Guttmacher Institute Claims Contraception Lowers Abortions, Data Shows Otherwise
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
October 15, 2009
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — The new report issued earlier this week by the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute claims promoting expanded birth control and contraception has lowered abortions worldwide. However, firm statistical evidence from various nations shows abortions increase despite contraception promotion.
The report from the Guttmacher Institute, a former affiliate of the Planned Parenthood abortion business, has already been panned for relying on pro-abortion groups to draw its conclusions and promoting a dubious number of how many women have died from illegal abortions worldwide.
The Guttmacher study also claims "increases in global contraceptive use have contributed to a decrease in the number of unintended pregnancies and abortions."
It claims "positive global trends in increased contraceptive use" have helped "lower unintended pregnancy rates and declining abortion numbers."
"The rate of abortions in a given country corresponds mostly to the rate of unintended pregnancy, which in turn corresponds closely to rates of contraceptive use," Guttmacher claims.
However, recent news out of England dispels the long-held myth that promoting contraception and birth control reduces the number of abortions.
According to the London Daily Mail, teen pregnancy rates in England are now higher than they were in 1995 and pregnancies among girls under 16, below the age of sexual consent, are also at the highest level since 1998.
That is despite the British government spending £300 million (that’s over $454 million for those of us in the United States) in an attempt to cut the number of teen pregnancies in half by promoting comprehensive sexual education.
The British teen abortion rate, according to the newspaper, has also climbed steadily since 1999 when the government released its Teenage Pregnancy Strategy.
That would be an aberration were it only an isolated case, but it is not.
Last year, officials in Sweden reported that the number of abortions increased 17 percent in Sweden from 2000 to 2007 despite sales of the morning after pill increasing during the same time period.
The morning after pill became a drug that could be sold over the counter in Sweden in 2001. In that time, sales of the drug tripled in the nation’s capital and doubled nationwide.
Still, new national figures show 37,205 abortions in Sweden in 2007, up approximately 17 percent from the 30,980 done in 2000. In Stockholm, 10,259 abortions were done — a 6.9 percent increase in just one year from the 2006 figures.
Meanwhile, last year the number of abortions in Scotland rose for the third straight year despite a heavy push for women to use the morning after pill.
Abortions in Scotland rose four percent according to a report from the British National Health Service and now number 13,703. That increase came after NHS reported 13,081 abortions in 2006, up from 12,603 the previous year — an increase of nearly 3.8 percent.
Not only is the increased promoting of the morning after pill resulting in more abortions, not less, the number of women having repeat abortions is increasing as well.
NHS reports more than a quarter of women, 26.3 percent, who had an abortion in Scotland last year had at least one prior abortion before that. That’s 3,600 women who had one or more abortions prior, according to the government’s statistics.
Finally, a report from Planned Parenthood of Western Washington shows abortions are on the rise in Washington state even though it participated in Washington state’s Take Charge pilot program.
Take Charge is a Medicaid section 1115 Waiver program initiated in 2001 to provide free contraceptives to low-income women not already covered under Medicaid. It was originally funded for five years in 2001, then extended for three more years, and comes up for renewal in 2009.
Yet the PPWW annual report indicates abortions rose 16 percent from 7,790 in 2006 to 9,059 in 2007.
Abortion advocates have claimed higher use of the Plan B drug through over the counter sales will result in a drop in unintended pregnancies and fewer abortions.
Mary Emanuel, who runs the web site Abortion in Washington, studied the report and also found that the abortion increase occurred despite sales of over 106,000 emergency contraception kits to Planned Parenthood customers.
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