>Thanks Yoshie, for (mostly) confirming my inchoate impressions with
>real statistics! It would indeed be very interesting to know the
>incomes of the women who could not afford to. Given how many
>extremely poor people have children, and how many times I've heard
>middle-class people say they couldn't afford them, my guess is that
>for many - sure, not all - of those who picked that answer, money
>was a proxy for desire. That is, having a child was a financial
>burden they did not WANT to shoulder.
Your hypothesis that women who say that they "cannot afford" a baby as the primary reason for abortion aren't necessarily the poorest women and that the majority of them may very well be middle-income women, I think, is most likely correct. I believe that for middle-income women to say that they "have to" have an abortion because they "can't afford" a baby when lots of poor women have children (and often rear them without male financial support) is probably counter-productive politically, especially for the purpose of building solidarity of working-class women across income strata, because the stated reason probably won't strike many poor women as "true." It's much better for us all to discuss what we want and don't want frankly.
Joanna wrote:
>In deciding for/against abortion, the mother is considering the
>viability of the child and the viability of the mother -- and
>seemingly unrelated issues like subsidized child care, health care,
>family wage etc. may play a large part in that decision.
***** Volume 25, Number 1, March 1999 Recent Trends in Abortion Rates Worldwide By Stanley K. Henshaw, Susheela Singh and Taylor Haas . . .
Table 1. Rates of legal induced abortion, by completeness of data and country, according to year, 1975-1996 Country 1975 1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 Belgium* u u u u 7.0 7.4* u u u 6.1 6.2 6.2 6.8 CanadaÝ 10.5 12.6 12.5 11.4 11.2 11.6 14.6 14.7 15.1 15.3 15.5 15.5 u Denmark 27.0 21.4 19.3 18.5 17.7 18.6 18.2 17.6 16.8 16.9 15.9 16.1 u England & 11.2 12.8 12.2 12.8 13.5 15.3 15.8 15.2 14.8 14.7 14.6 14.4 15.6 Wales§ Finland 20.4 13.9 12.6 12.3 12.0 11.5 11.1 10.7 10.2 9.6 9.4 9.3 10.0 Israel u 17.9 19.8 21.4 18.4 16.5 15.8 15.5 15.5 14.2 13.7 14.3 u Netherlands§ 5.2 6.7 6.3 5.6 5.3 5.1 5.2 5.6 5.6 5.7 6.0 6.1 6.5 New Zealand u 8.6 9.6 9.7 10.5 12.8 14.0 14.4 14.3 14.6 15.7 16.4 u Norway 19.7 16.3 15.8 15.9 17.1 17.2 16.8 16.8 16.5 16.3 16.7 14.9 15.6 Scotland 8.1 8.4 8.4 8.9 9.2 9.7 9.8 9.6 10.3 10.4 10.7 10.4 11.2 Sweden 20.2 20.7 19.0 17.7 18.9 21.4 21.3 20.4 20.0 19.7 18.7 18.3 18.7 SwitzerlandÝÝ u 11.3 u 9.3 u u 8.7 8.6 8.3 8.0 7.8 u 8.4 United States 21.7 29.3 28.8 28.1 27.4 27.3 27.4 26.3 25.9 25.4 24.1 22.9 22.9
<http://www.agi-usa.org/pubs/journals/2504499.html> *****
The United States does have a higher abortion rate (per 1,000 women aged 15-44) than other comparably rich countries, but the US rate in 1996 (22.9/1,000) is not much higher than the Swedish rate (18.7/1,000) and the Norwegian rate (15.6/1,000), despite the vastly better provisions for health care, child care, parental leaves, income support, etc. that Sweden and Norway make than the United States. -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>