Excerpt: The Anti-Abortion Paradox

(Editor's Note: this is an edited excerpt from Cristina Page's new book, "How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America," reprinted with permission from Basic Books, 2006.)

For the most part, pro-lifers tend to be absolutists. For them, you are either churchgoer or sinner, procreator or contraceptor, for the culture of life or for the culture of death. Pro-choicers, by contrast, tend to be more pragmatic.

For the pro-life movement, decision making is less complicated. For the unmarried, the right course is abstinence (which we'll discuss later). And for everyone, single or married, the right course never, ever leads to abortion. Unfortunately, if the goal is to reduce abortion, the pro-lifers' morally unambiguous strategies don't seem to work.

To begin with, criminalizing abortion may be a sacred pro-life goal. But in practice, bans have failed to curb rates of abortions. Many countries that have outlawed abortion have higher abortion rates than countries where abortion is legal. Brazil, Chile and Peru -- in which the predominant religion is Catholicism -- are among these. (It's worth noting that the Catholic Church wasn't always pro-life. Until 1869, it supported legalized abortion until quickening, at approximately 19 weeks of pregnancy, which is when it considered the fetus was given a soul.) The truth is that if abortion is outlawed, women don't seek services less frequently; they just survive them less often. This has been true in the United States (when abortion was illegal) as well as in many countries abroad today.

And it's not just pro-choice women who seek abortions, and it never has been. Most people would be startled to learn that even today, when battle lines are drawn, 40 percent of women who have abortions in the United States are Evangelical Christian or Catholic. They are your average morality voter, your above-average churchgoer. In all likelihood, they call themselves pro-life. Even though the great wish of pro-lifers is to cast those seeking abortions as irresponsible daters, the actual statistics are more forgiving. The majority of women in the United States (61 percent) having abortions are already moms.

Unable so far to criminalize abortions in the United States, the pro-life movement has taken up a strategy of incrementalism. It has strived to delay abortions, placing hurdle after hurdle in their way. The result has been, even by pro-life definitions, perverse. After all, the net effect hasn't been to stop abortions, but to postpone them until the fetus is more developed and the woman is at greater risk. This strategy is carried out even if it means forcing a woman to have one of those dreaded late-term abortions. Indeed, some of the later-term abortions -- "partial-birth abortions," as the pro-life side labels them -- no doubt occur as a result of campaigns waged by the pro-life movement.

Let's take a look at how this works. One favorite pro-life strategy is to pass laws that require a waiting period before a woman can obtain an abortion. Twenty-three states have enacted what are called "mandatory delay" laws; all are coupled with mandatory-counseling laws that typically require abortion clinics to dispense information designed to dissuade women from having an abortion.

Once a woman receives the counseling, she must wait, usually 24 hours, before she can obtain the abortion. The 24-hour wait may seem inconsequential, but the effect on real lives is considerable. The series of small barriers often means scheduling two days of missed work or missed school, traveling long distances twice -- don't forget, 87 percent of U.S. counties don't have an abortion provider -- and paying to stay overnight in a hotel.

In fact, the statistics show that the mandatory delays postpone the procedure much more than 24 hours. A study of the Mississippi experience found that after August 1992, when the delay law took effect, 53 percent more women had abortions in the second trimester.