Amanda Hess looks at how Virginia's new regulations on abortion clinics, designed to do little other than force them to close, might actually affect abortion rates.
But anecdotal evidence suggests that clinic closures can effect where women seek out abortions. When the Guttmacher Institute released its most recent data on abortion rates in the United States last month, senior research associate Rachel Jones suggested that state-by-state abortion rates can shift with the closure of clinics. From 2005 to 2008, D.C.'s abortion rate fell by 45 percent; in that same period, four abortion providers in the District shut down—a significant reduction for a city of 600,000. In past years, Jones says, about 20 percent of abortions in D.C. had been performed on women from outside the District. With the closure of several D.C. clinics, District women may have been moved to seek out abortions in Virginia—and Virginia women may have opted to receive abortions within state lines. From 2005 to 2008, Virginia's abortion rate rose by 7 percent.
The increased regulations may succeed in pushing more Virginia women back into D.C. to receive their abortions, but there's no evidence that they will actually stop abortions from happening. "We don't have any evidence that these laws succeed in reducing the abortion rate, which is their intended effect," Nash says."What we do know is that women who make the choice to have an abortion surmount many obstacles in order to do so." How Virginia health officials will attempt to outmaneuver the state's women remains to be seen. "What if a woman is told she must drive 300 miles to get an abortion?" Nash says. "That is a pretty steep barrier."
As with defunding Title X, the likely impact is not banning abortion entirely but merely making it more difficult for women of more modest means to decide for themselves when to have children and to obtain basic health-care services.
Republicans have grown more tactful in framing their arguments as concern for unborn children, but as Pema Levy writes, every once in a while, someone like Rep. Steve King of Iowa "lets the cat out of the bag." King recently explained his vote to defund Planned Parenthood by stating that “Planned Parenthood is invested in promiscuity.” By defunding health-care services for millions of women, King seems to think he can stop them from having sex -- or at the very least, force them to suffer some kind of moral retribution for having done so.
