Thinking About Abortion (3) Why Women Get Abortions
The reasons why women obtain legal induced abortion can be obtained from several sources. The women can be asked. Researchers have done this on numerous occasions in many countries. The Alan Guttmacher Institute surveys and Planned Parenthood organization surveys are the most frequently cited sources for the self-reported reasons of women in the U.S.
Women's intentions can be inferred from statistical analysis of biographical and clinical information about the women obtaining abortions, the timing and circumstances of the abortions, and the quality of the aborted fetuses/babies. More of this kind of research appears to have been done than direct interview surveys. The US Center for Disease Control annual abortion surveillance report provides extensive statistical data.
All abortions as a group
We will approach the reasons from the broadest to the most specific. We are looking only at women in the US. First, most women obtain an abortion because they want to end a normal pregnancy. Few abortions (1%) are obtained because the pregnancy was initiated by rape or incest./1 Few abortions are obtained because the fetus is unhealthy or at risk (3.3%), or because the pregnancy is not healthy (2.8%)./2
Second, half of women obtain an abortion apparently because the contraceptive methods they were used failed to prevent pregnancy./1 The majority of abortions are to young women under the age of 25 years, who are not married, and a third of abortions are to college students./3
From the profile of the majority of abortion seekers, we can infer that the women were inexperienced in preventing pregnancy by contraception. They were in the beginning years (from a lifetime perspective) of their sexual activity. Their inexperience probably contributed to their misjudgments concerning the risks of pregnancy involved in timing and type of sexual activity.
Let us now turn to specific reasons why women decide to end a normal, albeit unplanned, pregnancy. These are summarized by the Heartlink article/3 as:
- Can't afford the baby right now
- Not ready for the responsibility of parenthood
- Concern about how a baby would change their lives
- Problems with relationship/desire to avoid single parenthood
- Too young, or not mature enough to have a child
I would lump these specific reasons together under the two general headings, inconvenient and difficult. The women have abortions, because it would be inconvenient to them to be parents or difficult for them to be parents. Twenty-five percent of American women state their reason for an abortion as a desire to postpone having children, rather than not having children, ever, at all. This is the most frequently cited, specific reason for an abortion./2
Given the sexual inexperience and life inexperience of the women obtaining the abortions, the inconvenience and/or difficulty of having unplanned parenthood with an unwanted child, while they are still in a preparatory stage of their own life, must loom psychologically large. Since abortion is legal and socially acceptable in large segments of American population, abortion is the simplest and comparatively easiest way to solve the women's problem.
Repeat abortions, as distinct from first abortions
What the general characterization and statistics I have presented so far do not address is the issue of repeat abortions, which are nearly half of all abortions in the U.S., as we mentioned the previous article in this series. A woman who has had one abortion could no longer be characterized as inexperienced sexually or inexperienced in life. She certainly would not be naive about the risks of sexual activity.
It makes sense to describe two separate motivational schemes in analyzing why women choose abortion - one scheme for women seeking their first abortion, and one scheme for women seeking a repeat abortion.
All of the specific reasons that a woman might seek abortion might be the same for a first-time abortion and for a repeat abortion, but how we understand those reasons would surely be different. We might say of a woman seeking a repeat abortion, she should have known better. It is this difference that might lead someone to say a woman having a repeat abortion is simply using abortion as a means of birth control, at variance with the legally intended use of abortion.
Nonetheless, the situation is too complicated to permit this conclusion easily. A recent study of Canadian women who have had repeat abortions (including women who were having their first abortions, as a control) concluded that physical abuse is involved. Women seeking repeat abortions were more likely to have been physically and sexually abused than women seeking their first abortions./4
On average, for all women (first abortion and repeat abortion) 25% to 30% of women reported some kind of conflict, physical abuse, or sexual abuse with their sexual partner. But when we separate first abortion from repeat abortion, the percentages are signficantly different. For example, 22% of first abortion women report sexual abuse (not described), whereas 35% of second abortion women and 45% of third abortion women report sexual abuse.(Table 1, source 4.)
In the pregnant woman's eyes, sexual abuse would probably taint the father of their child as a potential parent. This negative evaluation could be lumped in the category of difficult parenthood; but it is a qualitatively different kind of difficulty than simply, for instance, the management difficulty of working at a wage job and raising an infant at the same time.
The study specifically examined the issue whether the women seeking repeat abortions were using abortion as a method of birth control. The researchers concluded they were not.
ADDED NOTE. September 28, 2006. I continue the discussion of why women obtain abortions in my article, "Decision Context" (the next article in this series), looking at the role of boy friends in convincing women to end pregnancies.
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/1. "Reasons Women Choose Abortion." WebMD. (Sources cited in article.)
/2. "Reasons Why Women Have Induced Abortions: Evidence from 27 Countries," by Akinrinola Bankole, Susheela Singh and Taylor Haas. International Family Planning Perspectives (Alan Guttmacher Institute publication), Volume 24, No. 3, August 1998. Table 2.
/3. "Abortion Statistics: Who and Why." Heartlink. (Alan Guttmacher Institute sources cited in article.)
/4. "Characteristics of women undergoing repeat induced abortion," by
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