Pro-Facts

So we were talking about abortion the other day. It came up, of course, because King George (of Texas) recently signed ye old ban on certain (certainly unpopular and certainly rare) late-term abortions. It’s a touchy emotional issue for sure, especially with the fetus in those cases looking so recognizably human. But I always like facts and perhaps a bit of arm-chair analysis on the side.

I pulled this image from a news report about the swift court action to block the new law. Note how few late-term abortions are actually performed: roughly 1-2%. I also recall reading that most third-trimester abortions are for the health of the mother, for which Bush’s law specifically didn’t account. So not only is that law ill-conceived and inflammatory, it’s largely moot, at least for its stated purpose of bringing more fetuses to term. Except it’s not moot from the legal point of view since these battles tend to establish precedent and so on.

But what’s more interesting to me about this particular graph is that surge in abortions at the end of the first trimester. I added the red, blue, and cyan lines for effect. The red line shows an approximate trend line. The blue hatch shows a discrepancy between the trend line and the actual data. The cyan is simply there to mark the seventh week, the time by which most women should know they’re pregnant (symptoms may not even kick in until week six or so and the "missed period" logic seems to be hit and miss for a variety of reasons).

So what’s that surge about in weeks 7 to 11? Well, think about it for a second. It’s now week eight of your pregnancy and you’re still not sure what to do. You’ve discussed the options and you feel, for a variety of reasons, if you’re going to terminate, it’s best done before week 12. Still, it may take you some time to come to this decision. But judging from the sharp decline in abortions after week 11, this is the make or break point. This interpretation could be even better illustrated by normalizing or "bending" the data so that the red line is perfectly horizontal. You’d see the blue section jump up like a giant bulge.

And the fact that there’s that bulge between week 7 and week 11 says to me that people are giving the decision an enormous amount of weight. It’s not some quick "get rid of this thing" sort of impulse. If it were, you’d see the big spike centered around week 7 or even earlier. The fact that week 7 is way below the trend line only supports my assertion. There are certainly a significant percentage of abortions in weeks 1-6 and this data doesn’t tell me anything about the thinking behind those decisions. But overall, this data indicates to me that we’re making the right decision in trusting the mother (and father) to make the decision for themselves.

As for the law itself, I’m not entirely sure what to think. I agree that laws limiting women’s right to choose are dangerous on a number of levels. But a law banning certain specific procedures (see this article for details of which procedures) that the public largely feels are gross and barbaric? If it were that simple, I might agree that society has an interest in limiting people to only reasonable procedures while still giving women full choice over if and when to have an abortion. I mean, many states permit capital punishment but we as a society generally restrict how it can be done to avoid cruel and unusual punishments (such as hanging or beheading, for example).

But it’s more likely that the Republicans intentionally dropped the "for the health of the mother" clause so as to create the impression that a) many abortions involve crushing or salting a mostly-formed fetus and b) pro-choice activists are rabid and would support all forms of infanticide. It’s a pretty cynical view, I know, but I think it’s borne out by the results we see. And it’s not even uncommon for one side of a debate to knowing pass a doomed measure to force their opposition (the courts, or a veto-wielding president) to support something that politically weakens them in the long run. That Republican operatives are willing to play games with women’s and children’s lives speaks volumes to me about how fit they are to decide this issue.