








It’s often pointed out that a disproportionate number of abortions are procured by women living below 200% of the poverty line (that’s about $22,000/yr for a single person). This causes people to conclude that poor women are more likely to abort because they can’t afford a child. As it turns out, however, poor women are less likely to abortion an unwanted pregnancy than non-poor women.

The numbers I’m looking at are from this study by the Guttmacher Institute (the research arm of Planned Parenthood — hardly an anti-abortion source) which looks at pregnancies and abortions for women aged 20-29 from 2001 to 2008.

The study looks at women in three economic groups: Those living below the poverty line (around $11,000 per year), those living between the poverty line and 200% of the poverty line ($11,000 to $22,000), and those making more than 200% of the poverty line. For convenience, I’m going to look at the two most extreme groups, those living below the poverty line and those who make more than 200% of the poverty line. The middle group falls pretty much in the middle on all statistics.

The first thing you see is that poor women get pregnant a lot more than better off women. The pregnancy rate for women living below the poverty line was 277 pregnancies per 1000 women in 2008. For women making more than 2x the poverty line, that rate was 56 per 1000 women. So poor women are five times more likely to get pregnant.

Now, the first thing that most people would guess is: Poor women must have a lot more unintended pregnancies. They can’t afford birth control, or they hadn’t had good sex education, or for some other social reason they’re not able to control their pregnancies.

Well, it turns out that for women between 20 and 29 a majority of pregnancies are unintended, but poor women have a lower percentage of unintended pregnancies than better off women. 67% of pregnancies of 20-29 year old women living below the poverty line were unintended in 2008 while 73% of pregnancies of women making more than 200% of the poverty line were unintended.

Even so, surely a woman with more means is going to be more able to support an unplanned child than a truly poor women, right? Well, she may be more able, but that’s not, on average, what she chooses to do. Women living below the poverty line aborted 48% of their unintended pregnancies in 2008. Women making more than 200% of the poverty line aborted 62% of their unintended pregnancies in 2008. So a woman living at more than 2x the poverty line is 30% more likely to decide to abort an unplanned pregnancy than a woman living below the poverty line.

This data includes both married and unmarried women between 20 and 29. Unmarried women are far more likely to abort unintended pregnancies (51% aborted) than married women (17% aborted), but this is unlikely to account for the difference as poor women are much less likely to marry than women with higher incomes.

So it turns out that the conventional wisdom is wrong on all fronts. A smaller percentage of pregnancies are unplanned for poor women than for better off women. And a smaller percentage of poor women who have unplanned pregnancies abortion than better off women. The only reason why a disproportionate number of abortions are obtained by poor women is that they get pregnant far more frequently than better off women.

What this underlines is something that should be fairly obvious to anyone with a Christian understanding of fallen human nature: Having more money and resources does not make us better people. Those who are better off are just as capable of doing wrong than those who are less well off. Indeed, in this case, it appears that people who are better off are more likely to do wrong than those who are less well off.

Does this mean that we shouldn’t work to alleviate poverty or to make sure people are able to get the medical attention they need? Of course not. But this conventional wisdom that people only do wrong things because they’re not well off is simply not the case.


DarwinCatholic (49 Posts)