Dramatic Drop in U.S. Abortions in the News The U.S. government agency, Centers for Disease Control (CDC), recently reported these figures from their records: Between 2006 and 2015, in 9 years, the number of abortions dropped 24%. and The rate dropped from 15.9 per 1,000 women aged 15-44 in 2006 to 11.8 in 2015. The rate decline shows the lower number of abortions isn’t merely because there are fewer women of child-bearing age So what’s causing this decline? Many pro-lifers cite their work on state-level abortion regulations, and groups such as Planned Parenthood cite their own work on spreading contraception to prevent the pregnancies that would otherwise be aborted. The PBS News Hour mentioned both possibilities in a short report on the story, thus being rather balanced – we criticized them for lack of balance recently. It gets more complicated, of course, since usually many factors are in play. For example, greater use of contraception might be due not to greater efforts of groups like Planned Parenthood, but because young people with ultrasound photos of themselves as unborn babies stuck on their refrigerator doors find abortion a more repugnant option. Therefore, they take greater care.
New Book: Feminist and Pro-Life
We’ve found on the web a book written from the point of view of a Catholic who assumes a pro-life position to start with and then finds inspiration in such groups as our member group Feminists for Life. A review/interview with the author is entitled "Can you be a feminist and pro-life? Why not, if feminism is about justice and equality?"
The book is entitled The Abolition of Woman: How Radical Feminism is Betraying Women, by Fiorella Nash.
Latest CLN Blog Post: No Nukes Conference We helped co-sponsor an anti-nuclear weapons conference that just happened in Maryland. John Whitehead reports on his experience there in To Save Humanity: What I Learned at the “Two Minutes to Midnight” Conference.
Quotation of the Week Mel Miles We Were Built For This, January 27, 2015 That one fact alone was a mental earthquake. The death penalty was wrong. . . . . What else was I wrong about? I started praying for a way to navigate all the bajillion of questions that started flooding my mind. I had to start taking issues one at a time, spending hours flipping them around in my mind, trying to find an opinion on each one that remained compatible to my faith and my understanding. It was a beast. . . . The more I thought and pondered, I noticed a pattern emerging. One idea consistently worked across issues, across every lens I could pass things under, and that was the fact (yes, I’m going to call it a fact) that life matters. . . . My goals as of now are to be aware of the myriad places where our culture accepts death and work against it. From people calling for the genocide of Daesh, to abortion, to the hero worship of soldiers, to the minimal effort we give to keep the people of Africa from falling to every numerous thing that tries to take their lives . . . It’s a crazy long list.
Responses/News Tips/Questions to share are all welcome. Send to weekly@consistent-life.org.
