Media Misleads on Reasons Behind Abortion Decline

(by Michael New) Last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released abortion statistics for calendar year 2009. The news was good for pro-lifers as the CDC statistics indicate the number of abortions decreased by approximately 5 percent between 2008 and 2009. Overall, the abortion rate has been declining fairly steadily since the early 1990s, but has leveled off somewhat during the current decade. Furthermore, some research indicates that the incidence of abortion increases when the economy slows down. As such, this reported decline in the abortion rate was somewhat unexpected.

 

Unsurprisingly, most of the mainstream-media coverage of the abortion decline was quick to credit contraception use. The Associated Press story on the abortion decline cited two professors and a Guttmacher Institute analyst. They each credited contraception use, even though they were unable to provide any actual evidence of increased contraception use in 2009. Perhaps unsurprisingly, no one representing a pro-life group was quoted or cited in the article.