Opinion

November 22, 2012 (Bound4Life.com) – Under President Obama’s pro-abortion leadership, abortions have fallen a full 5%, which is the biggest decline we have seen in a decade. Those are the findings released yesterday from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), reflecting Obama’s first year in office.

The timing is a gift to us as we celebrate Thanksgiving in our nation this week. This year, we get to celebrate the lives of 5% more Americans.

The data was just released this week because it takes a few years to compile. I have said many times that I was curious to see what the abortion rate did in 2009, after the most pro-abortion president in the history of our nation was elected to office. The reason I wondered this wasn’t obvious, but ironic.

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You see, as I have reported before, President Obama has actually been one of the best things to happen to the pro-life movement. Despite his intentions to bring a culture of “choice,” his dramatic approach to abortion has caused a sleeping church to wake up and stretch its muscles of both prayer and activism to increase a culture of LIFE. The result has been myriad new laws restricting abortion—under his reign as president.

Last month news reports told us this:

Just this year, 17 states set new limits on abortion; 24 did last year, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion rights nonprofit whose numbers are widely respected. In several states with the most restrictive laws, the number of abortions has fallen slightly, pleasing abortion opponents who say the laws are working.

Of 50 states in our nation, 41 of them have passed over 90 new laws supporting LIFE—and now the national CDC statistics prove that we can fight abortion even with a president who doesn’t. The report last month continued to note states where abortion rates had fallen (including Texas where pro-life Governor Rick Perry and the Texas legislature have fought to de-fund Planned Parenthood and push through pro-life laws):

States within the nation’s most restrictive region, the midsection, include North and South Dakota, which each have only one abortion clinic and have seen the number of abortions drop slightly since 2008.

And they include Texas, which has the most prescriptive counseling laws — requiring, among other things, that doctors tell women abortion is linked with breast cancer. A group of scientists convened by the National Cancer Institute in 2003 concluded abortion did not raise the risk of breast cancer.

A Texas law passed last year requires women to get an ultrasound and their doctors to describe the fetus. Texas abortions also have dropped every year since 2008.

The Associated Press story notes:

The decline, detailed on Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, came in 2009, the most recent year for which statistics are available. Both the number of abortions and the abortion rate dropped by the same percentage.

Please do read the article for the facts, but keep in mind the statisticians deviate and speculate that the recession caused the decline, that women were afraid they couldn’t afford to get pregnant, that they used more birth control; the even say that all these new laws didn’t affect the abortion rate.

But the truth is simple: if the new laws didn’t effect the abortion rate, Planned Parenthood wouldn’t have spent oodles of money fighting these laws since federal law supersedes state law, and federal law hasn’t changed. The numbers speak for themselves, and the Associated Press reports says, “Abortions have been dropping slightly over much of the past decade. But before this latest report, they seemed to have pretty much leveled off.”

Notable facts include the state of Mississippi, with only one abortion facility, which hovers on the verge of being closed. The report says:

Mississippi had the lowest abortion rate, at 4 per 1,000 women of child-bearing age. The state also had only a couple of abortion providers and has the nation’s highest teen birth rate. New York, second to California in number of abortion providers, had the highest abortion rate, roughly eight times Mississippi’s.

New York, it should be noted, has fewer abortion restrictions and many abortion facilities.

The article concludes with some more of its statistical findings from 2009:

— The majority of abortions are performed by the eighth week of pregnancy, when the fetus is about the size of a lima bean.

— White women had the lowest abortion rate, at about 8.5 per 1,000 women of child-bearing age; the rate for black women was about four times that. The rate for Hispanic women was about 19 per 1,000.

— About 85 percent of those who got abortions were unmarried.

— The CDC identified 12 abortion-related deaths in 2009.

By the 8th week of pregnancy, all babies already have a heartbeat, by the way (which comes at close to three weeks, usually before a woman knows she is pregnant). Obviously we still have a racial divide with abortion, with African-American women having a much higher abortion rate.

There is always speculation on both sides with data. It’s not too hard to put a personal spin on data, and I acknowledge that as an academically trained researcher myself. However, whether there is a direct correlation scientifically or not isn’t even the point I am trying to assert. The point is that of gaining hope and strength for what we do. Many lamented that the election of the most pro-abortion president in history was a seal of death to more babies than ever before. What we know now is that even though in his first weeks in office Mr. Obama worked to loosen abortion restrictions, in that same year abortions in our country dropped.

We have four more years of a pro-abortion president, which tells me if we keep waking up and using our spiritual muscles and our political and social abilities, we have four more years to continue working—through prayer, through loving women, through helping adoption, and through laws and legislation—to reduce abortion even more.

Happy Thanksgiving, pro-lifers. This week as you sit around a table and give thanks for your many blessings, thank the Lord for the increase of 5% of babies who were born. They are somewhere around three years old now, and probably bringing much love and light to many around a Thanksgiving table themselves.