Abortion and Universal Healthcare

On why Britain's abortion rate is much lower than the US's:

[O]ne important explanation was Britain's universal health-care system. "If that frightened, unemployed 19-year-old knows that she and her child will have access to medical care whenever it's needed," Hume explained, "she's more likely to carry the baby to term. Isn't it obvious?"

A young woman I knew in Britain added another explanation. "If you're [sexually] active," she said, "the way to avoid abortion is to avoid pregnancy. Most of us do that with an IUD or a diaphragm. It means going to the doctor. But that's easy here, because anybody can go to the doctor free."

For various reasons, then, expanding health-care coverage reduces the rate of abortion. All the other industrialized democracies figured that out years ago. The failure to recognize this plain statistical truth may explain why American churches have played such a small role in our national debate on health care. Searching for ways to limit abortions, our faith leaders have managed to overlook a proven approach that's on offer now: expanding health-care coverage.

When I studied health-care systems overseas in research for a book, I asked health ministers, doctors, economists and others in all the rich countries why their nations decided to provide health care for everybody. The answers were medical (universal care saves lives), economic (universal care is cheaper), political (the voters like it), religious (it's what Christ commanded) and moral (it's the right thing to do). And in every country, people told me that universal health-care coverage is desirable because it reduces the rate of abortion.

Abortion: Sometimes It's Really Not That Big a Deal

A really great essay on abortion, and not feeling guilt, but relief:

But with the recent popularity of slapstick pregnancy comedies like Knocked Up and Juno, you'd be surprised at how randomly "So have you ever been pregnant?" or "What would you do?" can invade a light conversation. And where anti-choice activists believe "confession" is a necessary step to absolve yourself of the "crime," and Christian sites like Care Net are full of essays about regretful women weeping about the mistakes of their youth to disapproving, divinely forgiving husbands, the pro-choice side isn't offering up any nifty guides titled So You're Eating a Cheeseburger With Your Man and Abortion Comes Up. That, at least for me, would've been more handy than all the safe-sex pamphlets stuffed in my hand when I exited the clinic. Between my desire to be honest and my fear of that honesty's ramifications, managing and packaging my abortion became more difficult than the act itself.

One of the problems is that Hollywood is too afraid to actual show abortions--not to protagonists, not to sympathetic characters. They always, in the end, decide to have the baby.

Men, the writer of the essay contends, have a hard time dealing with abortion, thinking that it's this gut-wrenching emotional experience, when in fact for many it's just an annoying but necessary medical procedure, like going to the dentist. We're conditioned to think of abortion as this horrible thing--killing babies!--but at such an early point it's nothing, and depending upon one's views and stage of life, it can be hard to attach such emotion to something that merely seems like a crappy outcome.

The New York Times explored these mixed feelings with this cover story. For another type of abortion--one that freaked me out when I first read it--check out this, another cover.

(Original essay link from Slate)