Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Abortion & Social Change

Abortion & Social Change

John Lott has a column up at Fox News that uses the enormous difference between Obama and McCain on abortion as a starting point for discussion--with links to a number of studies of the effects of abortion. I'm not sure that I completely agree with Lott's assertion:

Liberalizing abortion rules from 1969 to 1973 ignited vast long-term social changes in America. This discussion might finally provide a chance to evaluate how Roe v. Wade has changed the U.S.
One often misunderstood fact: Legal abortions didn't start with Roe or even with the five states that liberalized abortion laws in 1969 and 1970. Prior to Roe, women could have had abortions when their lives or health were endangered.
Doctors in some surprising states, such as Kansas, had very liberal interpretations of what constituted danger to health; nevertheless, Roe did substantially increase abortions, more than doubling the rate per live birth in the five years from 1972 to 1977.
But many other changes occurred at the same time:
• A sharp increase in pre-marital sex.
• A sharp rise in out-of-wedlock births.
• A drop in the number of children placed for adoption.
• A decline in marriages that occur after the woman is pregnant.
I agree with Dr. Lott that making abortion more available certainly changed behaviors, taking away the consequences not just for women who became pregnant, but also for men. Without the substantial consequences that an unplanned (and often illegitimate) pregnancy entailed, both men and women had less incentive to use contraception, or to get married. And I also find Lott's argument that the net effect was a dramatic increase in single mothers (generally a disaster for both the mother and the child) quite persuasive.

One area where I think I would differ from Lott is the sequence of events. His article seems to be arguing that making abortion readily available caused this change. I'm not convinced--or at least, I'm not convinced that it was the primary cause. There was an enormous social change in the United States in the 1960s and early 1970s--and the awareness that large numbers of teenaged girls were getting pregnant, I think, drove a lot of the liberalization of abortion laws.

It is rather difficult for a lot of younger people to really appreciate how dramatically the society changed. When The Sensuous Woman was published in 1969, the author felt it necessary to justify and explain that it was okay for women to have oral sex with men. (That she felt it necessary to publish her book under a pseudonym is also pretty indicative.) When Dr. David Reuben's Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex was published that same year, the book acknowledged that one of the principal reasons that men went to prostitutes was for oral sex, because most women would not do that. And now we have reached the point where I linked a while back to this article in Marie Claire about a cosmetic procedure that makes that seem downright old-fashioned.

If you are under 40, you are probably startled to hear this. Our culture changed dramatically during the the 1960s and 1970s--and not just in how open it was about sexuality, but in what people were actually doing. Liberalized abortion certainly caused significant cultural changes--but it was also a byproduct of changes already in progress.

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