Is campus contraceptive use sensitive to funding changes?

Study shows students turn to riskier methods when insurance doesn't cover contraception | Inside Higher Ed

Note how the most important finding (or non-finding) was buried in this article: While contraceptive use was affected by price shifts, there was no statistically significant change in the number of accidental pregnancies.

This study, from Slate, has more nuanced reporting on the question of accidental pregnancies, suggesting that accidental pregnancies did go up for a subset of women in the study.

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Medically necessary abortions: The battle of the experts

Apparently, Representative Joe Walsh is not entirely alone! The assertion that an abortion is never medically necessary has been floating around in the pro-life universe for at least a little while. We are now witnessing a battle of the experts. One the one side is Joe Walsh and friends. Walsh himself released a pdf document with quotations from several doctors-- including some historically prominent pro-choice doctors, like Alan Guttmacher-- making the 'never medically necessary' claim seem quite reasonable. Also on Walsh's side are several doctors who particpated in a recent "International Symposium on Maternal Health" in Dublin. Ireland, despite a European Court of Human Rights ruling in 1992 , has a total ban on abortion. Irish pro-lifers want the country's politicians to resist pressure to implement even a life exception, so the question of medical necessity is directly relevant there. The "Dublin Declaration," released after the S...

Book review: The Street Politics of Abortion

I recently wrote a review of The Street Politics of Abortion , by Joshua C. Wilson, for the Law and Politics Book Review. It can be found here .

Asking Pope Francis to reexamine abortion

Philosopher Gary Gutting, who always writes something interesting for The Stone column in The New York Times , recently asked if Pope Francis might reconsider the Catholic Church's traditional absolutist opposition to abortion. In doing so, Gutting makes a case for a kind of minimalist justification for abortion-- that is, abortion is immoral in most circumstances but there are a few cases where abortion is justified (in the case of rape, for example). For that reason, the column makes for informative reading. Still, Gutting puts the cart before the horse: how and why would Pope Francis review the Church's view on abortion before reexamining its even-more-restrictive view of artificial contraception? Anything can happen, of course, but Pope Francis has not really indicated a willingness to reconsider the doctrine of the Church on sex, conception, and abortion. Everything I have read from and about Francis is that he is advocating for a change of tone and emphas...

Reproductive Politics

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