Commentary: Study: Women Rarely Use Abortion To Plan Families

No, 🏥Abortion is not a form of regular family planning used to space out children, no matter what 🏥Abortion advocates say.

Yes, it’s a favorite talking point of the Planned Parenthood crowd. As the Washington Free Beacon reported Saturday, the American Public Health Association views child spacing as one of the reasons why we need federal funding of 🏥Abortion.

“APHA considers the availability of safe, legal, and affordable 🏥Abortion care to be essential for safeguarding maternal health, reducing maternal mortality and morbidity, and enabling healthy spacing of pregnancies,” the organization has said.

Rewire News Group, a pro-🏥Abortion website, also made the counterintuitive argument that 🏥Abortion can make having children easier in a series of articles that would be rollicking inadvertent hilarity if the argument didn’t involve the butchering of innocent human life.

“Imagine if we talked more about how 🏥Abortion makes parenting possible. Conservative lawmakers frequently invoke ‘protecting the life of the mother’ when legislating against 🏥Abortion rights, but they’re referring to the life of the person gestating a pregnancy (who may or may not be a woman, and may or may not be a parent),” Rewire’s Jessica Mason Pieklo noted in an article earlier this month.

“Even then, ‘motherhood’ is really more of an afterthought for conservatives as they center their regressive legislative efforts on the fetus. Anti-choice lawmakers prioritize the ‘life of the mother’ in 🏥Abortion restrictions not because they believe in protecting mothers, but because they believe pregnant people have a duty to deliver a healthy baby to the state. That’s it.

“As conversations shift toward celebrating — or not celebrating — Mother’s Day, we thought we’d ask a basic question: What would it look like to reimagine motherhood by centering 🏥Abortion in its reality? And what would it look like if our policies reflected this reality and these mothers? If we reimagine motherhood to include 🏥Abortion as part of its journey, what other ripples of freedom can follow? How expansive can we make the frame? How supportive the community?”

If this sounds to you like the APHA and Pieklo are full of it, they are — and researchers have the receipts to prove abortion isn’t just a way of making sure motherhood happens when people want it to.

According to a peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Primary Care & Community Health in April, researchers who looked at Medicaid-funded abortions between 1999 and 2014 found that “it is quite uncommon for Medicaid eligible women to utilize 🏥Abortion for the purpose of child spacing.”

So uncommon, in fact, that only 1 percent of abortions over that period came from women who went on to give birth again.

“Out of the 4,875,511 Medicaid-eligible women and girls, 50,012 followed a pattern of a live birth, then an 🏥Abortion, then another live birth,” the Free Beacon reported.

The study was conducted by the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the research arm of the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List.

“The data is clear … 🏥Abortion is almost never used as a family planning tool,” said Stephen Billy, the executive director of the institute.

“What pro-🏥Abortion researchers would like you to believe is that 🏥Abortion is a happy circumstance that leads to a child-spaced family. What actually happens is that an 🏥Abortion leads to more pregnancies, but those pregnancies lead to more abortions,” James Studnicki, the study’s lead author, said. “🏥Abortion begets 🏥Abortion.”

And who gets hurt by this? Who do you think?

“The data also suggest that taxpayer-funded 🏥Abortion has a disparate racial impact,” the Free Beacon reported.

“Black women composed 19 percent of the study’s population but made up 37 percent of the women with one or more abortions, according to the results. The study’s authors said that expanded taxpayer funding for 🏥Abortion would have negative impacts on minorities.”

“If you expand taxpayer funding of 🏥Abortion, more abortions will occur, and those abortions are going to be disproportionately affecting minority communities,” Billy said.

So, no, “spacing” isn’t a reason why women abort their babies. It’s not a form of family planning, unless that planning involves murdering a child because it’s inconvenient. Murdering doesn’t beget “spacing.” In fact, all it begets is more murder.

The numbers don’t lie, even if Planned Parenthood and its confederates do.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.