Religion and Abortion: Is there a trend?

[Erik Mesoy]

@Erik Mesoy, the actual rate of Abortions actually increased with the legality of it.

What neutral sources I can find disagree.

TIME magazine, 1964:

Every year a million abortions are performed in the U.S., and 99% of them are illegal. Back-room operations, they endanger a woman's health and life. Some 8,000 are done by physicians in hospitals, with a semblance of legality, but even this is often a fiction. The law in virtually all 50 states declares that a therapeutic abortion is permissible only to save the mother's life. In some hospitals, doctors construe this liberally and do an abortion if the woman threatens suicide, especially if she is unmarried or has been raped.

Roe v. Wade happened in 1973.

As quoted on Wikipedia, the Center for Disease Control says 850k legal.

A total of 848,163 legal induced abortions were reported to CDC for 2003

Assuming that humans are generally rational and will get legal rather than illegal abortions where possible, the number of illegal abortions is probably less than five percent of this number, or perhaps 43k, and that's being generous. Even adding this is still well under a million, and we haven't yet taken into account that the US population increased. According to the Census Bureau, it was under 200M in 1964, and is 300M right now.

You will have to convince me that there were either less than 600k abortions in 1964, or that there were more than 1,5M in one of the last five or so years, or some combination of these, possibly including a huge morality shift.

 

[Keshik]

Christian, pro life

 

[plarq]

Religious unstable and pro-pill/condom.

 

[PrincepsAmerica]

Mainly because I like to scratch once in awhile, and don't want to feel guilty about it. Maybe I'm lazy and immoral, and I should be disparaged for scratching. But I doubt it.

Right, a vague allusion to skin cells being the same as a growing human. Sorry if I don't really see the connection.

What neutral sources I can find disagree.

TIME magazine, 1964:

Roe v. Wade happened in 1973.

As quoted on Wikipedia, the Center for Disease Control says 850k legal.Assuming that humans are generally rational and will get legal rather than illegal abortions where possible, the number of illegal abortions is probably less than five percent of this number, or perhaps 43k, and that's being generous. Even adding this is still well under a million, and we haven't yet taken into account that the US population increased. According to the Census Bureau, it was under 200M in 1964, and is 300M right now.

You will have to convince me that there were either less than 600k abortions in 1964, or that there were more than 1,5M in one of the last five or so years, or some combination of these, possibly including a huge morality shift.

From your own wikipedia link:

"After 1973, legalization of abortion led to an approximately ten-fold increase in the total number of abortions.[29]"

 

[PrincepsAmerica]

doublepost

 

[El_Machinae]

Right, a vague allusion to skin cells being the same as a growing human. Sorry if I don't really see the connection.

You're the one who suggested that we err on the side of caution.

 

[Erik Mesoy]

From your own wikipedia link:

"After 1973, legalization of abortion led to an approximately ten-fold increase in the total number of abortions.[29]"

I make a preliminary rejection of this datum as being inconsistent with all other known numbers. The sentence stands on its own and contradicts most of the rest of the article.

Edit:
Graphic display. Please draw where this "ten-fold increase" occurs.

 

[Azash]

Agnostic - It's the mother's choice.

 

[Eukaryote]

Pro-Choice Christian

Although I believe abortion is wrong I think so strictly for religous reasons and I don't think religon should be used in law-making because it forces people to obay the rules of a religon they may or may not believe in. That doesn't sound like freedom of religon to me. So I'm pro-choice.