Nearly every time conservatives talk about abortion, conservatives like Janice Crouse from Concerned Women for America do their best to portray abortion as a problem stemming from women in their 30s who have access to birth control but act irresponsibly. They should, the narrative goes, know better, and when they spend their floozy time having fun its the babies who suffer.
The falsity of that argument should be apparent, but unfortunately it's not. What Crouse says in the clip linked to above is true: Those having abortions are not, for the most part, panicked teenagers. More than half of women obtaining abortions already have children, and almost half live with incomes below the federal poverty line. Three-fourths say they cannot afford another child, and half say they do not want to be a single parent or are having problems with their partners.
It was this last point I tried to elucidate for Crouse, and a new study shows how true it is. Of nearly a thousand patients who had abortions at a large clinic in Iowa, nearly one in seven women reported one or more instances of physical or sexual violence in the previous year. The study says, "Abortion patients experience high intimate partner violence rates, indicating the need for targeted screening and community-based referral."
There's rarely little nuance in the abortion "debate," and anti-abortion advocates do as much as they can to try to bring up babies as often as possible so that the issue seems more about them than it does about the women whose bodies are held hostage by abusive partners, poverty, or lack of access to birth control. Women in these situations often don't have much of what we think of as choice, though obviously it would be OK if they did. They're exercising the best option of a plethora of bad ones. Efforts to curb choice wouldn't change the range of options available to wealthier women, but it would hurt the most vulnerable more than we can imagine.
-- Monica Potts
