Is the Recession Causing More Abortions?

To plunging home values and tanking stock prices, add another effect of the recession: a spike in abortions. Newspapers are reporting [2] that more women are seeking to end their pregnancies because they can't afford to raise a child. Family planning clinics from Florida to Iowa to Denver have seen the number of abortions they perform rise by as much as 15 percent; this past January, Planned Parenthood of Illinois provided the highest number of abortions in its history. The National Network of Abortion Funds, which helps needy women pay for abortions, reports that calls to its national helpline have nearly quadrupled from a year ago. At the hotline for the National Abortion Federation, the phone has been "ringing off the hook" with calls from women in financial trouble, Vicki Saporta, the group's president, told [3] a Reuters reporter.

Pro-life activists and commentators deplore this rise in abortions, of course-but they are especially agitated by the reason behind it. Women are choosing their own material comfort over the life of their unborn children, they say, a development that reveals the sorry state of our country's moral fiber. "Americans, coming off years of hedonism and credit card spending orgies, are now increasingly aborting their babies who were unfortunate enough to be conceived during this economic recession," Christian radio show host Ingrid Schlueter writes [4] on her blog. "Gone is anything remotely related to the spirit of America past where difficulties were not solved by taking the coward's or murderer's way out, but by fulfilling one's duty and taking responsibility for loved ones, no matter how hard the challenge."

But this interpretation of the relationship between financial distress and the decision to have an abortion gets it wrong on several counts. No one wants her most intimate decisions to be driven by money. At the same time, opting not to have a child you can't afford to raise can be a realistic and responsible-if painful-choice, one often based on taking good care of the kids you already have. Nor is the intrusion of economic concerns on childbearing a phenomenon of this recession, or even of the loosening of sexual mores over the past half-century: historically, financial hardship has been an ever-present motivation for ending a pregnancy.

A report [5] by the Guttmacher Institute, a nonpartisan research organization focused on sexual and reproductive health, demonstrates the persistence of economic concerns in women's decisions about whether to have a child. The study, titled "Reasons U.S. Women Have Abortions," draws its results from a survey of 1,209 abortion patients, and in-depth interviews with 38 more. When asked why they were having an abortion, the second most common reason, given by almost three-quarters of the respondents, was that they "could not afford a baby now." The most common reason was that children would interfere with their education, work, or ability to care for dependents-concerns that are also largely economic in nature. (According to other Guttmacher research [6], 57 percent of U.S. women obtaining an abortion are economically disadvantaged, 61 percent have one or more children already, and 67 percent are unmarried.) The study was published in 2005-when the Dow was still riding high and the housing bubble seemed it would never pop.

Indeed, the Guttmacher survey repeated one conducted in 1987 that asked similar questions of women ending their pregnancies. The results from more than 20 years ago were almost identical to the ones from 2005. The weighing of financial hardship in the decision to have a baby goes back still further, to a time even before abortion was legal. The founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, was moved to open her first clinic in 1918 by the stories of the poor women she encountered as a nurse working in the New York City slums-women like Sadie Sachs, who begged Sanger for birth control (then against the law), and later died from a botched abortion. "One by one worried, sad, pensive, and aging faces marshaled themselves before me in my dreams, sometimes appealingly, sometimes accusingly," Sanger wrote of these desperate women.

You can hear an echo of Sanger's description in an Associated Press story published in March. A pregnant woman in Oakland, Calif., already struggling to support three children and an unemployed boyfriend, couldn't afford bus fare to the abortion clinic. "I just walked here for an hour," she tells the clinic's doctor. "I'm sure of my decision." The same article quotes Stephanie Poggi, executive director of the National Network of Abortion Funds, who says her clients are telling her: "'I've already put off paying my rent, my electric bill. I'm cutting back on my food.' They've run through all the options."

And yet to hear the pro-life activists tell it, women aren't really struggling with difficult choices-they just don't want to give up the luxuries to which they've become accustomed. "Our vision of wealth...has been radically changing over the past 36 years since abortion was legalized," Serrin Foster, president of Feminists for Life of America, told [7] the Catholic News Agency. Our sense of what we need has become "inflated," Foster says, as we cling to unrealistic expectations of a "perfect life." A forthcoming issue of her organization's magazine aims to counter these expectations, featuring an article on "Raising Kids Cheap." A similar piece posted [8] on the Feminists for Life website offers tips like wearing second-hand clothes, cooking meals at home, and choosing generic-label products over name brands.

However well-intentioned, such advice will be of limited use to women who are among the almost 9 percent of Americans who are now unemployed, or the more than 900,000 who've had their homes foreclosed on since the beginning of this year, or the 46 million who have no health insurance. To raise a child to age 18 in a low-income family now costs $196,010, according to the federal government [9]; for middle-income families, the figure is $269,040. That's just for the basics-housing, clothes, food, transportation, health care, and child care.

As an alternative to abortion, pro-life activists promote their movement's "pregnancy resource centers," which offer psychological counseling, parenting classes, and free baby supplies to women who choose to continue their pregnancies. But a 2006 report prepared by U.S. Representative Henry Waxman concluded [10] that many such centers provide "false and misleading health information" to the women who come through their doors. In addition, mothers' financial needs may long outlast the centers' ability or willingness to give. The centers' promises are vague: "We'll help you through this difficult time."

And a report [11] on 11 of them, carried out by the NARAL Pro-Choice Maryland Fund in that state last year, found that the assistance they offered to new mothers "was typically limited to six months to one year after the child was born." After that, it seems, the women are on their own, reliant on a social safety net that's increasingly patchy-thanks to cutbacks urged by the political right.

Potentially more helpful over the long term is legislation like the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Pregnant and Parenting Student Services Act, introduced in Congress several times over the past four years with support from Feminists For Life and other pro-life organizations. The bill would provide grants to colleges and universities that offer assistance to students having or raising children while enrolled. So far, however, the proposed law has gained little traction.

Pro-life activists are surely right about one thing: It's tremendously sad when a woman decides that she can't bring into the world a child whom under better circumstances she would have welcomed. But harsh rhetoric about selfishness and irresponsibility help far less than an acknowledgement of-and lasting aid with-the true costs of raising a child. In the absence of such help, the most responsible act is to face economic reality head-on. For some women, that may mean abortion.

You can hear that painful reckoning in the words of a young woman quoted [12] last month in the Chicago Tribune. Pregnant, engaged to a man who'd lost his job, and all out of savings, she had decided to terminate her pregnancy. "It sucks that it comes down to money," she said. "But if we can't even support ourselves, it wouldn't be good for a baby."

Click here [13] to read why Lauren Sandler made a decision that she expects will cost her $260,000 over the next 17 years: to have a baby.

Photograph of pro-life activists in Washington, D.C. by Alex Wong/Getty Images.

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