The following is a great post by Reverend Debra W. Haffner, director of the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice, and Healing. Please check out her blog for her other terrific posts.


There was a steady drumbeat of articles last week calling for new common ground on abortion in light of the election of a pro-choice President. Articles quotes such anti-choice religious leaders as David Gushee, Jim Wallis, Professor Kmeic, and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good as calling in Gushee's words in the Baptist Press for "reducing the demand for abortion" by expanding adoption services and providing pregnant women with health care, child care, and education.

Missing from every one of these calls was a call to work to prevent unintended pregnancies in the first place through sexuality education and contraceptive services.

These leaders use the Guttmacher Institute's research that shows that women often choose abortion for financial reasons and that poverty impacts the abortion rate. But what they fail to mention, is that it first affects the unintended pregnancy rate: that poor women are at least five times more likely to become pregnant unintentionally.

Here's what Guttmacher Institute's Susan Cohen wrote the last time this abortion reduction strategy was floated by Democrats for Life in 2006:

While it is theoretically possible that increased social supports for pregnant women and even more “adoption-positive” problem-pregnancy counseling could have some impact, neither can hope to approach the real reductions in the abortion rate that could be achieved by preventing unintended pregnancy in the first place.

That's what the science says -- and I also think it's the moral position. I've worked with thousands of women facing unintended pregnancies. They aren't looking for "abortion on demand"; with less than a handful of exceptions, they sat with me (and often their partners or their parents) and wept as they tried to decide what was best to do. They often did have financial concerns, but they were rarely short term (how would I pay for prenatal care or infant care?) but rather about how they could afford to raise a child (or in many cases another child in a family that already had them) to adulthood. And they too often didn't have partners who they wanted to spend their lives with or who could support them. In the words of one of colleagues, "they had too much responsibility already and too few resources, both personal and economic."

So, here's my suggestion for common ground. Let's stop talking about reducing the numbers of abortions as a goal by itself, and let's start talking as a country about reducing unintended pregnancies in the first place. We'll work with you to make sure that every pregnant woman who wants to carry her pregnancy to term can afford to do so and you'll work with us to reduce the number of women and couples who have to face an unintended, unplanned, and often unwanted pregnancy.

Sounds like a plan.

Hopefully the one that the Obama administration and the new Congress (as well as my evangelical colleagues) will adopt.