January 25, 2006
From the desk of Jane Galt:Safe legal and rare?
Peter Northup of Crescat Sententia makes another attempt to prove his overwhelming intellectual superiority, and instead scores an own-goal:
One last point about Jane Galt's bizarre abortion post. Her line that '"safe, legal and rare" is like "good, fast, and cheap" -- you have to pick two, because it's not possible to have all three at one time' is a great example of a catchy zinger that turns out to be completely absurd upon examination. I already suggested in my last post various reasons for thinking that abortion could be made a lot more rare than now while staying safe and legal, but let's dig deeper into this "pick two" claim. So we can have safe and rare, but illegal, abortion? How interesting. Like safe and rare, but illegal, drug use, I imagine. Or how about legal and rare, but unsafe? Again, that's an interesting claim. How would that work? What would produce such a world? Now, claiming that legality and safety both increase abortion rates, *ceteris paribus*, might actually have the virtue of being true, but it would have the awful downside of being trivial--direction of effect is interesting, but tell me magnitude, and let's please unpack that "all else equal". And, of course, it would have the fatal flaw of not sounding clever.
To start with, Mr Northrup didn't suggest anything in his last post that suggested that education--the topic of my post--could make abortion substantially rarer. I have no doubt that there are lots of things we could do to make abortion rarer. We could shoot doctors who performed abortions. We could make sonograms mandatory for all pregnant women. We could put teenage girls under lock and key. We could improve the career opportunities for young poor women, making pregnancy a much less attractive risk (I understand from the social workers that I used to work with that, at least in the mid-1990s, a major driver of the abortion rate in New York's inner city was young women who mistakenly thought that getting pregnant was a good way to rekindle their boyfriend's flagging interest.) We could put men or boys who impregnate women into forced work programmes to pay for junior's diapers, unless they already have a paycheck to garnish. We could establish a DNA database for the purposes of identifying each and every child's father. We could imprison women who get abortions. We could force all teenage girls to go on depo-provera, or similar, until they graduate high school. We could, if we had some sort of magic social medicine that allowed us to change culture at will, stop teenagers from believing that promiscuous premarital sex is acceptable, that birth control is the woman's responsibility, and that teenage boys with seven kids aren't deadbeats, but studs.
Few of these options appeal to me. But I have no doubt that all of them would work. The question I was asking was not "is there some policy that will reduce abortions?" to which the answer is obviously, yes. The question was "will some Federally mandated sex education programme reduce abortions", to which the answer, as far as I can tell, is "not much". To the extent that Mr Northrup's reasons really are reasons, and not sarcastic invective hurled my way in the mistaken belief that I will be impressed, they are either wrong, or irrelevant to my point. They're also rather silly--does he really have some viable way to change all those embedded cultural values he claims result in women not getting birth control? I mean, for one thing, the idea of the government coming in and deciding to re-educate us out of our values is, frankly, more than a little creepy. And for another, when was the last time you saw such education work? Chinese concentration camps don't count.
As to the question of "safe, legal and rare", Mr Northrup seems not to understand the idea of "context". What are they teaching in schools these days? Obviously, there are many things that are safe, legal and rare; polite argument, for example. Likewise, "good, fast and cheap--pick two", which is a rather old saw regarding the quality of fast food; I apologize if it went over Mr Northrup's head. There are lots of things that are good, fast, and cheap, but Wendy's is not among them1. Good cooking takes time.
Safe, legal and rare abortion seems to me to be unlikely given the constellation of policy choices from which we can choose. The American electorate will let us teach their children about depo-provera; they will not let us inject their daughters with it against their will. And so forth.
But where's the data? Why, I'm so glad you asked. The magnitude, as it turns out, is very, very large, as you will find if you read these three pages from Freakonomics2:
In the first year after Roe v. Wade, some 750,000 women had abortions in the United States (representing one abortion for every four live births). By 1980, the number of abortions had reached 1.6 million (one for every 2.25 live births), where it levelled off. . .To be sure, the legalization of abortion in America had myriad consequences. Infanticide fell dramatically. So did shotgun marriages, as well as the number of babies put up for adoption (which has led to the boom in adoptions of foreign babies). Conceptions rose by nearly 30 percent, but births actually fell by 6 percent, indicating that many women were using abortion as a method of birth control, a crude and drastic sort of insurance policy.
Making the less-than-heroic assumption that legalizing abortion did not make it suddenly less prevalent, the most conservative analysis of the impact of Roe would suggest that it increased the pregnancy rate by 30%, the abortion rate by more than 50%. In other words, the effect of Roe dwarfs any other effect we have seen on either out-of-wedlock pregnancy, or abortions.
Since 1991 we have seen a long, slow secular decline in unwanted pregnancies, for reasons that are not clear; probably, some combination of social factors, better birth control, and (one might posit) Roe's breaking the chain of unwed motherhood that passed from hapless mother to unwanted daughter. But no scientist that I am aware of has made an even half-hearted stab at attributing much of this to better sex-ed.
But if Mr Northup thinks he has a policy programme short of prohibition which could cut the number of abortions in half, I would be eager to hear it.
Oh, and Mr Northup, if you want to know how abortion can be legal, rare, and unsafe . . . just give antibiotic resistance a few more years. Contrary to popular belief, it was penicillin, not Roe, which ended the high death rate from backdoor abortions.
1Yes, I like a Wendy's frosty and a biggie fries as much as the next gal. But they don't have any particular flavour; they're just sweet and fatty. I wouldn't choose them over, say, Boulud.
2If those links don't work--and they may not--go to Amazon, and search Freakonomics on the word "births". Those passages come from page 138 and 139.
Posted by Jane Galt at January 25, 2006 9:57 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links
I'm pretty sure "good, fast, cheap: pick two" was an engineering aphorism long before it was ever applied to fast food.
Wow, it looks like Crescat's link to the parody site "Assprat Pretentia" is approaching redundancy.
I would bet that the decline in unwanted pregnancies can be primarily attributed to the AIDS scare.
I concur with dave about "good, fast, cheap: pick two" having been an engineering aphorism. I heard it often in my steel fabricating days. Now I prefer to use live, long, and prosper.
Whoa, someone at Crescat Sententia made a gratuitously snotty post! Holy s**t, I'm shocked!
Oh, wait; no I'm not. I'm pretty sure that the only thing that would come as less of a surprise (blogospherically speaking, at least) would be a report that someone over at Crooked Timber was being a condescending prat.
While I can only admire the vigor of your reply, I am unfortunately reminded of that other truism regarding kids who are still in school: no matter how much evidence to the contrary they're presented with, they never really believe they've gotten the worst of any serious argument.
Jane,
Nearly everything I read here I find very interesting and thought provoking from both the blog posts and the many, and often heated, exchanges of comments.
Eloquent rhetoric is amusing for the reader and to the author can be satisfying as intellectual masturbation. However, grand words and inspired language alone do not build bridges, cure illness, nor, as it now seems evident, demonstrate that more sex education would lead to fewer abortions.
An ongoing discussion with Mr Northrup will likely prove unproductive and overly verbose. Should he be reading these comments: Mr. Northrup, you may be interested in the blog Marginal Revolution. The authors of said site make well informed arguments that are concise and poignant -- a style that you should consider emulating when engaging the hosts of this site.
It's "Northup" Like "North is up on the map."
So, in response to a "snotty" post, you have a post calling him snotty in a snotty fashion....
The "safe, legal and rare: pick two" was very nice from a word-game perspective (one of my favorite perspectives) but it *did* clunk when you think about it too hard.
From the section you posted, he wasn't responding to the *post,* he was responding to your choice of wordplay. It grated on my mind when I read it, too; the only thing is that I didn't make a post about it.
Actually, Sailorette, I don't think it clunks
Abortion can be safe and legal, in which case, given teh policy choices available in this democracy, it will not be rare.
It can be safe, but illegal, in which case it might well be rare. (Abortion statistics are notoriously atrocious, but it's reasonable to assume that Roe led to at least a 3-4x increase in the number of abortions.)
It can be legal, but unsafe (as it will be if antibiotic resistance becomes common), in which case it will most assuredly become more rare--I wouldn't let a surgeon do elective surgery on me if the resulting infection could kill or sterilise me.
Now, one can also envision situations in which not even two out of three prevailed: if abortion were unsafe and illegal, for example. But I don't see any way to get to safe legal and rare.
Jane said: "Now, one can also envision situations in which not even two out of three prevailed: if abortion were unsafe and illegal, for example. But I don't see any way to get to safe legal and rare."
That may be because you are over-eager to project your personal experience onto those of different social backgrouds. I am happy to hear you got a "state-of-the-art" sex ed. Sadly, large chunks of society still don't.
A simple example is here in Orange County, CA, where there is a large Viet Namese population that has had a high teen pregnancy rate. The local Planned Parenthood affiliate began targetting that population for educational outreach, and lo-and-behold, the problem got better. (sorry, I don't know if the number of abortions went up or down. I only know about the pregnancy rate).
Moreover, every woman I know who has had an abortion (a substantial number) has had ONLY one abortion: they got a lot more careful with their own contraception after the experience. Indeed, I spoke with the medical director of my local PP affiliate recently and she said they get very few repeat customers as well. So if we consider the first abortion as an extreme example of sex ed, one can see that effective sex ed does lead to behaviour changes that reduce demand for abortion.
Will a perfect sex ed program drive abortion rate to zero? of course not. But better education, when combined with cheap, confidiential, reliable access to contraception ( something the various Pharmacists at Target are actively fighing against) does reduce the number of abortions. Toss the Bush Administration-opposed Plan B into the mix, and we as a society definitely could have abortion be safe, legal and rarer.
The numbers simply don't back up your anecdotal evidence--at least not the ones I've seen. On a nationwide basis, the benefits of better sex ed and free contraception are statistically significant, but shockingly modest, suggesting 1) that it can't be too hard to get birth control in this country and 2) threshold effects seem to be high. And figures from the Alan Guttmacher Institute, which is generally recognized by all but hard-core pro-lifers as the best source of data on abortion (they are openly pro-choice), indicate that roughly half of all abortions are obtained by women who have had at least one prior abortion. What you're experiencing is a common sample bias: the majority of women who have had abortions have had only one, but because the repeate customers tend to have quite a few, the majority of abortions are obtained by women who have had at least one prior abortion. It's like divorce statistics: most people only get married once, but 50% of all marriages end in divorce, because some serial monogamists get married many times.
Crescat Sententia is one of the better student blogs, but Northup's post was remarkable for its 1) obtuseness, 2) snottiness, and 3) just plain bad writing.
It's not that surprising that in some cases, as tylerh notes, a poorly educated population can be taught about birth control with quick results. But these groups make up a relatively small proportion of the national population, and will predominantly consist of culturally-isolated people who speak little English. By all means reach them, just don't expect to affect national numbers much.
One friend of mine had two abortions when she was young; she's now one of the most thoughtful, organized, and responsible people I know. Individual people can change greatly; as Jane notes, cultures rarely do. If Roe v. Wade is overruled that may help effect a cultural change, but I think drastic state-level restrictions on abortion would have a quite limited impact on national abortion numbers. Texas is the only large (population) state I'd expect to ban it in most cases, and many women would either manage to travel out-of-state to a clinic or get an illegal abortion. (Or a quasi-legal one, persuading a doctor that carrying to term would threaten their emotional health.) I'd be surprised to see abortion numbers drop as much as ten percent in such a scenario; 2-3% seems more likely.
I really don't understand why you're framing this in terms of government policy; that was, in fact, part of why I was so annoyed by the piece. Of course I have no magic wand of cultural change; cultural change is poorly understood and the causal processes are incredibly complicated. My point was that *my* libertarian instincts are to look at whether we can make contraception less costly, both materially and psychologically, through voluntary, non-coercive means. I'm thus taken aback by other libertarians who dismiss all such possibilities, and say it's the state or nothing. It seems doubly weird to do that while simultaneously ignoring the possibility of state subsidies of contraception--oddly enough, in your list of horribles, simple subsidies don't even figure! I repeat that I'm not *advocating* that; I just find it weird to reach only for the state's stick, and not its carrot, if you're going to be bringing it in at all.
More here:
http://www.crescatsententia.org/archives/2006_01_25.html#006317
Peter, I think there are more costs to contraception than you're considering (which makes sense when you consider how many people fail to use it effectively). Financially, methods run the gamut from cheap or free (condoms) to rather expensive (surgery). Convenience of use is more or less converse to expense, though IUDs seem to my male eyes to have significant cost as well as inconvenience. Drawbacks to the experience, handiness at an unplanned moment, "ick factor" (for some people), side-effects (the Pill, for many), and visible marks (Norplant) are all also costs or deterrents for use. So is social opprobrium, in some cases.
How many of these can we reduce through non-State, non-coercive means? Most of the obvious ones are already pursued at some level or another -- Planned Parenthood is not an arm of the government, though it does get some funding, and it reduces many of the financial costs. Some groups try to reduce social criticism of contraception. Beyond these, though, I'm not sure how much room there is for significant improvement.
Also, appropos of your comment to Jane's previous post, I do think your sarcasm pretty much swamped any point you had about criticism of state vs non-state actors. I don't think that was what Jane addressed in her initial post, except insofar as she was responding to William Saletan. So your vitriol seemed misplaced, other critiques aside.
(I understand from the social workers that I used to work with that, at least in the mid-1990s, a major driver of the abortion rate in New York's inner city was young women who mistakenly thought that getting pregnant was a good way to rekindle their boyfriend's flagging interest.)
It's still the same-old/same-old.
Since 1991 we have seen a long, slow secular decline in unwanted pregnancies, for reasons that are not clear; probably, some combination of social factors, better birth control, and (one might posit) Roe's breaking the chain of unwed motherhood that passed from hapless mother to unwanted daughter.
People are occasionally surprised to find that I, a 2nd Amendment advocate, don't automatically say that the decline in violent crime over the past decade is due to more States issueing concealed carry licenses to their residents.
Instead I point out that the Baby Boomers, an enormous chunk of population, are getting older. Those who are prone to commit violent crimes have been caught and tossed in jail for long sentences, have been killed, or are simply old enough to learn a bit of caution during their sunset years.
(This doesn't mean I'm about to turn in my guns and donate to the Brady Campaign. Gun ownership is at an all time high while gun violence keeps going down, except in areas where they ban firearms. There the violence just keeps getting worse.)
Anyway, I digress.
Why does everyone always assume that only teenagers get abortions? Couldn't a woman who already has as many kids as she wants decide to abort? Or a woman who doesn't want any kids at all even though she's in her 30's and her biological clock is ticking?
The number of violent crimes in the United States kept climbing until 1992, when it started a...how did you put it, Jane? A "long, slow secular decline"?
I can't help but wonder how much of the similar decline in abortions is due to the greying of America. Any ideas?
James
Aren't blogs with serious Latin mottos almost by definition pretentious?
-AT
"Inscriptiones Latinae me terrent."
Obviously, there are many things that are safe, legal and rare; polite argument, for example
That's a great line. :)
James:
Couldn't a woman who already has as many kids as she wants decide to abort? Or a woman who doesn't want any kids at all even though she's in her 30's and her biological clock is ticking?
Well, yes, but the notion is that relatively few people in such situations are in fact seeking abortions -- they've mostly learned to avoid getting pregnant in the first place. Yes, there are always individual exceptions, but we're talking statistics here. Please provide some to support your hypothetical.
I mean, for one thing, the idea of the government coming in and deciding to re-educate us out of our values is, frankly, more than a little creepy. And for another, when was the last time you saw such education work?
Drunk driving.
When I was a kid, drunk driving was almost as acceptable as speeding. I remember the first laws that could plunk you in jail and cause you to lose your license were considered massively over-penalizing and they had difficulties getting judges to go along with it. (And I remember my father telling me that the purpose of the penalties was mostly to convince people that it was bad rather than to terrorize individuals into stopping. Social pressure would bring down the rates, not deterrence.)
However, over the years, the government managed to change that particular value, and now drunk driving is considered by most people to be about as acceptable as randomly firing a handgun into a crowd.
Social engineering *can* work. It just doesn't *always* work.
"I mean, for one thing, the idea of the government coming in and deciding to re-educate us out of our values is, frankly, more than a little creepy. And for another, when was the last time you saw such education work?"
Answer: on this issue, over the past ~40 years. Our values used to include pre-marital chastity. Someone "re-educated us out of" that value. I agree that the results have been "more than a little creepy". The government was not solely responsible this re-education; it was also not totally innocent.
It would be extremely difficult to re-educate that fraction of our society which believes that teenage single pregnancy is a "badge of maturity and honor" to believe that it is instead a badge of shame, as it once was in our society.
Drunk driving.
I have to question how much of the decline in drunk driving is due to education, and how much is due to the much, much harsher laws you allude to.
If we were to make sex without contraception something you could be thrown in jail for (though the mind boggles at how sort of law would be enforced), I'm pretty sure we could engineer a similar decline in abortion, but I'd imagine that the prime influence of "education" in that process would be "educating people on the punishments awaiting them".
Yes, there are always individual exceptions, but we're talking statistics here. Please provide some to support your hypothetical.
You misunderstand me completely, Shelby. I'm sorry if I haven't been very clear. Please allow me to dispel the confusion.
My interest is in crime, violence, law enforcement, the criminal justice system, foreign and military affairs. Not only do I know a little bit about these subjects and have had soem personal experience, I'm always willing to engage in a debate if someone doesn't agree with my conclusions.
This means, of course, that I stand ready to provide the sources of information that led me to my conclusions.
The whole point to my previous comment was that there appears to be a correlation between the aging of our population and the decline of abortion rates. (There's a correlation between the aging of our population and a lot of things, such as health care, marriage and divorce rates, etc.) So the question is: why does everyone assume that the majority of abortions are performed on teenagers? What sources led people to that conclusions?
I'm not particularly interested in abortion as a subject, but you can hardly avoid it if you're engaged in ongoing political debate in this country. Everyone seems to start from the assumption that teens are the major cause of abortions. Why?
If this assumption is true, then wouldn't it also be true that abortions would have a massive spike in the early 1980's when the Baby Boomers' kids entered their teens, and then fallen off when they passed their tender unwanted pregnancy years? This can't be true because we haven't seen the expected spike and dip.
I've never seen a study that examined the ages of people who sought abortions. Instead everyone just tells me that teens get plenty of abortions, and women in their 20's on up get them very infrequently indeed. I'm not seeing anything in the numbers to support this base assumption.
And, of course, if older women continue to get abortions then it's very questionable that any efforts in education, or any program aimed at teens, would have any effect at all.
So the burden isn't on me to provide statistics to support my conclusions since I don't have any yet. Instead I'm questioning your assumptions, and asking you to provide some sort of proof.
James
James:
Here are some figures (tables & graphs) from the CDC on abortions in and prior to 2002: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5407a1.htm#fig1
There's a bar graph (Figure 2) about halfway down the page with a breakdown by age group. It's a ratio graph rather than a raw-number graph, which is inconvenient, but probably in actuality more useful for your purposes, since you're interested in the rate per population. (I have not cross-checked against a census graph or anything. Feel free!) Table 4, farther down, is kind of hard to read but does give raw numbers and percentages. Looks as if teens (through age 19) accounted for 17+%, with 20-24's bringing the "young women" total to basically half of all reported abortions.
I know I've seen, somewhere, a discussion of how many of those 15-19-year-olds were actually 19-year-olds, that is legal adults, but I'm darned if I can recall where OR what the data showed.
Here are some figures (tables & graphs) from the CDC on abortions in and prior to 2002:
Thank you kindly, Jamie.
There's a bar graph (Figure 2) about halfway down the page with a breakdown by age group. It's a ratio graph rather than a raw-number graph, which is inconvenient, but probably in actuality more useful for your purposes, since you're interested in the rate per population.
Actually, I'm interested in raw numbers as opposed to how prevalent an age group is to have abortions. Everyone tells me that the greatest number of total abortions are performed on teens, which was something I found hard to swallow since the number of procedures didn't fluctuate with the number of teens in the population.
The page you linked to appears to show that teens 15 or less have the greatest chance of obtaining abortions as individuals, but that the greatest number of abortions (which is the data I'm interested in) are obtained by women who are in the 20-24 age group.
This has a bearing on Jane's original post, because it is absurd to think that public education would have an effect on women who have already spent a few years out in the world after graduating from high school. (Or dropping out, or whatever.)
James
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