pregnancies.
While many on the right put forth correctly that the only completely effective way to prevent unintended pregnancies is abstinence, this is simply not a practical course to pursue. Even Catholic schools cannot prevent their students from having sex -- who honestly believes, no matter the amount of education, people across the nation will not give in to their natural urges? There's no reason not to include abstinence education as a part of any comprehensive safe sex plan, but it shouldn't be taught at the expense or exclusion of contraceptive use.
Although condom use (especially among young people) has been steadily rising, a solid percentage still engage in unsafe behavior, including nearly half of all adults. Simply by using condoms, the risk of STDs and unintended pregnancies becomes microscopic in comparison to barrier-free sex.
It seems to me that everyone - proponents and opponents of abortion alike - should be able to get behind a national program to educate about the benefits of contraceptive use and more importantly supply inexpensive, readily available condoms. Perhaps not the emergency condom van like they just started in Sweden, but I'd rather see public money going to reducing an extraordinary risk to the public health than, say, producing a few more thousand pages of federal bureaucracy.
While the government traditionally does a terrible job of acting as parent, the fact is that sex ed. programs in high school which are quite graphic regarding pregnancy and STDs have been shown quite effective, and initiatives to provide accessible condoms even more so. Reproductive health isn't something to be politicized - real people are affected by unintended pregnancies and STDs every day. It puts more money in each of our pockets if the already overburdened American health care system doesn't have to handle these cases. And, it reduces the number of abortions. Everyone wins, no one loses.
We have a vision of government as this uncaring body which is primarily concerned with doing things as slowly and incompetently as possible. I envision a government which sees an epidemic sweeping through its populous and acts swiftly to stop it. Unintended pregnancies and STDs ravage millions of Americans a year; jumping condom use into the 90%s would go a long way to solving those problems. An easy solution with a myriad of benefits which is hardly objectionable when all the non-religious arguments are on the table...
I wish I didn't know with complete certainty it will not happen this decade.
Endnote: You can read my proposal for contraceptive availability at the University of Virginia, it's a program I plan to pursue in the fall.
