A new report reveals Detroit’s abortion rate is a shocking three times greater than the rest of the state’s, with one third of Motor City pregnancies ending in abortion.
“Of an estimated 18,360 pregnancies among Detroit residents in 2012, the most recent year for which data are available, 5,693 ended in abortion, or 31 percent,” the Detroit News reported on May 22.
“That translates into a Detroit abortion rate… of 37.9 per 1,000 women aged 15-44. That’s up from 27.5 per 1,000 women in 2001,” the report states.
That is three times higher than Michigan’s abortion rate statewide, a rate that has declined along with the rates in the nation generally. Yet Detroit’s abortion rate is soaring while rates in the rest of the country–including its own state–has declined.
The News blames the rise in abortion on a cut in funding for family planning coupled with growing poverty in the inner city. But the paper also notes that the rate of abortion all across the nation is at its lowest since Roe v Wade was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973.
The exact reason that abortion is falling is hard to pin down. Pro-lifers want to claim that their laws and moral lessons have finally started turning the nation’s women to their point of view. On the other hand, pro-abortion advocates want to say that it is only the wider dissemination of contraceptives that is preventing unwanted pregnancies.
But there is likely far more to it than that as the birth rate generally has fallen, not just the rate of unplanned or teen pregnancies. Certainly more than ever young women who become pregnant without wanting to are choosing life. But fewer young girls are choosing to put themselves in a position of becoming pregnant in the first place not to mention that fewer young married couples are having children. The slowing of abortion rates seems to be caught up in a general downward trend of pregnancies.
“There is no one explanation but rather a synthesis of medical, cultural and economic forces at work here. All of which paints a far more complex picture than the one we find in politics,” pro-lifer and historian at Oxford University, Timothy Stanley wrote for CNN earlier this year.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com
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