Punitive abortion policies aren’t reducing abortions. Maybe that’s not the intent | Opinion
If you measure the anti-abortion movement by its ability to reduce the number of abortions that happen in America, it’s a failure, we learned once again this week.
It’s a failure because the time in which the movement has gained legal power is also the time in which a longstanding decline in the number of abortions that take place each year has reversed, with the number of abortions now rising rapidly.
High-quality data from the Society of Family Planning now records the highest number of abortions since the overturn of Roe v. Wade, including a significant increase in the number of telehealth abortions, as Kelcie Moseley-Morris of States Newsroom noted in a recent report.
So, despite using unfair means to pack the Supreme Court with partisan justices, despite setting aside decades of precedent (shattering public confidence in the court along the way), despite passing total abortion bans across the country, despite ratcheting down abortion access in places where it isn’t banned, despite decades of threats and violence against providers, abortion is becoming more common.
Measured this way, the anti-abortion movement is a failure, not because it hasn’t gained sufficient power — its current power vastly outstrips the movement’s public support — but because using criminal and civil penalties is ineffective in reducing the rate of abortion. If anything, the anti-abortion movement has managed to reverse a decadeslong trend of decreasing abortions.
The number of abortions peaked in the mid-1990s, data from multiple sources confirms. From then until the mid-2010s, the number of abortions fell steadily (as did the teen pregnancy rate). Then Donald Trump was elected, driven in part by strong support from the anti-abortion movement. After 2017, the number of abortions has risen at the fastest rate since mid-1970s, immediately following the Roe v. Wade decision. Every year since 2017, there have been more abortions than the prior year.
The exclusive embrace of punitive abortion policy — outlawing it or allowing bounty lawsuits against it — has left entirely unexplored alternative approaches that could reduce the number of abortions that take place each year.
Such non-coercive means include increasing access to contraceptives, better sex education, better health coverage for prospective parents and greater financial support for parents. These are policies that would be embraced by the majority of Americans, who do not want abortion to be illegal in most cases.
But there has been no push toward these policies in red states like Idaho. Far from it.
So it’s worth thinking through the question: What does the anti-abortion movement really want? Does it care, first and foremost, about reducing the number of abortions that take place? Or is it principally interested in heaping self-satisfied moral condemnation on the woman who gets an abortion and those who assist her?
Because the single thing punitive abortion policy has accomplished is to give anti-abortion activists and politicians the opportunity to feel righteous, to provide lots of opportunities to label women who get abortions as criminals. Maybe this haughty self-superiority, this joy obtained by heaping judgment and condemnation on others, is the real motive.
Maybe they’re getting exactly what they want.