Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Department of missing data

A ways back, I meditated on the awfulness of the data available on the mechanism by which the morning-after pill (and by extension, the ordinary birth-control pill), prevents pregnancy.

Now, data on this sort of thing is hard to get. But it's not impossible to get; how come we don't have any?

Well, nobody wants to provide it, that's why. Pharmaceutical companies manufacturing birth control sure don't want a study indicating that taking the pill causes fertilized embryos to slip the womb, since that would limit the market for their products. They don't have to do such studies--so why do it?

Now, a number of my liberal readers are no doubt rubbing their hands right now, saying "See! We can't leave research in the hands of private companies! The profit motive distorts it."

Um . . . yeah. So where are all the government studies on the numbers of abortions, the reasons women have them, the biochemical effects of hormonal contraception?

Why, we don't have them, do we? Because the government sure as hell doesn't want to put out a study that will make millions of women at least think twice about their so-easy, so-convenient, so-effective birth control. Why, they'd be storming Capitol Hill with pitchforks!

I had a chance to air this theory at a dinner party this weekend with some science-y types, where a throwaway remark about the birth control pill preventing ovulation led to an intense discussion over whether or not this was true. A British woman who had in a previous life done a graduate degree in biochemistry was stonkered by my casual assertion that the pill prevented ovulation; she had always heard that it worked by preventing implantation, and said that believing otherwise went against everything she knew about biochemistry. I was reduced to arguing that if the Pro-Life Physicians of America believe it prevents ovulation in most cases, it probably does.

But this launched us into a broader discussion of why, exactly, the matter is uncertain. It should not, said the other people at the party, be that hard to figure out. Having read how some of these tests are done on rabbits and rats, I wasn't so sure, but they maintained that it should be easy to discover whether or not a woman is ovulating without cutting her open to check.

My first theory was the one I stated above: we don't know because no one funding studies wants to know. Even European pharmaceutical companies are, AFAIK, doing research primarily for the lucrative (read free) US market; they certainly cannot have much interest in funding research that might cause millions of American women to stop using their product.

But what about European governments? They pointed out. They have no political worries, since no one (okay, almost no one) in Europe cares. Why haven't they done good studies to find out whether the pill suppresses ovulation?

Theories that have been advanced, some of which are mutually exclusive, and none of which have been even cursorily checked:

1) They have, and I didn't find them, because American pro-lifers can't read French, German, or Italian, and neither can American journalists looking for studies on how birth control pills work.

2) The state of European financing for research is apalling, and this subject falls quite a ways down the list of topics their governments are willing to fund.

3) The only way to tell is to do microscopic analysis of a woman's fallopian tubes, which ain't going to happen

4) One sciency guy suggested that you could get around above by injecting some sort of tracer dye into a woman's ovaries and seeing whether it comes out in menstruation. My guess was that given that we already know that the pill is safe, and it works, an experiment that involved injecting anything into a woman's ovaries would never pass human subject review, or its European equivalent. Especially since I don't see how you'd find a single human cell 100 micrometers in diameter in several ounces of non-homongenous liquid without using something radioactive. But I have no idea what I'm talking about.

5) Human ovaries are too variable--or the fraction of total available eggs actually released over an average woman's lifetime too small--to discover whether a woman ovulates simply by totting up the number of eggs in the ovaries of longtime pill users

6) The average woman is on the pill for too short a time to have a statistically significant number of eggs suppressed from ovulating.

7) There are enough women on the pill long term that it would be possible to tot them up, but no one is interested enough in the topic to do a study which involves waiting for a bunch of young pill users to die of natural causes so you can take out their ovaries and have a look.

8) Someone is willing to do such a study, but the eggs in the ovaries disappear between menopause and death, and no one would sign up for a study that involved having your ovaries taken out as soon as you hit menopause.

9) Another possible means of detecting it--studying human ovaries in vats--is unfeasible, either because it's not possible to replicate the complex hormonal balance of the human body, or because the process requires a physical environment (such as proximate fallopian tubes) that cannot be realistically reproduced.

10) James Dobson's stealth operatives have infiltrated the EU.

All of which is a long-winded way of asking my readers (particularly the amazing Derek Lowe) to weigh in with any theories or knowlege they may have: why can't I find any solid studies to tell me whether the Pill works by supressing ovulation, or preventing implantation, or both?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Markets in measurement

There are many sources of bad statistics in the world, but few as fertile as the rolling green (but well-fortified) hills of the abortion debate. Remember how Bush made abortions go up? Or the thinly researched (though intuitively appealing) proposition that sex ed reduces abortion rates? Perhaps my personal favorite is the "legalizing abortion doesn't make it any more frequent" argument, beloved of feminists (including ones I respect greatly), but hard to swallow--its proponents are essentially arguing that every single woman in America knew where to get an illegal abortion, and was willing to break the law to do so, prior to 1973. Steven Levitt--a very smart economist, a super-amazing writer, and a guy who's spent a lot of time looking at figures on conceptions and births, also disputes it, with what seem to be some very compelling figures:

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.

Note that this is simply a prelude to establishing his thesis that legalizing abortion caused the crime rate to fall--an assertion that the feminists of my acquaintance have been rather happy with. Of course, it's only true if legalizing abortion caused the abortion rate to rise--which his data indicate they did. One of the problems with Amp's data is that it's not cohort-adjusted--we get the birthrate, but not the number of women of childbearing age in the population. And even his data show a sharpish drop in 1971 (the year after large states like NYC and California made abortion legal) and another sizeable one in 1973 (in January of which year, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roe v. Wade.)

My own investigation indicates that the "abortions didn't increase" assertion traces back to a paper that estimated the rate of illegal abortions at somewhere between 200,000 and 1.2 million per annum. (Note that if Levitt is right, this latter figure is certainly too high, as the number of abortions post-Roe was only 750K.) Some enterprising researcher took the upper bound, compared it to today's abortion rate, and concluded that abortions hadn't increased--a ludicrous assertion for many reasons. First, obviously, because the correct statement is "abortions have increased somewhere between slightly and 7-fold". And second, because today's abortion figure is not the same as the abortion figure around the time of Roe, as Levitt's figures show--nor would we expect them to be, if only because of population growth.

Not that feminists are the only source of lousy abortion statistics--far from it. Recently I've been looking at estimates of how often the Pill (or emergency contraception) prevents a fertilized egg from implanting in the womb. Dreadful, dreadful, dreadful stuff. The correct answer is: "beats me". But that's not the answer pro-life groups give. They're certain it's a big, bad number--even though they admittedly have very little handle on the smaller numbers that go into it.

How often do low dose pills (the most common ones) permit breakthrough ovulation? Oh, somewhere between 2-20%.

How often does the effect of progestin on cervical mucus prevent the egg from being fertilised? Well, I don't know for sure--but it's definitely between usually and never. (in that link's defense, they did use some real, actual scientific evidence showing that a whole lot of sperm make it through the thickened cervical mucus in rabbits, which does give pause.)

How many users of the pill are sexually active? Couldn't tell ya.

How many of them are fertile, and having sex with fertile partners? No idea.

With this paltry evidence, pro-life groups don't say "best not risk it"--they treat dispensing birth control as the equivalent of a war crime.

To be fair, you also get a huge number of pro-choicers adamantly denying that the pill or EC ever work by preventing implantation, an assertion for which they have exactly as little data as their opponents.

Now, data on this sort of thing is hard to get. But it's not impossible to get; how come we don't have any?

Well, nobody wants to provide it, that's why. Pharmaceutical companies manufacturing birth control sure don't want a study indicating that taking the pill causes fertilized embryos to slip the womb, since that would limit the market for their products. They don't have to do such studies--so why do it?

Now, a number of my liberal readers are no doubt rubbing their hands right now, saying "See! We can't leave research in the hands of private companies! The profit motive distorts it."

Um . . . yeah. So where are all the government studies on the numbers of abortions, the reasons women have them, the biochemical effects of hormonal contraception?

Why, we don't have them, do we? Because the government sure as hell doesn't want to put out a study that will make millions of women at least think twice about their so-easy, so-convenient, so-effective birth control. Why, they'd be storming Capitol Hill with pitchforks!

Lesson: when information markets fail, those failures are often hard to correct through government action, because the consumers who don't want certain data are also the voters who would rather not hear it. I don't know how we do correct those failures, but a good start is acknowleging that we have met the enemy, and he is us.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Conundrum

If I'm pro-choice--and I am--then how come I'm always gleefully reporting setbacks for my side?

Dunno the answer to that one. When I get a spare moment, I'll head off to the ashram and see if I can't figure it out.

Meanwhile, I am pleased to report that the ridiculous and despicable attempt to halt protests at abortion clinics by charging them under the (itself pretty ridiculous) RICO statute has been decisively struck down by the Supreme Court. No, abortion clinic protesters are not terrorists, or racketeers, or extortionists; they are people who want abortions to stop. Where would this nation be if Sheriff Park had had RICO at his disposal when Dr. King marched into town?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Specificity matters, or why abortion is different from birth control

Let's think of a health care rity that wants you to give them $10,000. With that, they can go to Africa and save the lives of 50 people. (Assume, arguendo, that you can be sure that the programme will actually save those people--and indeed, Africa is in such a dire state that you could save many more than that with airfare, a little rent, and $10,000 worth of bleach to help people purify their water at home.) Are you a murderer if you don't give them the $10,000?

Now, say I give you $10,000 and an airplane ticket to go to Africa and shoot fifty people. Are you a murderer then?

If you said no to the first question, and yes to the second, what's the difference? The result is the same: you have $10,000, and fifty people in Africa are dead. Logically, they're exactly the same thing.

But intuitively, they aren't, are they? There are all sorts of differences, but mostly they boil down to two things: we make a big intuitive distinction between active and passive, between probable and likely, and between specific and unspecific.

Let's say the guy from the charity shows you pictures of fifty people who have TB; without your money, those fifty people, who have names and faces and huts and argumentative mothers-in-law, will die. You feel worse about it than just hearing about some generic fifty people in Africa, don't you? (That's why those television charity appeals always tell you the name and details of some desperate child). It shouldn't make a difference--after all, no matter who it is that dies, that person will be a person, with all the details and relatives and names that generally accompany personhood. But we do care.

That's why abortion is different from birth control. Yes, if you reason from only one principle, you can ban birth control as akin to abortion. But there are a lot of principles tied up in analyzing abortion; that's what I've been arguing all along. You cannot refute my arguments by taking one of those principles and following it to a logical, but thoroughly unreasonable conclusion.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Why I am unimpressed with the argument that a fetus is only a "potential" human being

This argument is a favourite on the pro-choice side, and it leaves me cold. Why? Because the fetus is not merely "potential"; it is inevitable. (If it isn't, why bother having the abortion?) When you have an abortion, you are making sure that the baby who would be born in six months or so, isn't.

So why am I not against birth control? Fuzzy intuition, I'm afraid; you're stuck arguing with people, not computers. There is a difference between something that might happen, and something that almost certainly will, which is why many of us support assisted suicide, but not letting doctors off people with a 50% chance of dying in order to free up the bed. There is a difference between taking action against a single specific potential baby, whose DNA blueprint is already written and under construction; and preventing the conception of any of a few million potential DNA combinations, of whom the fetus you are aborting was only one, improbable, combination. There is a difference between sperm swimming towards an ova, and a complete and fully functional set of human DNA. Just as we distinguish between the drunk driver, who could have killed someone but didn't, and the woman who guns her car towards her lyin', cheatin' bastard of a husband, I think that it is reasonable to draw moral lines between "coulda" and "almost certainly did".

So why am I not against abortion? Because I don't want to put the state in the business of compelling women to donate their bodies for gestational purposes, any more than I want to get the state in the business of preventing people from saying cruel and devastating things to their spouses. The fact that the baby depends on the mother's body for succor does matter to this libertarian, making abortion different from simple infanticide. But that doesn't mean I think it's the only consideration. That means that, denied the comfort of simple deduction from rigid first principles, I must grope for answers that are bound to be highly unsatisfactory, even to me.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Is abortion "bad" or just "sad"?

William Saletan and Katha Pollitt debate the issue in Slate.

Let me see if I can clarify a little bit, for those who purport to be genuinely perplexed that others consider abortion to be morally, if not legally, wrong.

You are undergoing some fairly strenuous action to prevent another human being from being born. (We can argue about whether or not it is a human being when it is aborted, but I think we can all agree that it will be a human being by the time it is born. Yes, thank you, Mr Singer, your objection is duly noted. You can sit down now.)

To put it a different way, you are exerting yourself, consciously, to make another human being not exist. At its most charitable construction, it is time-lapse infanticide; you are killing the baby that would have been born six months from now, if not for your action. This is complicated by all sorts of factors, but it nonetheless seems to me that abortion is essentially different from murder in degree, not in kind. Note that this does not mean I think that it should be illegal; combat is also different from murder in degree rather than kind, but there are all sorts of times when I think it is not only justified, but positively to be celebrated.

If you do not go into that clinic and pay that doctor to scrape out your womb, there is another person who will be born, go to school, eat fistfuls of candy on Halloween, learn to read and ride a bike, go to college, get their heart broken, break hearts, make friends, fall in love, and eventually, have babies of their own. You--you--are ending all of that when you choose to have an abortion, or to pressure your partner to do so. This is serious business, and yes, it is bad. I am tempted to say "D'uh!" How can anyone question that taking roughly 30,000 days and every good thing that humans feel from another person is a Bad Thing to Do?

Of course, it may be less bad than the alternatives. But I sense . . . I certainly know for myself . . . that many of us cannot bear to contemplate this, because the alternatives aren't really that bad.

The march of time has removed the stigma from unmarried sex, and thus removed the feeling that women ought to have to continue unwanted pregnancies simply because they deserve the consequences for being "bad"¹. I have no doubt that as the stigma on extramarital sex has decreased, support for abortion has increased.

Yet there is a countervailing force that is swinging the pendulum back towards the pro-life side: as the stigma on extramarital sex has decreased, the consequences of having an abortion have gotten much less bad. My great-aunt had an abortion in the thirties, to prevent a pregnancy that would have ruined her life: kept her from getting married, having a decent job, or having any sort of place in teh small rural community where she lived. I cannot imagine any modern woman credibly claiming to be facing the sort of utter ruin that she would have endured had she carried that pregnancy to term.

No, we are now having abortions so that we can have a really great career, instead of a mediocre one; so that we will not get stretch marks, hemorrhoids and that baby pooch; so that we can afford to have the really nice house, car, and stereo that we've always pictured ourselves with; so that we can find a great guy to marry; so that we can have a youthful, carefree college experience instead of a harried, burdened one. We are having abortions, instead of giving up our babies for adoption, so that we will not face the inevitable stigma from our bosses, our friends, and our families, who will wonder what kind of a heartless woman gives up the baby she bore rather than raising it.

For the left, this is, I think, a little harder, because the left is always dodging guilt about the things they do have. Why do you deserve that, when others suffer? is the eternal question of the left (and not a bad question, either, I think, though I don't want the State to get into the business of asking--or answering--it). Why do you deserve a big television, a fantastic vacation, your cushy job, your high income, when welfare mothers can't pay the gas bill, old people have to eat oatmeal in order to afford their drugs, African children die in the street?

And yet abortion asks that question much more powerfully, if we listen . . . for I got my electronic toys, my good health insurance, my wonderful, wonderful job entirely through a system of voluntary exchange, in which both parties thought that they were better off . . . and people who give me the money got it through a series of similarly voluntary transactions. And the capitalist system that produces this wealth, at worst, generally leaves people no worse off than they would be without it . . . compare the life expectancy of a New York City homeless man with a Tanzanian infant, if you don't believe me.

Abortion is an action where one of the parties to the transaction most certainly would not consent, if they were asked . . . whether you take that party to be the fetus, or that baby who will never live because of the doctor's knife in your womb. It takes some very fancy mental footwork to avoid asking yourself why you deserve to get your wonderful career, your lovely house, your thoroughly satisfying life, when in order to get them you apparently must prevent another human being (whether potential or actual) from ever tasting the spring air, or seeing a sunset, or smiling back at someone who loves them?

¹ Or have we? Many of the pro-choice commenters have pointed out that carving out exceptions for rape and incest seems to violate this new social norm. But though they may be correct in the case of certain religious sub-populations, I don't think they're right about the general American population, a majority of whom seem to believe that abortion is only legitimate in the case of rape, incest, or when the mother's life/health/fertility are at risk. I think, rather, that we're dealing with messy and illogical intuitions. The life/health/fertility of the mother exception is, except for certain religions, obvious and uncontroversial, except where "health" is construed so broadly as to mean "she'll be unhappy about having a baby". The incest exception is not, as far as I can tell, concerned so much with issues of consent and punishment (since those who believe in it would generally extend it to cases where the woman consented, such as some brother/sister sex); rather, it is based on (largely erroneous) beliefs about the probability of birth defects, and a completely irrational² disgust with incest and its products. The rape exception does seem to carry cultural freight about responsibility, but as I discussed here, it seems to me that this has much more to do with intuitive distinctions between active and passive responsibility than with a desire to "punish" women for having sex. I, personally, make a distinction between rape victims having abortions and others, even though I was raised in an admirably progressive home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and have no desire that I can discern to stamp out fornication.

² I don't mean this perjoratively; the incest taboo undoubtedly has all sorts of culturally indispensible functions. But the "ick factor" that attaches to incest, cannibalism, and so forth operates far below the level of rational, or even moral, judgements; I revolted by what those Uruguayan soccer players did, even though I think that it was perfectly morally all right, even admirable, in the circumstances. We endorse abortion in the case of incest because this disgust completely bypasses our moral circuits and commands our limbic system to get rid of the products of that disgusting union by any means necessary.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Response to Peter Northup, and why I continue to believe that contraceptive availability is not a major factor in teen pregnancy

Am I a prisoner of UChicago price theory? Perhaps, though I never "drank the Kool-Aid" as thoroughly as some of my compatriots at the business school.

But price theory can be a useful, if simplistic framework, with which to look at human behaviour.

Let me posit that if women, or men, had some button they could push by their bed that would instantly render them temporarily infertile, the rate of abortions would fall dramatically. It would not be totally eliminated: we would still see terminating pregnancies because they have found out that their babies are potentially disabled, or the wrong gender--and those pregnancies (anecdotally considerable in some areas) that occurred because young girls erroneously believed that having a baby would revive their boyfriend's flagging interest. But it would be reduced by an order of magnitude.

But of course, contraception is not instant and costless. It has monetary costs: about 75¢ per condom, and about $25 a month for birth control pills, plus the cost of a doctor's visit. My argument, which I stand by, is that these costs are trivial relative to the non-monetary costs.

My evidence for this proposition? Well, for one thing, we know that a very substantial fraction of the women in the country are getting their birth control from subsidized public sources: "Of U.S. women who use a reversible method of contraception, 24% each year obtain family planning services from a publicly funded clinic or a private doctor reimbursed by Medicaid." I'd say that one-quarter of women of childbearing age is probably a generous estimate of how many of them would have difficulty affording birth control (even among women aged 18-24, the poorest age group, the poverty rate is only 19%).

For another, we know that free contraception programs produce only very modest results where they are tested. Consider these highlights from Planned Parenthood:

* The most successful adolescent pregnancy prevention programs in the U.S., which combine sexuality education with direct access to or information about contraceptive services, have increased contraceptive use among participants by up to 22 percent (Frost & Forrest, 1995). [emphasis mine]

* More boys who participated in a high school condom availability program in Los Angeles reported using condoms every time they engaged in vaginal intercourse during the past year (50 percent) than the year before (37 percent), and more boys reported condom use for recently initiated first vaginal intercourse (80 percent) than the year before (65 percent) (Schuster et al., 1998).

* Condom use among students in New York City public high schools that have condom availability programs is five percentage points higher than in Chicago, where no such programs exist (Guttmacher et al., 1997).

In other words, if we give birth control to students for free, and tell them how to use it, and urge them to do so, we might increase the number of students using birth control regularly by 22% [memo to study neophytes: that 22% figure does not mean that out of 100 students, 22 more of them are now using contracpetion; it means that whatever smaller group were previously using contracption is now larger by 22% of itself--so if 50% were previously using contraception, 11 more students are now using birth control than were before.]. That's pretty damn underwhelming. And that's the best study Planned Parenthood can come up with, the one that is probably the outlier on the normally distributed bell curve of such study outcomes. I've no doubt that the abstinence folks have grabbed whatever study lies at the other end of the bell curve, and are using it to claim that contraception-based sex ed actually increases the number of pregnancies by teaching students that it's okay to have sex.

I do believe that educating people about sex and giving them contraception for free increases contraception usage somewhat, and lowers unwanted pregnancy. But how much it reduced unwanted pregnancies depends on how many of today's unwanted pregnancies result from ignorance or lack of access to contraception; if these are not the primary cause of unwanted pregnancy, then the effect of such laudable programmes will be modest. And based on the studies so far done, that effect seems to be pretty trivial--too small to make more than a small dent in the number of unwanted pregnancies.

This leads me to conclude that the monetary cost of contraception is, at best, a small contributing factor to unwanted pregnancy in this country. (These studies were, after all, conducted in school districts with some of the worst concentrations of poverty in the country.)

I must apologize to Mr Northup on one count; when I saw him linking AGI data on regional variations in abortion rates, I assumed that he was linking the same chart I had been looking at, which shows state-by-state variation in rates of abortion and pregnancy both for teens, and the population of childbearing women as a whole. I assumed that he was looking at the same thing.

Bad Jane! When you assume, you make an ass out of u and me both! He was not looking at the underlying data; he was looking at a puff-piece summary sheet supporting AGI's position of "more birth control, less restriction". Not that there is anything wrong with this position, but that page is a position paper, not data.

Remember that scene in Crocodile Dundee where the frightened heroine tells ol' Croc to give his money to a mugger because "he's got a knife"? Mr Dundee looks bemused and says, "That's not a knife." Pulling a sort of 3/4 length machete out of a holster, he says "This is a knife," and the muggers run in the other direction.

Well, that's not data. This is data. And Mr Northup, I'm sorry you were mugged.

Those data simply do not, in my admittedly cursory reading, support the contention that education and contraception access will substantially reduce abortion. The places with the best contraception access, the most liberal sexual mores, and the most liberal sex ed, are also the places with the most abortions. These are the states with more than 23 abortions per 1,000 women of childbearing age, which is the national mean.

California
Connecticut
District of Columbia
Florida
Hawaii
Illinois
Maryland
Massachussetts
Nevada
New Jersey
New York
Rhode Island

All have outstanding liberal governments, dense populations, and high levels of spending on public health, as well as lots of Planned Parenthood clinics.

I think Mr Northup has made a common, and understandable, error, conflating preventing pregnancies with preventing abortions. The best candidates for the kind of outreach he advocates--changing social mores, making birth control more known about and easily obtained, are poor rural areas in the bible belt, where the sex ed is least contraceptive focused, and the nearest Planned Parenthood may be a long drive away. Even allowing that one could march in down there with one's hip northeastern values and overcome parental resistance to giving their children free condoms, one might have a salutory effect on unwanted pregnancy (though I'm still unconvinced). But because so few women there have abortions, this would do very little to lower the number of abortions in this country.

Given the urban concentration of abortions in the United States, I simply cannot endorse the idea that the main problem is contraceptive access, or contraceptive education.

Mr Northup, in response to my posts, has clarified his position as follows:

So, to be clear, Ms. Galt's post annoyed me not because I disagreed with the claim about education, but because I disagreed quite strongly with the implicit claim that, having disposed of the education question, Saletan's *general* argument about targeting contraception falls apart. I was annoyed, not by what she put in, but by what she left out: all the other causal mechanisms that influence the relative costs and benefits of protected versus unprotected sex (which she rightly enough acknowledges in her replies to me).

Ms. Galt and I both seem to agree that, overall, there are two interrelated choice functions in place, both of which are sensitive to costs and benefits: the choice to have protected v. unprotected v. no sex, and the choice to terminate v. keep an unintended pregnancy. Moreover, we can't look at these two separately: the relative cost of abortion will feed into the relative costs of protected and unprotected sex. And of course the number of people who are faced with the second choice, and so the number of abortions overall, is determined by the choices made at the first stage.

But the cost of abortion is hardly the only factor that constitutes the cost of protected v. unprotected v. no sex. And what I really objected to was the implication that protected sex is already basically as cheap as it can be, so the only way to shift costs is by manipulating the costs of unsafe sex through sanctions on abortion. Again, whether or not this is a fair reaction to her piece is up to the reader. I can only note that she seemed to dismiss such concerns pretty flatly with her claim that "there are cheap and effective prophylactics at the nearest drugstore." Even in her followup, she seems to stick with this: she has an extended paragraph about how Trinessa is only $25/month, condoms are often free, and Planned Parenthood allows for doctors' visits at "trivial" cost.

I don't think these claims serve to undermine my argument. $300 a year is not trivial, not for everyone, and again, we should not ignore the non-monetary costs of time and effort.

Ignore them? My primary argument, based on that tired old UChicago price theory, is that the reason that we will not significantly reduce abortions is that the non-monetary costs of birth control--acquiring and remembering to use it, and the unpleasant side effects, medical or otherwise (insert "raincoat in the shower" jokes here), so far outweigh the monetary costs that even giving people birth control for free has only a limited impact on their usage. In this, I have the advantage of having actually looked at some of the data. In this age of AIDS, if you can only achieve a modest increase in condom usage by giving them away for free in school, where everyone under the age f sixteen must at least occasionally drop in, then it seems to me that you have simply taken government action as far as it can go.

Mr Northup sticks by his thesis that social stigma and class are still big issues here. And to some extent they are. But in the context of reducing abortions, it's only useful to discuss them insofar as we believe that we can remedy these ills. I am very much aware of the fact that Mr Northup and I are members of a privileged class, and that this has conferred all manner of non-monetary benefits on my life. But while I would like to distribute the benefits of my privileged upbringing to everyone, not just insofar as access to health care goes, but in terms of having a great job and a stimulating life. But so far, I have no idea how to go about doing so. Nor, as far as I can tell, does Mr Northup; he states the goal of changing destructive norms as if it were a policy prescription, rather than merely a (laudable) desire.

And, of course, money and effort don't exhaust the "costs" of safe sex; social stigma is very real. This matters both directly, as worries about shame and reputation influence decision-making, and indirectly, as social norms about who is responsible for birth control (and whether birth control is something that, obviously, one should use, or is instead a signal of moral failure) factor into the monetary and non-monetary costs (do parents pay, or must a teenager pay secretly? Will her boyfriend chip in? Will she have to drive an hour away to fill her prescription so that no one knows she's on the pill? Etc.) Obviously these vary enormously across individuals and communities; for many people, they may indeed be trivial. But for many, they are not, and I believe that they could be lower than they are now--but not necessarily through government action, let alone reeducation!

As we've seen from the above, given the urban concentration of abortion, this is simply not credible. No teenager in Chicago, DC, New York, Boston, LA, New Haven has to drive an hour to get birth control from a completely anonymous source, and even if there were only one pharmacy in the city, it's unlikely that her community outside of her immediate failure will even tut-tut as she proudly steps up to the counter with her box of condoms. Payment, as we've seen, is pretty much irrelevant, since there is excellent free birth control provision for young women. If you want to go ahead and start another clinic to give kids the Pill, be my guest. Add a shuttle service, education classes, and for all I care a pedicure station. I'll applaud your efforts, and throw in a little of my own hard-earned cash to boot, since I think it's a worthy cause. But I will be surprised indeed if we see a meaningful drop in abortions as a result. I'm not denigrating providing contraceptive access as a project; I think it is a fine, fine idea. I just don't think it's going to do very much about the abortion rate, which was after all Mr Saletan's point.

I didn't intend the cross-national data to be anything but suggestive, but I do feel the data ought to make us realize that these costs, especially the social ones, are not set in stone or written into the deep structure of the universe. Cultures can and do change, although I would certainly hope that state coercion would be absolutely the last tool people reach for (sadly, it rarely is). Which, again, is why I was so very annoyed by Ms. Galt's first post: she critiques Saletan's statist prescriptions only to implicitly go along with his presumption that the only thing on the table is State Policy. She seems to have backed away from this in her replies, which is great, but I stand by my reading of the original post.

To me, the question of state vs. non-state policy simply isn't very relevant here--and to the extent that it is relevant, it undercuts Mr Northup's case. Giving out free stuff is something that the state is actually very good at, as state activities go; I don't expect substantial disparities in the success rate between free condom programmes from the New York City School District, or Planned Parenthood. Education might be a different story--but a widespread non-state sex ed programme simply is not within the constellation of available policy options, as far as I can see; there's no way to get the teenagers to you.

And broad social change, the third pillar of Mr Northup's argument, is simply too broad to be useful as a policy alternative. I certainly agree with Mr Northup that if there were different attitudes towards sex and contraception among the groups that currently rely heavily on abortions as birth control, then we could see a dramatic drop in abortions. But as an insight, that's trivial: if people were different, they'd be different. How do we persuade them to behave differently? Public education campaigns designed by non-profit groups have roughly the same dismal success rate as ones designed by public health departments.

The challenge posed by Mr Saletan (or so it seems to me), is "What can we do to make abortion rarer" But if "we" is Mr Saletan, and Mr Northup, and me, the answer is "very little". "We" are not members of the communities where abortion is prevalent, and have very little hope of effecting the grassroots change that might alter abortion rates. And the options available to "us", changing the relative cost of contraception, doesn't seem to work very well. That leaves an option that we know works: changing the relative cost of abortion. I don't find that an acceptable option. But it is the only policy open to those of us in the commentariat that we actually know works.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Why children are a special libertarian case

There are a number of people arguing in my comments that abortion is fine even if the fetus is a person, because no one has a right to use another person's body for their support.

Well, in the classic libertarian formulation, no one has a right to my income either. But it would take a pretty hard core libertarian indeed to say that the state should allow parents to kick their children out on the streets if they tire of them.

Formulations that make sense, are even admirable, when applied to two adults, simply won't wash when they are applied to children. And even if you can find some like-minded clique of ultra-libertarians to share your opinions with, you have no possibility at all of ever convincing any but a tiny fraction of one percent of the rest of America that your ideas should be put into practice.

You certainly won't persuade me. I not only think that the state should intervene if parents are abusive, should garnish the paychecks of reluctant parents, and should ensure that parents attend to the health of their children, but also believe that the state should provide high-quality education and health care for children under the age of eighteen (plus pregnant women who can't afford prenatal care). Now, many would argue that in so believing, I have forfeited any right to call myself a libertarian. But if this be treason, make the most of it.

You cannot morally treat children, or fetuses, as if they have the same rights and obligations as human adults; they have fewer freedoms, but more entitlements. Children are not only uniquely vulnerable, but also uniquely innocent; that fetus did not ask to be in your body, and has no means at his disposal to get out and stop bothering you. Trying to reason his fate from principles designed for consenting adults is neither practical nor morally just. Moreover, any society that did try to treat children and fetuses as adults, in the way that my commenters are advocating, would not be long for this earth. Evolution does not take cognizance of how beautifully consistently you have reasoned from first principles when it decides what behaviours will survive.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Things I am not . . .

I am not a "theist"
I am not a "statist"
I am not a misogynist who just wants to control women
I am not a puritan who wants to punish women for having sex
I am not an "abortion monger"
I am not a "would-be baby killer"

Staking out the middle ground on abortion is so much fun, isn't it?

If you want to know what I think about abortion, read this. I want abortion to be legal, but I am in favour of stigmatising it. I am also in favour of more and better birth control, which I devoutly hope the pharmaceutical companies will provide as fast as they can. I would love to see the Pill be otc. I think that abortion is not a question of people who want to kill their babies versus people who don't understand that I have a right to control my body; I think it is a complicated question of conflicting rights, and that as the cost of pregnancy, in terms of heatlh, money, and social stigma has gone down, we are rightly worrying less about the rights of the woman to control what happens in her body, and more about the also-compelling right of the fetus to get born. I think Roe is bad law and poisonous policy for the health of our Republic, and I think that abortion should remain legal, at least in the first trimester, with limited restrictions--a state of affairs that would bring our abortion law in line with most of the rest of the civilized world. Feel free to disagree with me. But I am not a beknighted fool who does not understand the issues involved--after all, I'm not the one reflexively repeating slogans, at an ever-more-hysterical pitch, rather than actually engaging with my opponents.

And when you vituperate and foam, when you call me names instead of engaging in civilized debate, when you argue with my social class, or my moral values, or my putatively limited intellectual gifts, rather than my points . . . well, it may make you feel good. It may impress your fellow travelers. And it undoubtedly protects you from ever having to consider that your position might be the slightest little bit wrong. But it does not persuade me, or any of the other mushy moderates that you need on your side if you want to actually make policy. Pro-choice folks: you're losing the Court. Pro-life folks: you've already lost the public. But you might have a chance of getting something done if you stopped shouting at us and talked to us instead.

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.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Those happy Golden Years . . . .

Lord, do I miss being a student. And not just because I loved "Ramen-and-cheez-doodle surprise" night in the drafty old Victorian house I shared with seven roommates, not to mention waiting in line for seven hours at Student Health to get my asthma meds. I mean, it sounds terrible, but we had a sort of proletarian solidarity in those days that you young whippersnappers will never know. Why, many's the time when I led the other students in singing the Internationale before we . . . but I digress. The point is, I don't just miss being a student because it was such a delightful combination of adult freedom without adult responsibility. No, I miss being a student because I was just so damn smart.

I mean, a lot of you may think that I'm smart now. But when I was in school, I was a supergenius. Any old idiot can get to be a genius merely by dint of having a 150 IQ, but my intellect was of finer stuff altogether, faster than a speeding bullet and more powerful then the people who get to decide whether or not you make it onto American Idol. Even better, I knew everything*. My intellectual superiority to the rubes who did not attend my august institution--and many of those who did--was a tangible, glorious thing, which animated my days and warmed those dark nights when the boiler broke and I had to sleep in my entire wardrobe.

Best of all, I thought that I had invented snotty. Waxing sarcastic about the opinions of others was just so wickedly fun, especially when those other people were right there where I could watch the backs of their necks turn red. It honed my verbal skills to a sharp edge. It impressed the hell out of my fellow students, proving to everyone that I was exactly the supergenius I thought I was. The fact that other, older people, were not snotty confirmed my opinion that I must be some sort of genetic breakthrough, far outstripping the mental powers of my doddering elders.

Those days have passed, for me. But others are clearly still enjoying them¹. I wanted to comment directly on the post, but I can't, since there are no comments. Then I thought about writing Mr Northup an email gently pointing out the error of his ways. But that's so, you know, square. So I thought, "Hey, one good turn deserves another!" And don't I deserve, really, to be a little snotty? I've kept it in check for so long.

Besdies, while Mr Northup, like almost every PhD candidate I know, seems to think that he has discovered this literary art form, he is sadly mistaken. Friends, I not only perfected the medium; I hold the patent.

Mr Northup thinks I am an idiot. And not some garden-variety idiot; a "hard-nosed quasi-libertarian" idiot:

If I were going to write a parody of hard-nosed quasilibertarian policy analysis--an attempt to gently mock the tendency of some of my fellow travelers to only make the tough calls when it's someone else's ox being gored, and play into the stereotype of a libertarian as a person whose policies correspond astonishly well with his or her privileged status--and I decided to write about abortion, it might go something like this:

I'd sadly note the impossibility of a free lunch and the power of incentives to affect behavior in even the most private of realms. I'd talk about how naive it is to expect problems to be solved by well-meaning programs of governmental education--in this day and age, does anyone really not know that sex can result in pregnancy? That contraception makes it less likely? I'd shake my virtual head mournfully at the fantasies of my benighted friends on the left, pro-choice like me, but lacking the wisdom imparted by UChicago price theory.

No, the simple truth is that women--not me or my friends, you know, but other women--have unprotected sex and then have abortions because, well, it's not very costly; that's what Roe v. Wade means! "Safe, legal, and rare"--only in Shangri-La, I'm afraid; you only get to pick two. I'd write that, much as I hated to admit it (pro-choice as I am, you know), the deep, dark secret of all clear-eyed pro-choicers is that keeping abortion legal is, in fact, *the* secret cause of (other!) women's risky sexual behavior. Pro-choicers might talk a good game about safe sex, I'd sigh, but until we're willing to break out the coathangers, it's clear where our priorities really lie.

Now, to make this parody just right, I'd have to ignore what, on the face of it, would be the most obvious response to risky sex being too "cheap" relative to safe sex: target the "price" of safe sex *directly*, instead of getting at it only through the indirect (and, to the lustful mind, far less salient) route of penalizing those who actually end up pregnant. You know, the sort of line of thinking that might take into account the non-trivial costs of reliable birth control, especially for the uninsured (better not bring up how the state makes you see a doctor!). And I'd sure as hell better sweep under the rug all the unpleasant little truths about sexist social norms, about who pays for the pill, about the very real stigma that in many communities clings to any young woman who dares imply by what she purchases from her pharmacist or what she demands of her doctor that she is, in fact, sexually active.

After all, if I brought any of that stuff up, my readers might start wondering why the cross-national variance in teenage pregnancy and abortion rates is considerably greater than the variance in teenage sexual activity; they might think these considerations suggestive of a deeply undesirable set of policies and social norms that punish only optional public markers of sexual activity, like contraceptive use, while doing little to deter the private aspects, like actual sex. They might start thinking that this is one of those social ills that *does* hold out the prospect of unambiguous improvement; perhaps we needn't break out the coathangers, after all, if we want teenage pregnancy and abortion rates as low as those in Sweden!

Of course, the kind of change that would be required wouldn't be easy; it would involve shifts in both norms and policy, and a lot of down-and-dirty activism. It would mean confronting deeply embedded belief systems, ideologies that are quite hostile to female sexual autonomy. It would mean recognizing that the state is not the only cause of oppression in society, particularly for certain groups.

I know, I know--it's not polite to excerpt the entire thing. But I think it's safe to say that Mr Northrup's post has already brought us outside the dainty bounds of etiquette.

Interestingly enough, I was preparing a post on cross-national variation in pregnancy and abortion rates! Using that very chart! Unfortunately, unlike Mr Northrup, I have a job². However, I am hard-pressed to see how he draws his conclusions from the AGI's excellent data. For one thing, it seems to indicate that there is some sort of terrible "deeply undesirable set of policies and social norms that punish only optional public markers of sexual activity, like contraceptive use, while doing little to deter the private aspects, like actual sex" in the liberal Northeast, where women who get pregnant choose to abort, while the tolerant, loving Bible Belt is clearly comfortable enough with a woman's sexuality that should she get pregnant, she feels free to carry the baby to term.

Had he spent a little more time with the data, he might have noticed something curious: how many teens get pregnant does not seem to be very well correlated with the kind of sex ed they receive, at least if we assume that having voted for Al Gore is a pretty good proxy for a state's general attitude towards sex ed, and toss in Nevada on the (possibly erroneous) assumption that a state that has legalized prostitution probably doesn't have hard-nosed "abstinence only" education. Indeed, the very worst rates of teen pregnancy (and abortion) are in the District of Columbia, which I am assured by acquaintances who have taught there, has the very liberalist sex ed there is, and extremely good access to all sorts of family planning clinics.

Rather, a brief scan of the data reveals that abortion seems to be correlated with three things: being in the Deep South, having a large population of hispanic immigrants, and being highly urbanized. I assume that item number one is highly correlated with having abstinence-only education, but if that's so, why aren't Kansas, Missouri, and so forth similarly afflicted? And why do California, DC, and so forth dwarf Mississippi and Alabama in rates of pregnancy?

Furthermore, assuming that the number of abortions is at least a rough proxy for whether or not the pregnancies are wanted, it seems likely that we are picking up some noise from early teen marriages/cohabitation in the South and among hispanics. Over 50% of the pregnancies in the District of Columbia are aborted, while less than 20% of the pregnancies in Alabama are. I presume that some large part of that is due to differences in personal beliefs among the two populations, but the magnitude of the disparity--almost three times as many pregnancies carried to term in the deep south--suggests to me that more of the pregnancies in Alabama are probably intended, or at least welcome.

Regardless, the data simply doesn't support his core argument: that the problem is social norms and government policies are responsible for low rates of contraceptive use, leading to teen pregnancies. Indeed, the high rate of teen-pregnancy/abortion in states like New York, Maryland, and DC is driven in great part by the urban African-American population, where an illegitimacy rate above 80% makes the statement that extramarital sex is stigmatized ludicrous.

It is mildly fascinating to find myself--who has been an uninsured woman of extremely limited means forced to rely on Planned Parenthood for her women's health needs--the target of such a very pompous lecture on the subject by a white male graduate student who most assuredly has not "been there", or indeed in the neighbourhood of "there". Despite the impressively forceful self-confidence with which Mr Northup advances his view, I am afraid I will have to disagree, for which I have only the dull excuse that when I was actually in that situation, it was nothing like what Mr Northrup describes. It is not expensive to acquire birth control when you are poor; Planned Parenthood provides both doctors visits and birth control pills on a sliding scale, making the cost trivial to even the poorest of women. Even if they didn't provide it, a prescription for Trinessa (the generic form of Ortho-Tri-Cyclen Lo) is about $25 a month--or less than five hours of work at minimum wage; an annual exam is a couple days of extra work. That is not insignificant, but it's not impossible, either, especially for teenagers who have enough time on their hands to be having sex. Moreover, even in counties without Planned Parenthood, there are free healthcare clinics. And where there are not free healthcare clinics, there are condoms, and if memory serves, the girls don't usually pay for those. At $8 for a box of twelve, they are for most teenagers even more affordable on a per-act basis than the Pill, and while they certainly aren't perfect, I'd imagine they could put a hefty dent in those over 50% of aborted pregnancies that resulted from not using anything at all.

I'm not satisfied with this response, because it's so disorganized and muddy. But then it occurs to me that the reason that this is so is that the source shows exactly those characteristics--disappointing both from Crescat Setentia, and a graduate student at NYU. He never really attempts to refute my core thesis, which is that for teenagers, sex ed has high threshold effects: once you are aware that sex causes pregnancy, and birth control prevents it, there's not that much that sex ed can add. A perusal of the data on sex-ed programs would seem to back me up; effects are extremely modest. Abstinence-based education pretty clearly doesn't work, but contraceptive-based education, surprisingly, doesn't do much better.

Education works by countering ignorance. That's why initial anti-smoking education worked well. But after people knew that smoking caused cancer, telling them so again didn't much deter them. Likewise, once people know how to get pregnant, and how to prevent it, telling them so more elaborately doesn't get you much bang for your buck.

Now, there might be another threshold--there might be some form of sexual education so fabulous that it pushes us across the line. But I doubt it. For one thing, most sex ed is pretty useless--my head is still crammed with useless information about the relative effectiveness of vasectomies, IUDs and tubal ligations that I will certainly not need until I've had a few children, and can get from a doctor if I want it then. And for another, public health education campaigns have a pretty dismal success rate. Obesity, smoking, and drugs are only a few of the things that we have tried, and failed, to eradicate by telling people not to do them.

But why bother to deal with the data, when heavy sarcasm is so much more expedient, and is just as impressive to your audience--as long as they don't know anything either. Besides, that result doesn't feel right. A public education campaign about contraception should be overwhelmingly more effective than one about not smoking--after all, you're telling people who don't want to get pregnant, something cheap and easy they can do to not get pregnant! Yet, it doesn't work all that well. I find that outcome as surprising as Mr Northrup.

I don't pretend to know why we have so many unwanted pregnancies in this country, though these folks have some ideas. But at the heart of it, it seems to me to be a fairly typical case of people making a bad decision now to ignore the potential bad consequences later. That's very common behaviour--it's why I didn't floss yesterday--and it's very, very hard to eradicate with education.

Why is our pregnancy rate lower than Sweden's? Mr Northup would like to know, and so would many of my would-be interlocutors, and so would I. I'd also like to know why their rape rate is so high compared to the rest of Europe's, and Austria's rape rate is so low compared to ours. But I'm pretty sure that it's not because people in Sweden don't know that rape is bad, or how it can be prevented³.

*In a job interview a while back, I was being quizzed by an economics professor about how I had liked graduate school, and the intervening period. "When I graduated from grad school," I said ruefully, "I thought I knew everything important there was to know. Four years later, I've been humbled."

"Everyone thinks they know everything when they get out of grad school," he said solemnly. "Count yourself lucky that you got over it--a lot of my colleagues never do."

¹You made fun of him for being a young whelp! I hear you cry. Don't you know that that's just going to make him madder?

Indeed, I do. I remember very well the towering, not to say incoherent, rage to which I could be reduced in my student years by the mere suggestion that someone, particularly someone who was not one of my professors, or a radical guerilla living in exile, knew more than I did simply because they are older. But frankly, he earned it. And besides, one of the rare pleasures of getting older is the joy of pointing out to someone that they are not only being a jerk, but exactly the same, stunningly unoriginal kind of jerk, that you used to be before you knew better.

²Cheap shot! you cry. Is there some other kind in snotty-land?

³But what if sex ed is different? you ask. Undoubtedly it is. Maybe Sweden has found some unbelievably fabulous sex ed programme that we should import by the tonne. Sell it in Ikea!

But cross-country comparisons, as Mr Northrup should know, are fraught. They can be sabotaged by differences in reporting--does Sweden count an RU-486 abortion as an abortion, or something else? More importantly, with something that is as multi-factorial as abortion is, effects like having a relatively young, or relatively old population, poverty rates, cultural attitudes about childbirth and sex, and so forth often--even usually--swamp the things we are trying to measure, like effective sex education. It is interesting that Sweden has a low abortion, but if the reason their abortion rate is low is that that Sweden is full of Swedes, instead of the ethno-religious mutts that inhabit our fair nation, then that doesn't give us many useful policy options--other than moving to Sweden.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Want to cut down on abortions? Make them illegal

Now is the time of year when William Saletan tells us that we should stop arguing about abortion and just keep women from getting pregnant in the first place.

Well, thank you, Dr. Insight. Hey guys--let's stop arguing about the death penalty, and make it so no one ever commits heinous murders!

The insistence that the abortion problem can be remedied with better education would seem to me willfully obtuse, if it weren't obvious that the more ardently pro-choice members of our society need, in a deep down way, to believe that abortion is a necessary response to an unforeseeable misfortune, rather than a form of birth control for the lazy and imprudent.

Which sounds more perjorative than I mean it to. I mean, I'm lazy and imprudent in all sorts of ways--just ask my student loan officer. But even a cursory thought about abortion leads one to the conclusion that inadequate sex education is simply not likely to be a major contributor to the number of abortions in this country.

People who get abortions can be divided into three categories: those who were using birth control perfectly, but had an unforeseeable accident; those who were using birth control imperfectly ("imperfect" use apparently, in many of the statistics collected, includes "oops, we're out of condoms!"), and those who weren't using birth control. The largest group is apparently group number three.

Now, to a certain sort of social analyst, this seems to indicate that these people desperately need education and cheaper birth control. But it seems to me that, outside of a few religious communities where abortion is not likely to be a common practice, there are very, very few people in America, even young ones, who do not know that having unprotected sex gets you pregnant. Whether they have hip, now, "Do what ever you want, but do it safely" sex ed, or mean, puritannical "Good girls don't have sex" abstinence-based education, they are being told exactly what sort of thing can get you pregnant--and in abstinence-based programmes, having the bejeesus scared out of them with scenarios that are possible, but wildly unlikely. If there is a teenager in America who doesn't know that doing that can result in a baby nine months later, then they are being home-schooled by incredibly uptight religious parents, and any resulting pregnancies are Mom's responsibility, not ours.

Even in the depths of the bible belt, teenage boys know what condoms are, and teenage girls have heard of the pill--if not on television, then in the girl's bathroom. Now, one might argue that without good sex ed, teenagers will not be adequately informed about the relative benefits of condoms or the pill. But roughly half the people getting abortions were not using birth control at all. What is better sex ed going to tell them that they don't already know?

Nor do I think that sex ed is likely to remedy what is (I assume) the other major source of unwanted-and-terminated pregnancies: people using their birth control incorrectly. I had (she said modestly) pretty much the finest sex education money can buy. It started in fifth grade and went every year until I was a junior in high school. Yet apparently none of my classmates could remember things like "no, you are not protected for a few months after you stop taking the pill". My classmates avoided pregnancy (to the extent they did) not because they had fabulous sex education, but because they were anxious enough about their futures to use protection each and every time. As far as I have been able to tell from a cursory examination of the literature, abstinence-based education is almost completely ineffective at reducing teen pregnancies, a failure mitigated only by the fact that birth-control based education is also almost completely ineffective at reducing teen pregnancies. Sex education simply is not telling teenagers very many crucial facts that they don't already know.

Better education might prevent some condom failures, if the same kids who forgot the dates of the Civil war three days into summer vacation actually recalled their sex-ed lectures at the moment of truth. But the other common failure--failure to take the pill every day, at the same time--is amply warned against by one's gynecologist. Over and over and over again. Especially if you get your pills at Planned Parenthood, as so many of our uneducated teens do. Still one of the most common ways to get knocked up.

As for the people who get pregnant despite having taken every reasonable precaution--that tiny minority so beloved of Hollywood scriptwriters--education isn't going to help them at all, is it?

Mr Saletan seems to be ignoring a very basic question, implied by his own statement that half of all terminated pregnancies occur in women who weren't using any protection: why are so many people engaging in behaviour that they have been repeatedly told will lead to an unwanted pregnancy? Especially when there are cheap and effective prophylactics at the nearest drugstore? Answer: because it's not very costly to do so.

Abortions are relatively cheap, and relatively painless (or at least, they sound that way if you haven't had one--I don't actually know if they're painful or not), and America's youth, like youth everywhere, are not very good at correctly estimating the future disutility of current actions. This is why smoking continues to be popular. And the back seat of a car is a terrible place to by trying to do an expected value calculation in your head.

Not that I'm advocating making abortion illegal; I'm not. As I've said before, I'm reluctantly pro-choice. But "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. At least not until we get that perfect birth control that doesn't have to be remembered, doesn't have to be prescribed, doesn't have to be applied, and never lets its user down. And by then we won't have to worry about getting pregnant anyway, because the Trump will have sounded and we'll all be on our way to meet Jesus at the pearly gates.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I know! If we want to reduce abortions, let's keep women from getting pregnant in the first place!

On the one hand, I find it maddening that conservatives who oppose abortion also oppose teaching girls how not to get pregnant. On the other hand, I am extremely sceptical about the possibilities of nice-sounding ideas like this one:

Balkin and Levinson can talk all they want about whether to abandon Roe, but The Carpetbagger has a better idea: endorsing Tim Ryan's "95-10" legislation (still in process). The numbers signify the bill's claim that it will reduce 95% of abortions in 10 years.

How precisely will it do this? According to The Carpetbagger, "the 95-10 plan expands women's health care programs, emphasizes contraception equity in health care plans, and makes adoption tax credits permanent. Better yet, it would demand full funding for the federal WIC program. Then, there's the flip side. The "95-10" initiative also bans late-term abortions and requires parental-notification laws. That might be a little more problematic."

Why am I sceptical? Well, for one thing, the authors of legislation always make extravagent claims for the efficacy of their programmes, which are never met in practice. But beyond this, the assumption seems to be that women are getting pregnant because they lack access to birth control.

Planned Parenthood gives condoms away for free. When I was uninsured, I used them for my annual exams, and they literally forced a big paper bag full of condoms into my hands despite multiple attempts to demur. They also provide women's health on a sliding scale that goes down to practically nothing if you're poor. In other words, you literally cannot be too poor to get birth control, at least in the more urbanised areas of our country where child poverty (the kind that the authors are presuming causes abortion) is most concentrated.

I am sure that there are, here and there, women who get pregnant and have abortions because they just don't have the cash to go on the pill. But there can't be too many of them--if they can't afford $20 for the pill, or $10 for a box of condoms, where are they getting the money for the abortion?

The authors also push WIC, which is not a programme that I'm against, although there are some who argue that WIC is a contributing factor in the disproportionate rates of obesity among the poor. But saying that one could reduce abortions by modestly subsidizing food for children seems to imply that having an abortion is an economic decision. But if that's so, why aren't women making the even more economically sensible decision to use birth control, which costs a lot less than either an abortion or a baby?

The permanent adoption tax credit may also be a nice idea, though in principle I'm opposed to using tax credits to subsidize anything, no matter how much it warms my heart. But it will do absolutely nothing to increase adoption, because in the United States, adoption is constrained by the supply of adoptable babies, not the demand for them. It might provide a tiny increase in the number of families willing to adopt the older, sicker children currently clogging our nation's childcare system.

In other words, the post seems to suffer from the view of abortion that pro-choicers like to sell themselves: that it is the province of desperate women unfairly singled out by fate. Let me offer an alternative, and in my view much more plausible view: abortions are obtained by women largely because they, or their partners, were careless. Either they used their birth control wrong, or they ran out at an inconvenient time and decided to risk pregnancy for a moment's pleasure. Improperly discounting future risks against current gains is a vice not confined to executives of large corporations.

For evidence, I offer Steve Levitt's contention that when abortion became legal, the number of pregnancies rose, even as the number of live births dropped. In other words, women became more willing to risk pregnancy when they knew that they could terminate it. That does not look to me like women getting caught out by circumstances beyond their control; it looks to me like women rationally (or irrationally) taking on the risk of pregnancy.

I am sure that some marginal progress could be made by widening access to birth control in rural areas without free clinics, and getting the old "put a condom on a banana" demonstration back into high school sex-ed classes. But I would guess that we're talking about trivial gains. New York City's public schools have, if nothing else, excellent progressive sex education programmes. They also have extremely high rates of teen pregnancy, despite the fact that Planned Parenthood has not one but three clinics within the city limits, all conveniently reachable by public transportation. 95% of abortions eliminated in ten years? I'd be very surprised if you could get 9% with any government programme that didn't involve making it very, very difficult to get an abortion.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Abortion and viability

Radley Balko's Fox News Column about abortion echoes some of the thoughts that I've expressed here about the messy muddle that contains most people's beliefs about abortion.

This bit struck a mental spark:

Abortion policy, then, is a game of line-drawing. We're looking for the moment at which a fetus reaches the stage of viability, when its right to live becomes more compelling than its mother's right to terminate her pregnancy. Enmeshed in this line-drawing game are deep convictions about morality, and personal and community values, not to mention medical technology, which continually pushes back the point at which a fetus can survive outside the womb.

What happens if viability goes back to at or near the point where a woman is likely to detect the pregnancy? I know that this may not happen, since right now we can't save a baby whose lungs have not sufficiently formed, but I think it's possible that in the future we'll develop some sort of artificial womb-like thing for even earlier preemies than those we now save.

This poses a real problem for women, doesn't it? Because I don't think that many of us would endorse widespread abortion for viable fetuses, which is what common first trimester abortions would then amount to. And yet, whatever the rhetoric the pro-choice side uses about women controlling their bodies, the main reason that most women seek abortions is not that they don't want to be pregnant; it's that they don't want a baby. If nine months of abdominal swelling, acid reflux, and hemorrhoids were an occasional side effect of sex, most of the people I know would probably just endure it rather than have a doctor vacuum out their abdomen with a painful and bloody surgery.

What happens to women once babies can be gestated, in however inferior a fashion, outside the womb? They end up stuck in the position that men are currently in: if you conceive, you're on the hook to support the little darling for the next eighteen years.

As I was writing this, I questioned whether it was really true that women are more worried about the baby than the pregnancy, since after all, if this were true, women could just give the baby up for adoption. I think that this would be valid if we lived in a vacuum, but for most women over the age of eighteen, there's a pretty stiff social stigma attached to giving up your baby. I can much more easily imagine myself telling my colleagues that I was going to be an unwed mother than telling them that I was going to be pregnant, but had no intention of raising the little monster. And for women who are worried about what a baby will do to their lives, abortion is a way to get rid of the baby before you see it, feel it kicking, or hold it in your arms . . . like sending the puppy the kids bring home back to the pound before it can lick your hand. I would certainly fear that once I'd delivered a baby, I'd change my mind.

But I think the real test of what we worry most about is simply that I'd bet most pro-choice women would rather live in a world with an abortion ban, and stigma-free adoption, than in a world with an abortion ban, and artificial wombs. This will raise some interesting questions as medical science improves.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Abortion follow-up number seven: funny post from somebody else

This post from the John Roberts confirmation hearings is hilarious:

Make no mistake, then - the Supreme Court is no longer the Supreme Court of past fame. It is now the National Abortion Tribunal, and its members are no longer jurists, they are the Keepers of the Abortion Toggle Switch.

-----0-->0-----

Fig. 1A. Abortion Toggle Switch, closed.
Suction motors will engage.

As we can see from the schematic diagram above, the Abortion Toggle Switch is currently in the closed (ON) position. The entire purpose of the so-called Supreme Court, as current wisdom understands that purpose, is to stare at this switch all day wondering whether they should play with it or not.

Now this is a sad state for this once-great court to have fallen to, and makes me wonder if we don't need another court to assume the neglected responsibilities of the current one. Then the Abortion Toggle Switch could be moved to some remote corner of the public's attention, and the various abortion partisans could play their endless game of Keep Away without buggering up the entire constitutional process.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Abortion follow up #6: It's all about privacy!

It's between a woman and her doctor! Anti-abortion types just want to control women! They're poking their nose where it doesn't belong! If you think abortion is wrong, don't have one!

Whoa, Nelly. First of all, if you think that abortion is murder, or kinda murder, then you can hardly be fobbed off with a claim that it is none of your business. Even the most avid pro-choicer who caught the neighbours preparing to disassemble their children with a chainsaw would presumably try to stop it, not wander back to their own yard mumbling about the right to privacy.

Acting as if concern for the potential life in that womb is the same thing as peeking under the window shades to see whether you're renting porn or leaving dirty dishes in the sink is insulting. Try this one on for size: "If you think lynching is wrong, don't string up your neighbours."

Even more ridiculous is the pretense that we're somehow on a slippery slope back to the 19th century if we restrict abortion; that we should support Roe not because it is correct, but because overturning it would somehow endanger the precedents that underpinned it (to the extent that they did) such as Griswold v. Connecticut, which found a constitutional right to birth control.

I mean, c'mon. Griswold v. Connecticut is safe, and better than safe, it's irrelevant. The draconian anti-birth control laws it overturned were outdated decades before the case came before the Supreme Court, kept on the books only by Connecticut's politically powerful Catholic lobby. They were so laxly enforced, even in Connecticut (which was in no way typical of most states) that initial court cases aimed at the laws were dismissed because the plaintiffs had suffered no harm from them. The plaintiffs in Griswold had to gin up a case in order to appeal it to the Supremes--set up a birth control clinic, call the DA themselves to complain, and then appeal the drastic repressive treatment they received at the hands of the legal system, which consisted of a $100 fine.

Even if Griswold were rolled back, the result would be . . . nothing. There is no significant political movement trying to ban birth control in the United States, and there hasn't been since, oh, 1925. As well to worry that the court will bring back the gold standard. No one is coming for our birth control, our girly magazines, or our dirty dishes if Roe is overturned. And no one, except the activists getting pleasurably hysterical over margaritas and mango salsa, gives any credence to claims to the contrary.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Abortion follow up #5: Why am I writing so much about abortion?

Short answer: it's been a while since everyone yelled at me. Long answer: I hate the way the abortion debate is handled in this country. It's shamefully simplistic. And it's also ridiculously overblown. I mean, this is the only thing we care about in a Supreme Court justice? I can kind of understand why pro-lifers feel that way; they think that they think there are 1.2 million babies being murdered each years, which certainly dwarfs affirmative action and the constitutionality of telecoms regulation in my book. But on the pro-choice side, I am amazed that half the chattering classes really purport to believe that the single most important issue facing the courts is whether or not ten or so low-population states will, or will not, be allowed to outlaw abortion. More important than civil liberties? More important than towns condemning any old house they feel like it to build a strip mall? The highest cause in the land, the only one that really matters, is making sure that nothing interferes one iota with the free and unfettered scraping out of uteruses from sea to shining sea?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Abortion follow up #4: But it's not fair!

But it's not fair that women are the ones whose careers get all screwed up by an untimely pregnancy, wail feminists. We need abortion to make things right!

But it's not fair that women get to decide whether to abort, but men get stuck with the results of that decision, scream father's rights activists. We need the right to terminate our parental obligations!

Okay, kiddies, gather round, for Aunty Jane is going to let you in on a little secret: reproduction is not fair. It is not going to be fair. Once we made the decision to gestate the little suckers in our stomachs for nine months, instead of just putting out a few thousand eggs and hoping that a few of them hatched, things were bound to get a little asymmetrical. I know, none of us made that decision. But we didn't decide to walk upright or have opposable thumbs, either, and yet we reap the fruits of the wise planning of our ancestors. You have to take the bad with the good.

As a woman, of course I am extremely sensitive to the unfairness of it all. But there is no power on earth that is going to rectify that unfairness. Nature gave us a big job, and the tools to do it. Unfortunately, many of those tools, like hormones and breastfeeding, actively conflict with the establishment of an androgenous society.

And the same message to the guys. Most of you at some time are going to want to have kids, even if not right now. And when that time comes, you are not going to endure the stretch marks, morning sickness, hemorrhoids, labor pains, the searing agony of pushing a live human being out of an opening smaller than said human being's head, the late night breastfeeding, the postpartum depression, and so on. Life. Not fair. In so many ways, not fair, as you'll notice when you drive past the schizophrenic guy talking to his shopping-cart full of cans beside the highway.

Instead of trying to surgically correct reality in a fruitless quest to torture an organic thing into some impossibly symmetrical idealized shape you have in your brain, how about talking about tradeoffs, and making uncomfortable compromises? How about we stop pretending that we can find a perfect solution (or even worse, pretending that we have found it, and angrily denouncing any evidence to the contrary), and settling for finding the best one in a decidely imperfect world?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Abortion follow up #3: What's the difference between abortion and birth control?

Very little, according to the Catholic Church. For the vast majority of us who are not practicing catholics, however, there are three big differences.

Difference number one: Most second- and third- trimester fetuses feel pain. And I'm not referring to any existential anguish that my unfertilised eggs may feel at going unfulfilled. Abortion at that stage involves hacking what I hope pro-choicers will at least recognize as the moral equivalent of a small, defenseless animal to death without anaethesia.

Difference number two: Human intuition recognizes a big difference between affirmative and passive response.

The classic thought experiment that behavioral scientists offer of this is that of a train hurtling out of control down a track. Shortly up ahead, the track splits into two. On one track, there is a single man standing. On the other, there are five people hanging out. (Presumably they are all blind and deaf). With no time to warn them, your only option is to pull a lever to divert the train from its current path, towards the five people, onto the track where there is only one man. Do you pull it?

Most people say yes.

Now say there is only one track, with our five Helen Kellers standing thereupon. You have no way to divert the train, but you are standing next to a man who is fat enough that if you push him in front of the train, he will derail it, killing him, but saving the five others. Do you push him?

Almost everyone says no.

And yet the result--one man dead in order to save five others--is exactly the same. By a logical, utilitarian calculus, the one action is no better than the other.

Or say you refuse to donate a kidney to your cousin, knowing that there is no time to find him a donor? Wrong? Folks might argue. But is it as wrong as donating a kidney to some stranger in order to induce him to kill your (perfectly healthy) cousin? Logically, they are the same thing. Morally, they're not.

The human brain just doesn't work that way. Preventing a pregnancy just isn't the same thing to us as ending it once it has occurred, and you can ask any woman who's had an abortion if you need confirmation that it does not feel just the same as, say, having an IUD inserted.

Difference number three: birth control is low-probability, and non-specific. An abortion prevents the highly-likely birth of a single, specific child; birth control prevents the possible birth of millions of potential combinations of sperm and egg, all of which have an extremely low probability of being born.

Let's say that you are aske