Reproductive Politics

Reporters, analysts, and advocates are all discussing newly released abortion data from the Centers for Decease Control and Prevention (CDC): After years of holding steady, new Center for Disease Control  data  shows that the United States abortion rate has fallen to an all-time low. It dropped 5 percent between 2008 and 2009, the most recent years for which data is available, the largest decline in the past decade. (Source: The Washington Post )  So, why did abortions go down so much between 2008 and 2009? Analysts and pundits have offered the following explanations: Better contraception = fewer abortions. More women are using more effective methods of contraception. As a result, fewer pregnancies that do occur are unwanted, and therefore fewer pregnancies are terminated. A recent, much-discussed study indicated that, when women have greater access to more effective contraception-- when it was provided for free-- pregnancy and abortion rates went down. From th...

University of Massachusetts economics professor Nancy Folbre, in an Economix ( New York Times ) blog post, nicely combines several observations about the benefit of providing women with free contraceptives. Her observations? "[U]nintended pregnancy costs American taxpayers roughly $11 billion each year." The cost of unintended pregnancies affect poor young women more than others and exacerbates the cycle of poverty for the mother and her child(ren).  Insights from the field of behavioral economics suggest that simply expecting women/couples to engage in perfectly strategic behavior when it comes to preventing unintended pregnancy-- in particular, securing and using contraception effectively-- is unrealistic.  'Pre-emptive' birth control, like LARCs (long-acting reversible contraceptives), that have very low use error (i.e., people don't mess up using it properly), overcome this problem.  As a result, it is not surprising that the recent St. Louis study pu...