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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (878231)	8/7/2015 2:05:24 PM
From: tejek	1 Recommendation Recommended By bentway Respond to of 1578036

What's happening here is that we [taxpayers] are paying for Medicaid, then turning around and paying for this Planned Parenthood nonsense ON TOP OF IT. Here in Hicksville, AR, where you think I live, we call that Double Dippin'. If you all think this is double dippin'.........not that that explains it.........why don't you improve your educational system? After all, its been proven over and over again that better educated teens make better choices.

To: i-node who wrote (878231)	8/24/2015 6:28:21 AM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1578036

Free Contraception Can't End the Abortion Debate 930 Aug 7, 2015 4:59 PM EDT By Megan McArdle Ross Douthat, the resident social conservative of the New York Times opinion page, doesn't usually get angry. But in a blog post Wednesday, he unloaded on liberal columnists who suggest that defunding Planned Parenthood is going to cause more abortions by depriving women of access to birth control. Such columns, he argues, rest on the assumption, stated or not, that America's abortion rate is driven by a lack of that access -- and that if only we made birth control more widely and cheaply available, we could resolve America's rancorous abortion dispute by rendering the issue moot. I ended up in a long Facebook discussion with one of the columnists he attacked by name, Damon Linker. Before I go further, I should say that both Ross and Damon are former colleagues, and I think they're both brilliant columnists. But on this issue -- not whether abortion should be legal, but whether the main thing standing between America and fewer abortions is better government birth-control policy -- I think Douthat has the better argument. Damon, and many others who participated in that Facebook thread, voiced the belief that America has far more abortions than it otherwise would because conservatives are not doing enough to give women better access to contraception. This belief seems intuitive -- after all, birth control keeps you from getting pregnant, and it's hard to get an abortion if you're not pregnant. But when I look at the data, I am reminded of Ambrose Bierce's definition of prejudice: a vagrant opinion without visible means of support. Consider abortion rates in various developed nations: The U.S. rate is certainly high compared with, say Germany or the Netherlands. On the other hand, it's lower than Sweden, and right around that of New Zealand and the UK -- countries with comprehensive national health-care services that provide birth control. And who had one of the lowest abortion rates? Ireland, where it was illegal. (Irish women travel abroad to get abortions, but the rate still seems to be quite low by international standards.) Now, obviously, we could theoretically do something to reduce our abortion rates to more German levels without going so far as to ban it. But this data doesn't really suggest that "something" is necessarily "provide more affordable reproductive health care services to women," or indeed, anything else that lends itself to government intervention, such as "better sex ed." Extremely high abortion rates can coexist with extremely comprehensive health-care systems and liberal social norms. You see a similar pattern in the U.S. when you look at the variation in abortion rates between states: Liberal blue states with liberal abortion laws and liberal attitudes about birth control seem to have the highest, not the lowest, rates of abortion. What drives this? I can come up with a number of plausible theories, but I couldn't tell you which one is right. On the other hand, I think we can reject the hypothesis that liberal attitudes toward sex and birth control are a surefire way to get the abortion rate down. In fact, the evidence for this thesis was never very good. Even William Saletan, who used to be a leading advocate of the squishy pro-choicer thesis that abortion is terrible so we need to give people lots of free birth control, ended up abandoning this thesis when he concluded that there's just not good data showing that the high price of birth control, or the inability to get your hands on the stuff, is the major reason people end up having abortions... bloombergview.com