With all of the debates going on over the new health care bill, adding fuel to the fire is the ongoing battle over federal funding for abortions. The New York Times published an article September 28th covering the issue: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/health/policy/29abortion.html?th&emc=th
It spoke about republicans and moderate democrats wanting more restrictive language added to the new bill to ensure that abortion is not funded at all by tax-payer dollars.

The article didn’t do an adequate job explaining why the issue is so important. I understood that we had a 30-year-old ban on using tax-payer dollars to fund abortions, so I didn’t understand why the House and the Senate feel the need to change things now. I was also confused because Obama has been saying for months that the new health care bill will not give federal money to fund elective abortions, but the article seemed to have an underlying message that made me feel like I was missing something. The article makes a point that White House officials have declined to elaborate on what Obama means when he talks about federal funding for abortion. I didn’t get the whole picture until I found this article: http://www.factcheck.org/2009/08/abortion-which-side-is-fabricating/

The article basically fills in the gaps of The New York Times article. It explains that there are loopholes to the bill that Obama is cleverly disguising, such as “reproductive health” being covered by his public plan, under which abortion is sure to be included. Obama is saying that federal dollars will not be used to fund abortions, but the reason that opponents of the bill want tightened, more restrictive language is because they feel that it is too easy for the president to manipulate regulations so, in fact, abortion will be covered by tax-payer dollars. In my opinion, the Factcheck.org article did a better job explaining the whole issue than The New York Times article that just left me confused.

Legal v. Illegal, Abortion Rate Stats

Following coverage of the abortion battle is something of a roller-coaster ride. It is such a hotly-debated issue and each side generally makes a strong argument for being either pro-life or pro-choice.

The more research I do, the more questions keep popping up in my brain. The pro-lifers argue that legalizing abortion will cause women to be more casual about the decision and the number of abortions will rise. Pro-choice advocates say that making abortion illegal won’t stop women from going through with the procedure, and it will only force them to take unsafe measures, such as having the procedure done in back-alley clinics with untrained doctors. So which side is correct?

Finally, I came across an article in The New York Times that put to rest a lot of my questions. A global study concluded that abortion rates were the same in countries where it is legal compared to those where it is illegal. It concluded that making abortion illegal has no effect on a woman’s decision to terminate her pregnancy. The only difference is that in countries where abortion is legal, the procedure is considered safe, and where it is illegal, the procedure is dangerous and performed in secret.

There is a lot more conclusive information from the study, so here is the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/12/world/12abortion.html

From a critical viewpoint, the article was informative and eye-opening. It did answer my question regarding what the best plan of action to take is to reduce the need for abortions, which the study proved, is the use of contraceptives, and not abstinence education. The one thing that bothered me about the article was the amount of statistics the reporter used. The entire article was jam-packed with numbers and research conclusions. I found myself having to weed-out the less essential information in order to get to the important facts. It was comparable to the effects of compassion fatigue. By the middle of the article I had read so many statistics that they lost their impact.