Have you ever thought of abortion as “family friendly?”
A congressman from New Jersey shared his view earlier this year that, “by overturning Roe [v. Wade], we would be denying an entire generation of American women and children their chance at the American Dream.” An influential pro-abortion scientist told the New York Times that “the same people who become pregnant and give birth are the same people who have abortions at different points in their lives.”
According to this narrative, abortion is common among mothers, abortion is used to delay a first birth or space births to optimize family circumstances, and the ability to use abortion to control the development and composition of a family unit enables women to more effectively manage relationships, goals, and opportunities.
That rosy narrative is simply not supported by real-world data and the actual reproductive experiences of real women.
The campaign to normalize abortion in the context of motherhood and family planning is based on the fact that many abortions are performed on women who already have children. However, that one talking point obscures the broader experiences of all women with pregnancies.
Over the past two years, I’ve led a team of researchers at Charlotte Lozier Institute empirically testing various assertions about families and abortion using deidentified (anonymous) data from a population of 4.9 million Medicaid-eligible women who experienced nearly 8 million pregnancy outcomes (birth, abortion, natural loss) from 1999 to 2014. Based on actual Medicaid claims—in contrast with typical abortion studies, which rely on voluntary surveys—our studies utilize the largest, most comprehensive, and most reliable data set of confirmed pregnancy outcomes in the United States.
The results are clear.
First, abortion among mothers is decidedly uncommon. Out of 4.9 million Medicaid-eligible women with at least one pregnancy, fewer than 6 percent had both births and abortions. The vast majority of women who gave birth to at least one child had no abortions. Across the 16 years of verifiable data, there were 13 times more mothers with no abortions than mothers with abortions.
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The bottom line? Abortion among mothers is a rarity, not a normative feature of motherhood. Mothers with and without abortions are not “the same people…at different points in their lives.”
Abortion is also rarely used for the “healthy spacing of pregnancies.” Our thorough analysis of the sequence of pregnancy outcomes using Medicaid claims data found that only 1 percent of eligible women followed the birth-abortion-birth pattern that would suggest an attempt at “child spacing.” Only 2 percent of women used abortion to delay a first birth (for example, to delay parenthood until a more advantageous time).
The bottom line? Induced abortion to achieve a “family planning” objective is exceedingly rare.
Finally, we come to the question of the value of abortion for achieving aspirational goals and the American Dream. New Jersey congressman Donald Norcross shared the narrative earlier this year that “women who chose to and were able to receive abortions…often went on to have a child by choice when they were more financially secure, therefore improving outcomes for the mother and the child.”
That narrative is misleading. Charlotte Lozier Institute’s most recent peer-reviewed study reveals that a woman who has an abortion with her very first pregnancy continues to be statistically predisposed to abortion rather than birth for each and every pregnancy she may subsequently experience.
She’s also statistically predisposed to have more overall pregnancies, more overall miscarriages, and more overall abortions than a woman whose first pregnancy results in a live birth. Specifically, women whose first pregnancy ends in abortion have 35 percent more pregnancies over their reproductive lifetime than women whose first pregnancy results in a live birth, 53 percent more miscarriages, and more than four times as many abortions.
The bottom line? Over a reproductive lifetime, women whose first pregnancy ends in abortion will, on average, have half the number of live births as women who choose life for their first pregnancy. This is what abortion advocates describe as a better outcome for mother and child.
It’s important to note that multiple peer-reviewed studies also show that women with multiple abortions are more likely to experience premature birth and low birthweight in subsequent pregnancies. An analysis of the pregnancy and mortality records of 1 million Danish women finds that the risk of the woman’s death increases with each abortion.
Mothers hardly ever have an abortion. The data show that abortion leads to more pregnancies that result in more abortions, more miscarriages, and fewer births. Repeat abortions place women at a lifetime risk of experiencing a cascade of adverse events. To consider abortion a family-friendly option that helps women achieve the American Dream is divorced from objective reality.
Dr. James Studnicki, Sc.D., is Vice President of Data Analytics for Charlotte Lozier Institute. Over a span of four decades, he held academic appointments at the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health, the University of South Florida College of Public Health, and the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, where for ten years he served as the Irwin Belk Endowed Chair in Health Services Research.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
