David QuinnThe pro-life movement must promote marriage and commitment
The passage of last year’s abortion law by the Government was a very bad day for anyone committed to the right to life but there was some very good news last week. New figures from Britain showed that the number of women travelling to England and Wales each year for an abortion continues to fall and fall sharply.
In 2013, 3,679 Irish women had abortions in Britain. In an ideal world, of course, there would be no abortions but that is a 7% fall on the previous year and a massive 44% decline since the high of 6,673 Irish abortions in 2001.
What explains this good news? It’s very hard to say. Is it because of greater awareness and use of contraception? But the British abortion rate has hardly budged in that period even though they have been pushing contraception in schools and elsewhere for years.
Is it because of the ‘morning-after pill’ being more easily available? But it has only been on sale in pharmacies without needing a prescription from a doctor for a couple of years and our abortion rate has been falling since 2001.
Again, in Britain the morning-after pill has been easily available for a long time and again their abortion rate hasn’t budged by much.
Are we becoming more pro-life? Our law certainly isn’t, but in practice more and more Irish women who might have had an abortion a few years ago are now opting to keep their babies instead.
Rates
Let’s look at our abortion figures more closely. Who is having abortions?
The figures show that 32% of the Irish women who travelled to England for an abortion were single and not in a relationship. Another 45% were single but in a relationship, while 14.6% were married. The rest were separated or widowed.
So we can see that the overwhelming majority of women who have abortions are unmarried.
If you are unmarried and pregnant what is the chance of you having an abortion? Just over 25,000 unmarried Irish women had children in 2012. Another 3,000 or so had an abortion. That translates into a rate for pregnant unmarried Irish women of 10 or 11%.
In contrast there was only a 1.2% chance or so of a pregnant married woman having an abortion. That is tiny.
Overall, about 5% of Irish pregnancies end in abortion. That is very low by international standards.
In England and Wales, there were a massive 185,000 abortions in 2013 which accounted for about 20% of all pregnancies. So the British abortion rate is four times higher than our abortion rate. However you look at it that makes us a vastly more pro-life culture than Britain despite the passage of our recent abortion law.
What’s the likelihood of a married English woman who is pregnant having an abortion? By my calculation, about 8%.
What’s the likelihood of an unmarried English woman who is pregnant having an abortion? About 30%.
Connected to this, we find that the vast majority of women who have abortions, both in Britain and Ireland are in their 20s. This stands to reason because women in their 20s are far more likely to be single.
Deduction
We can deduce two things from these figures. The first (to repeat) is that we are substantially more pro-life than Britain. The second is that marriage is pro-life.
As can be seen from the above figures, married women in both Britain and Ireland are far less likely to have an abortion than single women, including single women in relationships. Why should this be so?
The big reason is that single women – whether in a relationship or not – are far less ready to settle down. The same goes for single men.
It might sometimes be that the woman is willing to have the child but her boyfriend or family or friends put pressure on her to abort it. Or it might be that the man wants to have the child but she doesn’t.
But when a woman is married both she and her husband are ready to have children.
That is what the very act of getting married almost invariably signals. These days people tend to get married in their 30s precisely because by then they are ready to settle down and have children.
In fact, to a large extent settling down means having children.
Some married couples don’t have children of course, but that doesn’t disprove the general rule.
Autonomy
So what can we do to decrease our abortion rate further, and this especially applies in other Western countries which have far higher abortion rates than we have?
Encouraging marriage would play a huge part. If people married in their mid-to-late 20s, as they did only 25 years ago, instead of in their early-to-mid 30s that alone would help to reduce the abortion rate by a lot.
Failing that, we need to challenge the ethic of autonomy in other ways. The ethic of autonomy values personal freedom at the expense of commitment, especially to children.
This is why people in their 20s are much likelier to opt for abortion than married people in their 30s. In their 20s they value their freedom hugely and the result is that they are much more willing to abort the children they perceive as a threat to their freedom.
If instead they could see the intrinsic value of the child and saw that making a commitment to that child is more important than their freedom then our abortion rate would come down further.
So the challenge before the pro-life movement is to promote marriage and promote commitment because nothing is more pro-life.