Reproductive Health – Page 6 – Population Matters-USA

*Ann Telnaes Editorial Cartoon* used with permission of Ann Telnaes and the Cartoonist Group. All rights reserved.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….” First Amendment to the United States Constitution

The United States of America is becoming a theocracy. The Dobbs decision has bypassed the Congress by having the Supreme Court establishing a de facto religion which forces unwilling women to become mothers.

So far this religion has evidenced itself with the Court’s failure to uphold the Roe v. Wade decision. The Court’s decision in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization gave power to individual states to regulate the legal status of abortion. Remember, the majority of Americans are prochoice, according to several recent polls. There are fears that more is to come, perhaps even resuscitating the Comstock laws which forbad use of contraception.

Abortion has not always been frowned upon. Back when the Constitution was written, women’s healthcare was in the hands of women, including herbal abortifacients, and it is likely that men had no idea what was going on. It is silly to think that the Constitution would include anything about women’s healthcare, let alone abortion, yet part of the argument in the Dobbs decision is that there is no mention of abortion in the Constitution. Remember, the people at the Constitutional Convention were all white males! Abortion was acceptable in colonial America and didn’t become illegal until the mid-1800s.

This new religion was sired by the coupling of rightwing politics and conservative religions, including Roman Catholicism and the evangelicals who have overtaken the South. The primary tenets of the new religion pretend to be in favor of narrowly defined “life”, claiming that human life begins when human sperm and egg meet. It appears that most followers of this new religion don’t care much what happens to the “life” except when it is in the woman’s reproductive tract—with little attention to the person who supports that uterus. After birth, they tend to not support healthcare, social services or education—especially sex ed. Teen pregnancy rates are highest where the evangelicals are strongest.

In reality, the “prolife” people may be courting death. They are encouraging continued human overpopulation with consequent destruction of Creation. Humans are causing the massive extinction of species, many of which are essential to our own existence. Our clever synthesis and use of chemicals is toxifying the air and water with poisons, some of which last forever. And don’t forget the climate chaos that even Trump cannot ignore.

The high priest of this new religion is Samuel Alito, the principal author of the Dobbs decision. His bishops are John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett; all supported the Dobbs decision. These 6 justices were all appointed by Republican presidents; the three dissenting justices were appointed by Democratic presidents. It is unlikely that this happened by chance. The unescapable conclusion is that this judgement was politically based.

What can be done about this apparent incursion of a state religion into the USA? A group of religious leaders have sued the State of Florida, which has one of the most prohibitive abortion laws in the country. These leaders claim that that their ability to live and practice their religious faith is being violated by the state’s new abortion law. One of them, Reverend Laurie Hafner of the United Church of Christ, stated “I am pro-choice not in spite of my faith, but because of my faith.”

Similarly, a patient at Planned Parenthood asked me, after her abortion, “Are you a Christian?”

“Yes”, I responded. “I am a Quaker. I feel obliged to perform abortions because it is one way I can help people and also help this overpopulated world.”

Rather than preserving the sanctity of human life, as believers in this new religion profess, it worships the contents of a pregnant woman’s uterus and damns the imagined evil of abortion. This religion ignores the fact that one in five human pregnancies ends in a spontaneous abortion, also called “miscarriage”. If human fetuses are so holy, why does God allow miscarriages to happen?

I am worried that minority religious beliefs are being imposed on the majority by a powerful minority. We must push back in the upcoming elections and send a signal to the Supremes that we won’t tolerate a state religion.

The media have done a good job of describing the implications of the Supreme Court’s abolishment of Roe to individuals. However, I have read little about the effects this regrettable decision will have on society.

First of all, it means that as many as 140,000 people will not have desired abortions. This estimate was published by the Guttmacher Institute and is hopefully too high. People all over the country are working to help refer women to abortion services in states that still allow this important healthcare procedure. However, there are many who cannot afford the time away from home or money to travel that a referral would entail.

Let’s estimate what this might mean to our population growth. Currently there are about 4 million births in the USA. Let’s say that 40,000 women are able to travel to receive abortion services or otherwise end up not giving birth. This would mean that the number of births is increased by 100,000 or almost 3 percent. We need to decrease the number of unintended births, not increase them!

Other than increasing the growth rate of the USA, will these added births have any effect on society? This is difficult to know, but there is reason to believe that many of these new people will not turn out to be the best citizens.

Dr. Henry David studied unintended pregnancies in Czechoslovakia during the 1960s, with the help of Czech researchers. Those researchers did all the detective work to find the mothers, gain their permission to test their children, and continue to follow them for all those 30 years.

Abortion was legal but needed approval by a state agency. A woman could appeal if her request for an abortion was denied —however, some women were denied twice. David’ group looked at these unwilling mothers, their children and controls (mothers with wanted pregnancies), following them for over 30 years. The results are available in “Born Unwanted”, and are summarized: “The overall findings suggest that, in the aggregate, denial of abortion for unwanted pregnancy entails an increased risk for negative psychosocial development and mental well-being in adulthood.” The children of unwanted pregnancies had more brushes with the law, were less satisfied with their lives, had less education and more mental health problems.

Another project, the Turnaway Study, focused on women who wished to abort a pregnancy. These women were refused abortion care because their pregnancies were too far advanced for the clinic they attended. The Study looked at families after the birth of a denied abortion and found that they didn’t thrive well after the unwelcome addition. There was poor maternal bonding, and the mothers’ other children’s development suffered. Furthermore, these families were more likely to live below the federal poverty level than the mothers who received abortion care. I’ll write more about this revealing study in the future.

A possible cause of the decline in crime in the 1990s was popularized by freakonomics.com. Males from age 18 to 24 are most likely to commit crimes, and the theory is that the decrease in crime 18 years after Roe v. Wade in 1972 was due to increased access to abortion. The decrease in the births of unintended children may have resulted in better citizens and less criminal behavior as kids reached adolescence and adulthood.

As a young doctor, I took care of a toddler who had been scalded. I remember his young mother saying “I didn’t want him.” She told me that he was fussy and she thought a bath would help quiet him, but instead he became fussier. Out of desperation she turned up the hot water to punish her son. She deeply resented the baby who prevented her from doing normal teen things.

The Freakonomics hypothesis is controversial. One analysis of the data suggests that the benefits to society were confined to the decline in teenage mothers. Certainly, my teen patient’s son had suffered from being unwanted. I have no follow up information on how he turned out, however.

Decreased access to safe abortion services will be a tragedy for some people and our society may suffer.