April 9, 2014 (Turtle Bay and Beyond) – Women claiming their pregnancies are unwanted were “trying hard” to avoid becoming pregnant at the time of conception, according to new data from the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (bpas).
Two thirds of the women who had an abortion at bpas were using a contraceptive, with the contraceptive pill being the most popular. None of the conclusions of the report indicated that the women lacked access to “modern methods of family planning” or that any false perceptions they may have had regarding their own fertility was due to being denied comprehensive sexuality education.
The chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, Ann Furedi, said:
“An unintended pregnancy is often a happy accident – and a large proportion of births in this country are unplanned…Ultimately women cannot control their fertility through contraception alone, and need accessible abortion services as a back-up for when their contraception lets them down.”
The UK has a long-established national health service, and is in many ways a model of what international development organizations would like to export to the developing world. Maternal health statistics in Western Europe are among the best in the world, meaning that carrying a pregnancy to term, even an unintended one, is unlikely to entail risking one’s health or life.
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Furthermore, as pro-life groups have consistently reported, increasing contraceptive use is frequently linked to increased abortion rates.
Pro-lifers are often attacked for not doing enough to promote contraception (or, in many cases, for opposing it on moral grounds) on the basis that abortion is best prevented by increasing contraceptive use. One prominent Catholic who famously bought this line of reasoning is Melinda Gates, who claims to oppose abortion, yet has vowed to make access to contraception a main focus of her life’s work.
The best counter-arguments to this often come from abortion advocates themselves, like Anne Furedi above and RH Reality Check’s Marge Berer, who wrote the following:
“The answer is not to promote contraception in order to reduce unsafe abortion, as the [Gates Family Planning] Summit did. The answer is to promote contraception to reduce unwanted pregnancy and provide safe abortion to every woman who finds herself with an unwanted pregnancy. That is the way to make unsafe abortion history. Abortion will not go away unless men and women stop having sex with each other or everyone is sterilised. So forget it!”
So much for “happy accidents,” then.
Reprinted with permission from Turtle Bay and Beyond