Short Note on the War Against Women

I always get annoyed that the pro-choice advocates never challenge the anti-abortion people about the number of abortions performed in the country. We hear from the Christian Right that President Obama is the most pro-abortion president in our history, that more abortions have been performed in his administration than in any other. Mike Huckabee talks about genocide when he says that abortion will be front and center as the most important issue if he runs for President.

This has led to the rash of anti-abortion bills in the new House and draconian measures contemplated in state legislatures. Only by challenging these attacks on women will these people have to pull back. An example of this was the proposed South Dakota law to make it homicide to harm a fetus. When pro-choice advocates pointed out that this was tantamount to issuing a muder sentence on abortion providers under the guise of "justifiable homicide" did the legislator pull it back.

The anti-abortion activists like to use the figure 50 million abortions per year performed in the United States. I tend to think they claim every gynaecological procedure as an abortion. But let's not say that do this and try to figure out the odds of this being right.

Here's the napkin math to figure this out.

The number of women in the United States is 155.8 million.
The average age of menopause is 51.
There are 50.6 million women 51 or older in the United States.
There are 30 million women under the age of 14. (I know you can get pregnant younger, but census figures don't break this out better.)


So the ballpark figure--give or take a million--is 75.2 million women of childbearing age,sort of.

This means 2/3rds of these women must get an abortion every year for the anti-abortion advocates to be correct about their 50 million a year figure. Sorry.

I knew Soviet women used to have abortions as birth control and had a far greater frequency than American women. From my napkin math, I find the anti-abortion people totally impossible, given the availability of birth control in the country.

It really is time for people of choice to push back on this nonsense.