It has been 37 years since the Supreme Court rendered its landmark decision guaranteeing a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy. Abortion existed before the decision known as Roe v. Wade but the choices for women then were incredibly expensive or extremely dangerous.
Since 1973, the cultural shift of Roe v. Wade has provided both sides of the ideological divide with plenty of fodder for debate. Elements of religion, morality, values and privacy have all contributed to a national dialog that, at times, has been screamed rather than spoken.
Reasonable people on both sides of the issue have touched for years on the subject of "common ground" regarding abortion. It involves ratcheting down the volume, stepping back to look at relevant statistics and honestly looking at ways to find a workable approach to this issue.
Without delving into a lot of numbers, there are some important large-scale concepts to push forward, the first one being unintended pregnancies. You can draw a square on a piece of paper to represent all the pregnancies in America. Now draw another line right down the middle, splitting the square in half. Roughly half of all pregnancies in this country are unintended, and of those unintended pregnancies, more than 40 percent of them will end in abortion.
Anyone with a mind for true reason will deduce that the most realistic opportunity for reducing the need for abortion lies in preventing unintended pregnancy. And the good news is the tools for prevention are already available to us. What are the two biggest tools in the kit? Education and family planning.
First, people need medically accurate and age-appropriate education in the way their body functions. While it's true the only sure-fire way to not get pregnant is to abstain, statistics from states that teach abstinence-only sex education have shown an increase in unintended pregnancies. The message of delaying sex is a good one but students also need to know how to use birth control and how to prevent sexually transmitted infections (STIs).
The second important tool is support and funding for family planning. Birth control, STI screening and treatment, and regular checkups for cervical cancer need to be available and accessible. Each dollar invested into family planning programs saves $4.39 in unintended pregnancy costs down a very short road.
So why not just ban abortion? If it's against the law people won't do it, right? Unfortunately, this is not the case. The Guttmacher Institute completed a study in October of last year that showed how women around the world will access abortion services whether they are legal or not and whether they are safe or not. Some of the highest abortion rates in the world are in countries where abortion is against the law. The lowest abortion rates are from countries in Western Europe where abortion is legal, sexual health is taught in home and at school, and people have access to contraception. If you really want to lower the abortion rate, banning the procedure is clearly the wrong choice.
As a nation of individuals, where people are entitled to their own beliefs and moral structures, we may never gain consensus on the issue of abortion. I have put forth a commonsense approach to identifying the roots of abortion in hopes that the more reasoned among us can begin to plot a direction out of this conflict. We have an opportunity to work a solution and we have to start now.
Clover Simon is Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest's vice president for Alaska, based in Anchorage.
BY CLOVER SIMON