VISION FOR LIFE

From Behind the Desk 


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    • Introduction
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5/3/2022

The Leaked supreme court decision, and the Legal future of abortion

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 Someone has leaked a draft of the upcoming Supreme Court decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, apparently written in February, that had to do with state restrictions of abortion. If the final decision is not significantly revised, the Supreme Court will finally have overturned Roe v. Wade.

Pro-life people are ecstatic, and with good reason. The Court, we hear, will return the matter to the states' legislatures. The decision, then, may not change abortion practice that much: red states will tend to have few or no legal abortions, and blue states will likely have slightly more. It will lead to a significant, though not likely massive, reduction in abortion numbers, however, as many people will not cross state lines to get the abortions that were available at home. (The Texas "heartbeat law," which prevents abortions after a heartbeat can be detected, has reduced abortion numbers 50 - 60%, though some women have gone to neighboring states for abortions. While abortion drugs are readily available online, many women will not break the law. The President of Heartbeat International, an association of pregnancy help centers, has observed that some women in Texas have expressed gratitude that they didn't have the choice to abort -- which points to the pressures on women to do what they really don't want.)


Let's look further down the road: the Supreme Court is just putting off a decision that should apply to all the states, and not be left to them individually. (I think we can assume that Congress will not have the courage and fortitude to deal with the issue head on, though it should.)

While the Court may be politically attuned (or cautious), the inner logic of any moral prohibition of abortion demands a Court ruling, if you have any law, anywhere, protecting the child from the abortionist. If what is in the womb has the moral status of an appendix, then the law should back off and let medical professionals decide about abortion. If the moral status of that which is in the womb is unknown, but possibly that of a human being, the courts have an obligation to defend what may be a person, another one of us. (In short, those for permitting abortion have to show that that a pregnancy does not involve an individual human being. The hunter can't just shoot at anything that moves in the forest. He has to know that it's not another hunter.) Attempts to say when in pregnancy the state has "a compelling interest" to forbid abortion, on the grounds that the child should be protected at that stage, are in reality arbitrary: e.g., why 6 months (Roe), and not 5 months, or 4 months, when a life is on the line?

A legal person inside another legal person is a challenge to the imagination, especially early in pregnancy. It is also a challenge, admittedly, to the legal tradition, but it is perhaps an inevitable development, and the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment will eventually apply, at least to the question of taking the child's life.

Compare our fight to the history of other issues before the Court, like race. From Wikipedia on the "equal protection clause": "The Equal Protection Clause is part of the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The clause, which took effect in 1868, provides 'nor shall any State ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.' . . . 

"A primary motivation for this clause was to validate the equality provisions contained in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which guaranteed that all citizens would have the guaranteed right to equal protection by law. As a whole, the Fourteenth Amendment marked a large shift in American constitutionalism, by applying substantially more constitutional restrictions against the states than had applied before the Civil War."

States surrendered their decision-making power as the Court saw the 14th Amendment entailing more uniform treatment of white and black peoples in more and more areas of life (accommodation, housing, education, etc.
 (https://historycollection.com/5-us-supreme-court-cases-defined-race/4/).

The Court, I submit, will eventually have to deal with the issue at the federal level; it can only be politics that holds it back at this point.

A good day. Let's hope and pray that the Court will stand firm.

Chris Humphrey, Ph.D.
​

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2/14/2022

2020 PA Abortion report - good news, obvious and hidden

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The Good News, Obvious and Hidden, in the PA Health Department’s Abortion Report for 2020
​

The PA Abortion Report for 2020 is not good news overall, but there’s good news for Allegheny County.  The bad news from Philly may be hiding the good effects of advertising, even there.
​
Abortions Down Again for Allegheny County Residents

At first glance, abortion statistics for Pennsylvania in 2020 are reasons for dismay: numbers are up. A close look at Allegheny County, however, shows that the number of abortions for residents actually dropped, while ratios remained the same. How is that possible? Birth numbers dropped, and abortion ratios are – wait for it – the ratios of abortions to births. So both abortions and births decreased proportionately in the County.

Philadelphia’s numbers were more discouraging at first glance. Both resident abortions and abortion ratios were up over the last few years, including 2020. On the surface, one might conclude that Vision for Life’s advertising was having no effect there. However, if one compares Philly not with Allegheny County, but with all the other counties, including neighboring counties, the picture is much brighter. It is quite likely that advertising pregnancy medical centers in Philadelphia County reduced the increase in abortion numbers and ratios of abortions to births.

First, the bad news: Abortion numbers for Pennsylvania residents were both up, for the third time since 2017.
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​The ratio of abortions to births measures the proportion of women who choose life. That ratio was up again for PA women in 2020. That is, more PA women who were pregnant chose abortion that year. This was the pattern statewide since 2018.
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​The good news, however, is that abortions to Allegheny County residents, after rising slightly in 2019, went down again in 2020, from 3,265 to 3,083.
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​How can the numbers of abortions drop from the previous year, yet the abortion ratios remain the same? 2020 was “the year of the fear.” Birth numbers for Allegheny County residents dropped sharply.
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​So abortions were down, but so were births, and the ratio of the first to the second remained the same. It is our contention that, without our advertising, abortion numbers and abortion ratios would have been up in Allegheny County, as they were in the rest of PA.
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Compare the abortion ratios of Allegheny County residents to the residents of all other counties.
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The abortion ratios for Allegheny County increased 8.1% from the low point of 2018 to 2020; in the rest of Pennsylvania the ratios from the low point of 2017 to 2020 increased 12.9%. Advertising makes a difference to demographics
What’s Happening in Philadelphia?

Mark Twain quoted British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Anyone familiar with the use of statistics (especially in political controversy) can see why this quotation is remembered. Well, we do not want to use statistics to mislead you, so here’s the truth: the numbers for Philadelphia County, where we have been working since 2018, do not look good by comparison with Pittsburgh.
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​As you can see, abortion numbers actually rose after we started advertising there. Abortion ratios for Philadelphia County also look disappointing.
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​The increase in abortion ratios between 2018 and 2020 for Philadelphia County residents was 2.1%. If we go back to 2017 and compare the ratio of the earlier year with 2020, the increase was 8.5%.
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Increases in abortion ratios can reflect an increase in the number of abortions, but they can also chiefly reflect, as we saw in Allegheny, a drop in birth numbers. Here are the birth numbers for Philadelphia.
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The decline in birth numbers in Philadelphia County for 2017–2020 was not precipitous – 3.1%; this was less than the drop from 2012 to 2013 of 3.9%. The decline of previous years continued, however. From a comparison of abortion numbers and birth numbers over the years, we can conclude that the increase in abortion numbers in Philadelphia County played the larger role in the increase in abortion ratios than the decrease in births.

It appears, then, that our advertising was not having the effect we were looking for. There may be a few of reasons for this. For one, Philadelphia is a bigger “market” than Allegheny County, with 1.6 million people to Allegheny’s 1.2 million. Our ad spending in Philly was not commensurate with this difference in population. For another, the pregnancy medical centers in Philadelphia were not as prepared to handle abortion-determined women as were the centers in Pittsburgh. Finally, the year 2020 was an anomaly: in the midst of Covid fears, the centers in Pittsburgh remained open for business, while those in Philadelphia had restricted services.
Comparing Philadelphia to Other Counties Changes the Picture

Could our advertising have affected abortion numbers, despite the increase? Did it hold abortion numbers down? A comparison of Philadelphia’s numbers with those of the other counties (besides Philadelphia and Allegheny counties) suggests it did.

What do we find when we look outside Allegheny and Philadelphia counties? The number of births fell in these counties, 4.9% from 2017 to 2020, and 3.6% between 2018 to 2020. The drop in births in 2020 is sharp, if not unprecedented, and responsible for a big part of those years’ decreases.
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​The really remarkable difference is the increase in abortion numbers and ratios in these other counties in 2020. Here are charts of the abortion numbers, followed by the ratios of abortions to births.
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Abortion numbers and ratios increased sharply outside of the counties in which we advertise pregnancy medical centers, Allegheny and Philadelphia counties. From 2017 and 2018, to 2020, abortion ratios for counties other than Allegheny and Philadelphia rose from 135 to 158 per 1,000 births, or 17.0%. How does that compare with the abortion ratios for Philadelphia County?
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In the chart below we see how the increases in abortion ratios of women in other counties compares with the increase in Philadelphia County, for the periods 2017 to 2020, and 2018 to 2020. (The low points in abortion ratios in the recent past vary from 2017 to 2018, hence the inclusion of both. The longer period, 2017 to 2020, is more significant, but our advertising in Philadelphia County began in earnest in 2018).
Counties                        % Increase in the Ratio of                  Difference Between the
                                              Abortions to Births                    Other Counties' Abortion
                                                       2017-2020                               Ratios and Philadelphia
                                                       2018-2020                                             County's Ratios

                                       
Philadelphia County                8.5% (2017 – 2020)
                                                    2.1% (2018 – 2020)

All Counties Other than            17.0% (2017 – 2020)                                               +8.5%
Allegheny and Philadelphia
      17.0% (2018 – 2020)                                               +14.9%
​The difference between the increase in Philadelphia County and its closest county neighbors (geographically, and in terms of abortion ratios) also suggests that advertising reduced the increase in abortion numbers and ratios there. The increase in the abortion ratios in Philadelphia County from 2017 to 2020 was greater than that in Allegheny County, but from 2018 to 2020, while our advertising was running, the increase in Philadelphia was smaller – by 6% (see the chart below).
Counties                        % Increase in the Ratio of                   Difference Between the
                                              Abortions to Births                      Other Counties' Abortion
                                                       2017-2020                                Ratios and Philadelphia
                                                       2018-2020                                             County's Ratios


 Philadelphia County             8.5% (2017 – 2020)
                                                 2.1% (2018 – 2020)


Delaware County                  7.7% (2017 – 2020)                                                –.8%
                                                7.7% (2018 – 2020)                                                +5.6%
                                               
Montgomery County            15.0% (2017 – 2020)                                            +6.5%
                                                 5.6% (2018 – 2020)                                             +3.5%


Allegheny County                 4.9% (2017 – 2020)                                              –3.6%
                                                8.1% (2018 – 2020)                                               +6.0%
Summary for 2020

Abortion ratios for Allegheny County residents fell from 2010 to 2013, and stayed relatively low and stable for years. The ratios dipped in 2017 and 2018, but rose to the same generally low level in 2019. Remarkably, those ratios remained stable in “the year of the fear,” 2020, because, though birth numbers fell, so did abortion numbers. Advertising continues to affect the thinking of abortion-vulnerable and abortion-determined women in Pittsburgh. The effects of advertising show up in demographics.

Abortion numbers and ratios for Philadelphia County rose overall in the period 2017 or 2018 to 2020, a gloomy picture indeed. When we compare the County to other Pennsylvania counties (that is, all other counties except Allegheny County), things look much better, however. Both Philadelphia County and Allegheny County saw half the increase in abortion ratios that the other counties had between their low points (either 2017 or 2018) and 2020. To put it another way, other counties in PA had double the increase in abortion ratios, compared to Allegheny and Philadelphia counties, from the latter counties’ low points to “the year of the fear,” 2020.

By comparison with Philadelphia County, from 2018 to 2020 the increase in abortion ratios in counties other than Allegheny County and Philadelphia County was almost 8.5% higher. Comparisons of Philadelphia County with its nearest neighbors reinforce the conclusion that Philadelphia’s increase in abortion numbers and ratios lagged that elsewhere.

No doubt, those who are well-versed in statistical methods could find more elegant ways to establish whether or not the small increase in abortion ratios in Philadelphia County from 2018 to 2020 was statistically significant, and, if significant, how much so. While the above comparisons do not let us quantify the likelihood that our efforts made a difference, they give us good reason to think that our advertising helped cap the increase in abortion numbers and ratios in Philadelphia County over this period. Our advertising, then, acted like a sea anchor, which (Wikipedia tells us) is deployed from a ship in a storm, and “provides hydrodynamic drag, thereby acting as a brake.”

What if Vision for Life had not been advertising in these periods? Would Allegheny County’s abortion numbers have been much higher? Almost certainly. Would Philadelphia’s ratios of abortions to birth have increased much more than they did? We can’t be as confident, but it is quite likely.
 
What Else Do We Learn from the PA Abortion Report That Is Helpful for Our Work?


In order to reach women thinking about abortion, especially with our under-two-minute video ads that run on Facebook, Instagram, and Facebook’s Audience Network, we need to know something about their situations. We learn a lot from sociological studies of abortion patients and their demographics, and also from the pregnancy medical centers, who have first-hand experience with women contemplating abortion. We also learn from the Pennsylvania Annual Abortion Reports, especially about things like race, age, number of previous children, and number of previous abortions. So from the 2020 PA Health Department’s Abortion Report, we learn that a majority of abortion patients are not scared teenagers, but women 25 years and older.
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​This trend has been going on for some time.
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Each multi-colored column in the chart above shows an age group over nine years (2012 to 2020). Within those columns, the colors apply to the particular years. As you can see above, within the muti-colored columns (Under 15, 1–17, 18–19, and 20–24), from the dark blue column on the left (2012) to the light green column on the right (2020), the trend is a decline in the numbers, except for the 20–24 group, which showed a slight increase in 2020. Among the older cohorts 30–34 and 35–39, the trend is an increase in the numbers of abortions, generally year after year. Among women 40 years old and above, the much smaller abortion numbers declined until 2018, and then rose slightly the next two years. So abortion patients are becoming older.
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They are also more likely to be mothers of another child or of children.
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Of the total number of abortions to residents in 2020, mothers of one or more children were the following percentages:
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One previous birth – 26%
Two previous births – 21%
Three previous births – 10%
Four previous births or more – 6%
Mothers with no previous births were only 36% of the total.
 
Abortions to women who had no previous abortion had been in decline for years, until they started to rise in 2018. The same was generally true for women who had one or more previous abortion(s).
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​Close to half of all abortions in 2020 were to women had had 1 or more abortion(s) – 47%.
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​In summary, we are grateful that abortion numbers fell in Allegheny County in 2020, and that abortion ratios did not increase, as they did elsewhere. We are disappointed to see that we have not brought down abortion numbers and ratios in Philadelphia as we had hoped, but encouraged by the fact that numbers and ratios did not increase at the same rate as they did in the rest of the State, or at the rate of the surrounding counties with significant abortion numbers. We are persuaded that advertising is responsible for keeping abortion ratios down, and have expanded in 2022 to Cleveland, Ohio, whose abortion rate is close to that of Pittsburgh when we began there. Pray that God may bless our work, and that many more moms and babies are saved from abortion.

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10/29/2021

Thousands of babies are here, because donors care

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(This is an adaptation of the talk given by Co-Founder Chris Humphrey at the Fall 2021 Banquet, "They're Here Because You Care.")
 
Most Americans don’t care about abortion.  That may anger us, or sadden us, but, as they say, “It is what it is.”  In Allegheny County, however, thousands of babies are here because donors to Vision for Life care.
 
That care comes at the right time.  Abortion is THE human rights issue of our age. In all of human history, more human beings have been killed before birth than after.  Most of these have been killed in the last 50 years.  In America, however, we are winning on abortion.  Since the mid-1980s, abortion numbers have been falling at a consistent rate.  The ratios of abortions to births are actually lower in the last few years than they were in 1973 – the year of the infamous Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision.
 
If you are a regular reader of our blog, or have read a few pages on our website, you will know that the biggest driver of this decline has been pregnancy help! Ratios of abortions to births are “inversely related” to pregnancy help centers: as pregnancy help center numbers rise, abortion ratios fall, from the mid-1980s to today.
 
We considered four other possible explanations as the main reason for the decline in abortion ratios: contraception (including abortifacients), restrictive state laws, fewer abortion centers, and public opinion becoming more pro-life because of activism and education.  See the series of six videos, and texts with data, on our website, for why none of these explains the decline.
 
Early on, we realized that trying to change public opinion in general was a mistake: we don’t have the resources.  The question then was, “If pregnancy help is the reason we’re winning, what can we do with what we have, to make the impact of the centers even bigger?”  A Charlotte Lozier Institute study confirmed what we thought: most young women had no knowledge of the centers.  Advertising could change that.  And it does!  Advertising pregnancy help is the most cost-effective thing we can do to reduce abortions in big cities in America now.
 
Our banquet theme was “They’re here because you care!” Who are the “they”? Our pregnancy medical center colleagues could tell you moving stories of individuals.  I want to answer the question, “How many are there?”
 
We estimate that roughly 9,600 fewer abortions were performed in Allegheny County, from 2012 to 2019, because of our advertising.  Incidentally, the abortionists would have lost much more than 4 million dollars.  (This is David versus Goliath, and we get to play the good role.)
 
Recently I looked more closely at the birth numbers in Allegheny County.  The birth numbers seemed a little low, in my analysis, and I realized that I hadn’t taken into consideration miscarriage, or those women, like students, leaving to have their babies at home.  That 9,600 number is still important: a woman who miscarried might be relieved, or grieve, or a bit of both, but she would not have an abortion on her conscience.
 
Here are the birth numbers from 1995 to 2019.
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As you can see, we started to advertise in 2011.  You can see the trend until 2011: birth numbers were falling.  Then, they went up.  Overall, they were elevated between 2011 and 2019.  We knew that pregnancy help was the reason abortion was in decline.  We were reaching tens of thousands of women every month with ads for the centers.  I can’t think of anything of sufficient scale to have that effect on birth numbers, except our advertising.
 
What would have happened if we didn’t advertise?
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The orange line above shows what would have happened if Allegheny County had the annual percentage changes in birth numbers of Philadelphia County, another urban county, using 2010 as the base year.  The gap between the actual numbers and the projected numbers is 8,200 lives.
 
Say, for the sake of argument, that the social conservatism of Western PA and the smaller size of Pittsburgh would affect those percentage changes here, making them less negative.  So we revise the number of babies born because of advertising downward to 7,000.
 
Still, 7,000 or so babies born in Allegheny County, who would not have been born without advertising: That’s about 368 kindergarten classes.
 
That’s who is here because you care because donors care.
 
The total cost in advertising to bring a child to birth would still be under $60.
 
The success of our advertising confirms that it is pregnancy help that is driving down abortion numbers.  Advertising simply amplifies the effects of pregnancy help.
 
We’ve learned a lot in 10 years.  Do you know what we don’t know? We don’t know, “If we put more money towards advertising, would we drive the abortion numbers even lower?” How deep could we go? We don’t know.
 
We have widened our work – to Philadelphia.  Now, I was been warned by two friends separately that Pittsburghers want to support what’s local – their city, their neighborhood.  I understand that.  Charity begins at home.  But it’s not meant to stop at home.  So if you’re not keen on supporting work outside your neighborhood, I appeal to you on the basis of your faith.  Our God is a missionary God.  As the Creed says, “I believe in one God . . . and in one Lord Jesus Christ . . . Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven.”
 
Consider that St. Peter was a Jew.  He found it hard to believe that God wanted to save Gentiles through the Messiah who came to the Jews first – so God gave him a vision.  Remember?  He was praying, and he had a vision of a sheet dropped down from heaven, on which there were unclean animals.  A voice said, “Rise, Peter, kill and eat.”  Peter replied that he had never eaten anything that was common or unclean.  The voice said, “What God has cleansed, you must not call common.”
 
This wasn’t just about food.  The God of the universe was showing St. Peter He was saving not just the Jews, but Gentiles – that is, the world.
 
Our God is a missionary God.  In terms of abortion, Philadelphia is a mission field.  Forty percent of Pennsylvania’s 30,000 annual abortions are performed in one county: Philadelphia County.
 
Brooke Nearman, the Executive Director of pro-life pregnancy medical center AlphaCare in Philadelphia wrote in September, "Our recent partnership with Vision for Life has dramatically increased our opportunity to reach more women -- including many considering abortion.  In one month, contacts from abortion-minded women jumped 184%.  As of July 2021, we have had more requests for abortions [i.e., abortion information] than we had for the whole of 2020."
 
As we see increasing success there, we expect that local people there will take up a bigger part of the cost of advertising.  We will also continue to work with our partners here in Pittsburgh to see that their services continue to be advertised widely.  Before Philadelphia can “man the oars,” we need the help of Pittsburghers there.
 
Imagine if every big city in America had an organization that just advertised pregnancy medical centers like Choices and Women’s Choice Network.  Many, many more lives would be saved.
 
We are winning in America.  
With your help as a donor to Vision for Life, we can win faster.

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9/2/2021

"The Right to Sex" And Seeing Life Whole

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ignoring the outrageous nonsense

I imagine, with a heading like "The Right to Sex," I have your attention. That heading is the title of a book, one that I haven’t read, admittedly. However, having read the review, I will save my money.
 
First, a detour. A friend involved in pro-life ministry was talking about what young women are looking at and saying on social media. In the six seconds of a TikTok video, they are saying outrageous things about abortion; for example, a girl says that she would get one as soon as she could. It is outrageous – so outrageous that it seems unreal. And it is. It struck me that, while we must take every person seriously, we cannot always take what they say seriously.
 
Now, back to The Right to Sex. The reviewer wrote, “And I came to think that this is, in fact, the hidden structure in this . . . book: the repeated, maddening contrast between confident pronouncements of theoretical [“woke” feminist] orthodoxy and miserable, inconclusive rummaging in the less than positive real-world outworkings of this orthodoxy. Read in this way, The Right to Sex is an accurate critical summary of woke feminism: clarity in theory, amoral mess in practice” (https://unherd.com/2021/08/what-moden-feminism-is-hiding/).
 
When I was young (1960s), I heard a lot of mouthy hotheads – anyone remember Jerry Rubin? -- who said all kinds of things, and I marveled. I still remember one writer’s summary of some fellow’s jabbering: he called it “not-sure-I-really-mean-it radicalism.” I thought at the time: bingo! And I think the same thing applies to today. So-called “serious” academics like the author of The Right to Sex can talk a great, abstract game, but they aren’t around to face the mess, and pick up the pieces of the sexual revolution. Their thinking lacks the integrity that can take in the whole of life. So, as the reviewer goes on to say, they can’t (and don’t) talk about love, and children.
 
So back to the young women on TikTok. There’s lots of bravado (“pretentious boldness or bravery; arrogant or boastful menace; swaggering defiance”), but who knows if they really mean it? An in-depth look at how pregnancy medical center clients think is revealing. According to what they say, they are relativists (what is true depends on you), self-centered, and superficial, apparently preoccupied with trivialities. They are also anxious, generally. One observer, Jean Twenge, wrote that “teen loneliness increased between 2012 and 2018 in 36 out of 37 countries around the world,” caused, she thought, by smartphone use (cited in https://salvomag.com/post/generation-lonely). Suicide and depression rates are up. Similar to what we hear about the author of the book, perhaps there is simply a “maddening contrast” between outrageous boasting and posturing on TikTok, etc., and actual uncertainty, confusion, and unhappiness in life.
 
How is this relevant to advertising? Vision for Life runs short video ads for the pregnancy medical centers. We ignore the outrageous nonsense, the posturing and self-absorption, and remember that these young women and their partners are made in the image of God like us. We invite the viewer to consider the whole of life, including what happens when things don’t go as we had hoped. Deciding whether to have an abortion is a momentous thing. We tell stories that assume the seriousness of the decision: a pregnant woman tells her friend her reasons to pursue an abortion; the friend gently challenges the idea, and suggests she go to a pregnancy medical center. The ad concludes with an actual testimonial to the center, delivered by the actress playing the pregnant woman. Stories are a great vehicle: if they’re good, they can challenge one’s thinking, and they’re not moralistic, they don’t lecture or preach; it’s hard to argue with them. In any case, thousands of these young women in Allegheny and Philadelphia counties now know that there are pregnancy medical centers with caring professionals out there, because we have told the stories.

What to Say to a Pro-Choice Christian

Do you have a friend, perhaps a young person, who professes Christian faith or belongs to a church, but who thinks that women should be free to abort their children? In my blog article “Laying the Groundwork for a Discussion of Abortion,” in Salvo: A Magazine of Society, Sex, and Science, I address someone who holds these views. It’s in three parts, and the first is here. In the article I put forward three things that I think pro-life and pro-choice Christians should agree on, and that, if followed through, would incline the pro-choice Christian to change his mind. Check it out.

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6/4/2021

What drives abortion numbers down? pa's data confirms it.

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No, it's not contraception or state restrictions

Those who promote abortion would have you believe that it is state restrictions that have reduced the number of abortion facilities, and in other ways make it hard for women to get abortions -- "lack of access," in their terminology.

A look at the abortion numbers in Pennsylvania over the years, and the  timing of the increase in the number of pregnancy help centers, refutes this. It is clear that, as pregnancy help centers increased, abortion numbers went down. Nothing else explains the drop. There was no sudden increase in the use of contraceptives, or of the most effective "long-acting, reversible contraceptives" (LARC). Women's opinions on abortion didn't change. The number of abortion centers didn't suddenly decrease in those first eight years, when abortion numbers began to fall sharply. And state restrictions, which were finally implemented in May 1994, may have had a statistically significant effect in the first year or two, but it would have been a one-time effect on the numbers. The decline preceded that, and continued years after.

This confirms what we find when we look at the national numbers: as pregnancy help increased, abortion numbers fell, and nothing else explained it. (See my article.)

What's the practical significance of this? If we apportion our pro-life dollars according to effectiveness, we should be giving a large share to pregnancy help. And as Vision for Life demonstrates, we should putting a good part of that money towards advertising: it costs less to increase the "reach" of a center into its community by advertising, than by creating a new center in a community already served by one.

You can see our video, which makes the case for Pennsylvania, here.

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6/2/2021

What our adversaries are saying

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One young woman's take on our ad

“This is awful.” So wrote a young woman who saw our ad for AlphaCare or The Hope Pregnancy Center in Philadelphia. The ad itself is one of our most daring, in terms of social media censorship, and, frankly, I was surprised that it was accepted by Facebook/Instagram for the four centers we advertise.

A young model asks a female photographer if she should have an abortion, and the photographer tells her that she herself had had an abortion, and that it was the worst decision of her life. You can see the ad here.


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Why was the ad “awful”? Because it systematically refuted the claims of those on the pro-abortion side. At first, our photographer (actress Katie Breckenridge, whom we’ll call “Joan”) says she seemed fine, but then she began to have nightmares. This is in fact what some who have had abortions say: they have had horrible dreams afterwards, among other consequences.

How large is this number? We don’t know. The “Turnaway Study,” on which claims are made that the vast majority of women don’t regret their abortion, is flawed from the start by selection bias: 72% of women who had an abortion would not participate. The 38% who participated in the beginning were the least likely to have regrets. The fall-off of participants over the years was high, too, which leaves unanswered the question of long-term consequences. Stevie Nicks, of Fleetwood Mac fame, wrote not too long ago about her abortion, saying that if she hadn't had it, she would have been kept back from accomplishing all she did. She even named her deceased child, "Sara," and wrote a song about her. One wonders if there isn't some doubt in her mind that lead her to justify her abortion publicly.

​There’s nothing new here. Marvin Olasky’s Abortion Rites: A Social History of Abortion in America presents many stories from women who regretted their abortions in the late-19th Century. An abortionist in New York said that about 10% of her clients have so adverse an immediate emotional/psychological reaction that she offers them mental health help. We know that about a third of abortion patients say they have feelings of regret or sadness a week after the abortion, along with feelings of happiness and relief. Relief fades. Regret? Not so much.

For those who like the science, here are the results of a 2010 Canadian study that looked at the mental health consequences of abortion (Can J Psychiatry. 2010;55(4):239–247):

"After adjusting for sociodemographics, abortion was associated with an increased likelihood of several mental disorders — mood disorders (adjusted odds ratio [AOR] ranging from 1.75 to 1.91), anxiety disorders (AOR ranging from 1.87 to 1.91), substance use disorders (AOR ranging from 3.14 to 4.99), as well as suicidal ideation and suicide attempts (AOR ranging from 1.97 to 2.18). Adjusting for violence weakened some of these associations. For all disorders examined, less than one-half of women reported that their mental disorder had begun after the first abortion. Population attributable fractions ranged from 5.8% (suicidal ideation) to 24.7% (drug abuse)."

A Swedish study published in 1996, looking at the medical history of suicide victims, found that 
“the suicide rate after an abortion was three times the general suicide rate and six times that associated with birth.”

You can read the stories of regret from women who aborted there children here.

So “Joan” is completely believable. I based her responses to her young friend on what I have read of post-abortion trauma. So Joan also says that she got irrationally angry when she saw moms with kids.

What is Joan’s advice? Talk to people, and not just those who “want to make money off of you” – Planned Parenthood and the like. Talk to “Matthias,” the girl’s boyfriend/husband. We know that involving the partner in the discussion will help a woman make a decision she won’t regret. The girl says that “Matthias” would probably want her to keep the baby. Joan says that this is good: for most guys, she says, “whatever you decide,” is enough. In fact, women need to know that they’re not alone, that the partner will step up, will offer not just neutrality, but support, no matter what. Men (and boys) need to be men, no matter the current social climate.

Taking up the idea of a recent college fad, Joan says, “You need a safe space.” “Where’s this?” she is asked. It’s a pregnancy medical center, she responds, and then lists all the services. “There’s no judgment and there’s no pressure.”
​
So what’s so “awful” about all this? It is the realism. Our ads are deliberately realistic and honest. Having a baby when you’re alone, or under pressure from your partner or your financial situation is hard, and our ads admit this. Planned Parenthood’s ads show happy, confident, self-assured young women. That’s the show; that’s how women want to see themselves. They also advertise and get something like 500,000 search results a month from women searching for “depression and pregnancy.” That’s the reality. We do ads that tell the truth, with no easy falsehoods. The truth is, doing the right thing may not be easy, but it is the right thing. Pregnancy medical centers help women learn the truth, and get the help they need to do what is right.

I looked up the Facebook page of the young woman who called our ad “awful.” I wasn’t surprised by what I saw. 
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One of the great things about what we do is that our adversaries can't complain that we're denying women a choice. That's why I occasionally suggest to anyone who will listen that we can appeal to "pro-choice" people on that ground: we help women to feel free to do what they really want. Not all women make the choice we would like, of course: about 15-20% leave the pregnancy medical center without saying that they will carry their babies to term. (That, too, is reality -- unfortunately.)

This young woman was "woke" beyond measure, it appeared. Her comment doesn't trouble me. My hope is that she will grow up, and that she will see how foolish it is to deny reality, to promote abortion as a solution. It may take time for minds like hers to change, but we have time: we are playing a long game. We want these young women and men to remember us, if and when they truly wake up, as the truth-tellers, the people who didn't lie to them to make them feel good.

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1/11/2021

Bad News and (Relatively) Good News from the PA Abortion Report for 2019

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The 2019 PA Abortion Report is out. Abortions to residents of Pennsylvania increased from 28,240 to 28,796, or about 2%. In Allegheny County, there were 386 more abortions performed than the year before, an increase of 6.3%.
 
Vision for Life advertises in Allegheny County on Facebook to residents of the County. (Some of the abortions performed in Allegheny County would be on non-residents – people coming from surrounding counties and nearby states. They would not see our Facebook ads.) We also want to measure the effect of our advertising on all pregnant women considering abortion, so we don’t look at raw numbers so much: pregnancy rates have been going down, and we want to see what proportion of all pregnant women chose life. So we look instead at the ratios of abortions to births for residents of Allegheny County. Abortions to this group were up 8.6%, from 3,007 to 3,265.
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A big wave on the beach, not the tide
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​There is no evidence yet of a statistical trend, and it is quite likely that 2019 is simply a bigger wave on the beach, and not the tide. Because the tide is definitely going out, as I will show below. The statistics for the rest of Pennsylvania indicate that this uptick is not local, but state-wide.
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When we compare abortions to residents in Allegheny County to those to residents in Philadelphia County, where 40% of Pennsylvania’s abortions are performed, we see that both saw an uptick in abortion ratios.
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More than 1 out of 3 pregnancies ended in abortion in Philadelphia County
It is shocking to realize that in Philadelphia County, more than 1 out of 3 pregnancies ended in abortion in 2019 (562 abortions per 1,000 births). In Allegheny County, 1 out of 5 pregnancies ended in abortion. Before we began advertising, that ratio was about 1 out of 4.

​What else do we learn from the report?

Abortion patients are getting older
It is common for people to think that the average abortion patient is a teenager who made a mistake. There are, of course, some teenagers in that category, but most abortions are to adult women. The PA Abortion Report tells us that “more than 87 percent (27,221) of the abortions performed in Pennsylvania in 2019 were to unmarried women. The largest age group having abortions was 25–29, accounting for 9,529 (29.9 percent) of all 2019 abortions.” In fact, the trend over the last many years has been for younger women as a group to have fewer abortions, and older ones to have more.
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The increase in abortions is entirely more abortions to women over 24
The increase in abortions in Pennsylvania in 2019 is entirely because of more abortions to women over 24.  This has implications for anybody working in pregnancy help.
Fewer women without children are having abortions
​While 2019 breaks with the trend, the abortion trend for women who have had no previous child, or have had one child only, is downwards. There is a slight increase, however, in the number of abortions to women who have had 3 or 4 children or more. This suggests that anxiety over finances and accommodation may be making abortion appealing to them.
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High rate of multiple abortions
​“First abortions” are a slight majority of all abortions again in 2019, at 52.6% of all abortions. “Repeat abortions” are almost half of all abortions.
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What may surprise some is the high rate of multiple abortions. More than 1 out of 10 abortions is the woman’s fourth abortion, or more. Is abortion being used as a method of birth control here? Are there psychological problems that lead women to abort repeatedly?
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The percentages have been generated by Excel using data for first and previous abortions from the Department of Health. For some reason, the percentages do not total to 100.
The death knell of the abortion industry
It is clear, however, that the trend with all abortions is downward. While 2019 is an outlier, the number of first abortions is actually declining faster than repeat abortions. This is the death knell of the abortion industry.
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In Allegheny County the birth rate was positive or stable
The bottom line is that, though abortion ratios in Allegheny County and Philadelphia County ticked upwards, in Allegheny County the birth rate was positive or stable over the period.
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Letting them know that they have a choice
This is good news. It shows that advertising for pregnancy help directs more women to pregnancy medical centers where they can see their unborn children on the ultrasound machine. About 80% of those who do, choose life. Advertising reaches tens of thousands more each month, letting them know that they have a choice, that abortion is not the only solution. The results are big enough to show up in birth numbers. We estimate that about 8,400 more children were born between 2010 and 2018 than would have been if we had not advertised the centers.

You can help bring the numbers down. Please consider donating today. It costs us less than $44 to save a life!

Share this blog post to help us reach more people who care about saving moms and unborn children from abortion.
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7/3/2020

About 10,000 Saved In Allegheny County by 2021

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Measuring Success

From the time I (Chris Humphrey) became involved in pro-life work, back in the late 1970's, I have been concerned about making a difference, and not just a statement. We've had 46 years or so since Roe v. Wade to make a difference with our protests and education, and we've had very little success, if we're honest. It's true, we've seen great progress in state regulation of abortion, which frustrates some who want to see abortion banned outright. However, these state regulations have had, at most, a 5% effect on the ratios of abortions to live births.

What is amazing, however, has been the decline in abortion numbers -- rates and ratios to births, too -- since about 1984. There's little question, to my mind, that it's pregnancy help that has accomplished this. (See earlier articles.) The ratios are lower now than they were back in 1973. With first-time customers declining in number faster than "repeat customers," the abortion business is dying. Thank God.

The fact that our advertising has had a demonstrable effect on the abortion ratios in Allegheny County confirms that it is pregnancy help that has driven numbers lower everywhere. The pregnancy medical centers, and the women and men at Choices Pregnancy Services and Women's Choice Network, are the heroes of the story. Without the centers, we would have nothing to advertise. Just tell women not to have abortions? It's done all the time, but there's no reason to think that it changes many minds.

From the beginning of our work with Vision for Life, I have wanted to measure the effect of what we are doing. If we're making a difference, how do we know? Our best resources here are the State Health Department figures: the birth numbers and the abortion numbers.
​

What do we measure?

Of course, we measure abortions. But how do we measure the effects of what we are doing in Allegheny County from just after Christmas in 2010 to 2018, the last year for which we have abortion numbers?

If abortion numbers are going down everywhere, it's clear that we can't just point to declining numbers in Allegheny County and say that our work caused that. We have to compare numbers with numbers. Our first concern is that pregnancy numbers are going down everywhere: if fewer women are getting pregnant, then of course abortion numbers will go down if the ratio of abortions to births remains the same. So we want to measure the ratio of abortions to births: if they are lower in Allegheny County after we have done our work, then we know roughly how effective advertising is. The ratios of abortions to live births fell 26% from 2010 to 2018 in Allegheny County, compared to 15% in the rest of PA, and 13% in Philadelphia County (where 40% of PA's abortions are performed).
​

Translating predictions into Approximate numbers of lives Saved

We know that we are succeeding: many more young women are choosing life rather than abortion because we are advertising. We can quantify the effect, approximately. There is a certain abstract character to numbers of "abortions to live births," however. How do we keep before our eyes the fact that moms and babies are being delivered from abortion by our work? One way is to take an educated guess at how many lives have been saved.

To do this we again need numbers to compare: actual numbers, and predicted numbers. The predicted numbers are approximations, representing a possible mathematical center in a range of possibilities. 
​There are two basic ways of making these comparisons, that I can see. One looks at past trends over the years (determined mathematically by Microsoft Excel), and extrapolates these into the period in which we were working, and then compares those numbers with the actual numbers. There is an assumption made, here: the period 2011 to 2019, and especially the period 2011-2013, when numbers fell sharply, was basically similar to the previous 25 years. There were no new developments in pro-life work, or changes in sexual mores, or availability of abortion, or of pregnancy help, and so forth. Another assumption is that the deviation from the norm of abortion numbers for the period will not be extreme. Here's what we get when we chart the numbers. As you can see, Excel predicts that by 2019 there were about 10,600 fewer abortions, based on the trend of the previous 25 years. By this point in 2021, we can be assume by the same analysis that there have been well over that.
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But what if there were changes outside allegheny county?

The assumption of predictions of the future (even a "future" in the past, so to speak) based on past performance is that there have been no significant changes that would affect those predictions. We can't "control" for all the things happening around us, especially regarding an issue that is at once very personal, emotional, and controversial, with relational and socio-economic factors beyond our ken. Do women in one period view abortion more as a moral failure, and in another period more as a necessary wrong? Has a disillusionment with abortion affected recourse to it?

So perhaps a better gauge of the effect of advertising is to compare the rates of change in Allegheny County to those in all the other Pennsylvania counties. If there are social and cultural changes that affect abortion numbers generally, it is unreasonable to think that women in Allegheny County would be immune to them. So we can take the percentage change of abortion numbers in the rest of PA, and apply them to the numbers in Allegheny County, beginning with 2010 as the base year. Then we can subtract the actual numbers from these projections to get our number of saved lives. When we do, we find that there were about 9,600 fewer abortions in the 9 years from 2011 to 2019. That's over 1,000 fewer abortions every year. By the end of 2020, there would have been well over 10,000 fewer abortions.
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The Numbers all point to the same conclusion

It is striking that the number of lives saved is not that far from the 10,600 that Excel predicted. It is fewer in this prediction, because Excel could not take into consideration that abortion numbers were falling elsewhere in PA. Without advertising, numbers in Allegheny County would have fallen, presumably, about the same as elsewhere. The abortion ratio numbers we have, however, point to the same conclusion: numbers and ratios were falling in Pennsylvania as a whole in 2011-2019, but they fell significantly faster in Allegheny County, and stayed lower overall, because of the advertising.

Birth Numbers point the same way, too

Another way to measure success is to look at birth numbers. If there are fewer abortions in Allegheny County, you would expect birth numbers to go up, or at least not to fall as fast. In fact, birth numbers rose after we began our work, and settled in 2019 a little bit higher than they were in 2010. If we apply the same technique of projecting past performance on the 2011-2019 period, we see a phenomenal difference between those projections and the actual birth numbers -- an amazing 11,259!


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Again, however, this leaves unanswered the question, What's happening elsewhere in Pennsylvania? If birth rate are falling, are they continuing to fall as fast as before? 

So we want to see what Allegheny County's birth numbers would have been if they had changed at the same rate as the rest of PA, and then compare that to the actual numbers. It's still impressive.
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The 5,079 births is lower than the projected 9,600 fewer abortions. Why? Wouldn't one fewer abortion in the County mean one more birth?

No. About half of the 6,000 abortions a year in Allegheny County are to non-residents. So the women who would have had abortions in Allegheny County, but didn't, were not all residents of Allegheny County. Some came from surrounding counties. Many would have been students, and would have gone home or elsewhere to have their children. So this chart is the least helpful in knowing how many unborn children were saved from abortion. Births as a whole, too, are less reliable as an indicator. Yet both birth projections point to the same result: thousands of lives have been saved by advertising pregnancy medical centers in Pittsburgh.

A Caveat

Our calculations for abortion numbers do not take into consideration the proportion of early pregnancies that would end in miscarriage if abortion were declined. There are no sure numbers here, as most early miscarriages do not involve a trip to the doctor. I have heard that between 17% and 32% of pregnancies end in miscarriage. So the number of births would likely have been smaller than our predictions using the abortion numbers.

Miscarriage is a tragedy, felt to varying degrees as such, often depending on the age of the child in utero​ or on the temperament of the woman. It is still important that a woman who miscarried did not have an abortion instead, because she knows that at least she did not participate in the killing of her child.

What do we conclude?

Advertising pregnancy medical centers is the way forward in reducing abortion numbers everywhere.

What we spend is small compared to the budgets of the large and well-run pregnancy medical centers. 
The effect of advertising, however, is much greater than one would expect from the money spent. God has opened doors for us, and provided people to help when we needed them, and provided the funds needed to save lives, and we have done our part. The results have been very encouraging, and we thank God. There are thousands more children out there who wouldn't have been, if we had not advertised the centers. We calculate that it cost us, in total, $ 42 to save a life using advertising.

We Calculate
that it cost us, in total,
$ 42
To save a life
using advertising.

a personal note . . .

I have three daughters and nineteen grandchildren. (Yes, when everybody's together, it can be like the Mad Hatter's Tea Party). I take great delight in my grandkids. They come to  me to roughhouse (which at my age I can still do for short periods). I want many others to have the joy I have had in my kids and grandchildren. Children are challenges; I learned when I was raising them that the children make the father, too. Yet they are a tremendous blessing, one I hope that many others may have. If you can help us share this blessing with others through our work, please donate today.

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4/10/2020

No Demand for Abortion?

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​Fewer Women Wanting Them, Not Less “Access,” Is Driving the Decline

Pro-choice advocates imply that state abortion restrictions are a main reason that abortion numbers have fallen across the country. Ohio is a good example: Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute notes that “Ohio is a testing ground for abortion restrictions.” So in 2019, Ohio passed a law prohibiting abortion once the baby’s heartbeat could be detected, unless it were to save the mother’s life or a major bodily function were threatened. The human heart begins to beat about 16 days after conception, but the heartbeat is usually detectable only sometime between six and eight weeks of gestation. Planned Parenthood and others sued, and the heartbeat law is in legal limbo until the lawsuit is resolved. Other laws are in force, however, including informed consent (the woman has to be told in person what the medical procedure entails, at least 24 hours before the abortion); a 24-hour waiting period; parental consent in the case of minors; and the limiting of public funding to those whose lives are at risk, or who conceived as a result of rape or incest. These and similar restrictions, it is implied, explain why Ohio’s abortion numbers are down from 34,128 in 2005 to 20,425 in 2018, or 40%.

The Guttmacher Institute, formerly the research wing of Planned Parenthood, and its many fellow-travelers tell us that these state laws limit abortion “access,” that is, they make it more difficult for women to get the abortions they want. The chief reason for lack of access, we are to assume, is the decline in the number of clinics near women who need them. On the Institute’s web page for Ohio, it presents its information tellingly under the headings: “Abortion Incidence,” “Where Patients Obtain Abortions,” and “Restrictions on Abortion.” We are to note that, in 2017, 89% of U.S. counties had no abortion clinics, though 38% of America’s reproductive-age women lived there. As a result, women wanting abortions would have to travel to get them.

State Restrictions aren't driving the decline

​One of the articles cited on the Ohio page changes the picture, however. “Abortion Incidence and Service Availability in the United States, 2017,” presents the same implicit argument – fewer abortion centers must mean hardship for women, and thus fewer abortions – but then admits that the number of centers is not a factor in declining abortion rates. “Although the number of state abortion restrictions continued to increase in the Midwest and South between 2014 and 2017, these restrictive policies do not appear to have been the primary driver of declining abortion rates. There was also no consistent relationship between increases or decreases in clinic numbers and changes in state abortion rates” (emphasis added). So Delaware, for example, had more abortion centers in 2017 than in 2014, but its abortion rate dropped 37% anyway. “States considered to be supportive of abortion rights in 2017 – including large states such as California and New York – accounted for 43% of all U.S. abortions in that year but 55% of the decline [in abortion rates] since 2014.” “Abortion rates declined in all 10 states that had more clinic facilities in 2017 than they did in 2014 . . . . Half of these states had not enacted any abortion restrictions during the study period.” It is to their credit that the authors of the study looked at the evidence and reported this observation, as inconsistent as it is with the mantra of reduced-access-means-fewer-women-get- abortions.

Many on the pro-life side would be inclined to discount the claim that the restrictions aren’t driving the drop: “See, the pro-abortion crowd just wants to discourage pro-life political activity, because it’s working.” Is it? Yes, the laws have their measurable effects on abortion numbers, as political scientist Michael New has shown repeatedly, though altogether these would be less than 5%. Moreover, the effect of a change in the law would be a one-time decrease in abortion numbers. There is no reason to think that, say, the new requirement of a 72-hour waiting period would have an increasing or cumulative effect on the ratios of abortions to live births in following years. As good as all these laws are, from the pro-life perspective, the Guttmacher researchers are right: the restrictive laws are not the primary driver of declining abortion rates and ratios.

Focusing on Supply; Ignoring DemanD

The problem with the “lack of access” claim is that the abortion-on-demand crowd are only looking at the supply side of the supply-and-demand relation: those state legislatures, they think, are dominated by men who want to dominate women, and are gradually cutting off the supply. (In reality, those legislatures usually have a share of women legislators, a large portion of whom are pro-life.) Ratios of abortions to live births have been dropping continuously for decades across the country – 49% from 1984 to 2016 – independently of changes to the law or the numbers of clinics. What if the decrease in clinic numbers and abortions reflects a decline in demand for abortion? What if the decline in the number of abortion clinics reflects market forces, and not government intervention? Jonah Goldberg makes a similar point about assumptions with the current coronavirus: to explain the less-than-catastrophic number of new cases and deaths, compared to earlier predictions, people either argue that the government overstated the likely cases and deaths, or that it was government action that “flattened the curve.” He argues for an alternative: when given accurate information in a timely way, people themselves act in a way that has better consequences for everybody.

contraception isn't the driver

What could be responsible for dropping demand? Guttmacher and its supporters would say that it is contraception. Fewer women need abortions because of better contraceptives (the long-acting kind), better contraceptive practices, or more widespread use of contraceptives. The evidence, however, doesn’t back this up. If it were so, better contraception would mean that fewer pregnancies would be unexpected or unintended. Researchers, however, found that “changes in contraceptive method choice and use have not decreased the overall proportion of pregnancies that are unintended between 1995 and 2008” (emphasis in the original). In fact, the proportion of these unexpected pregnancies went up 1%, from 48 to 49%. Here, the ratios of abortions to live births are a good measure of demand: while abortion rates (abortions per 1,000 women 15-44) would fall if pregnancy rates fell, the ratios tell us what proportion of pregnant women chose abortion rather than birth. According to the CDC reports, over the same thirteen-year period in the study described above, the ratios of abortions to live births dropped from 31.1 to 23.1 per 100 live births, or 26%. While there are other studies which seem to show a drop in unexpected pregnancies or births, or a certain volatility, so speak, there is no long-term trend in either that parallels the decrease in ratios of abortions to live births. While social-scientific surveys of women’s intentions and the statistics of abortions both have their problems, the latter, at least in terms of establishing a trend, are more trustworthy. Contraceptive use, then, is not driving down the numbers either.

So why is abortion dying in america?

So is there a candidate for the main driver of falling abortion ratios? Drum roll, please . . . . The increase in pregnancy help centers across America, now over 2,750, is the only candidate that lines up in terms of timing and trajectory. The number of centers increased sharply from 1982 to 1986, and continued upward to the present. In his horribly titled Abortion Rites: A Social History of Abortion in America, Marvin Olasky argued that it was mainly pregnancy help (in the form of maternity homes in that day) that reduced the very high abortion rates of the late-19th Century. We are seeing the same thing today.

The pro-choice side knows very well that pregnancy help centers are having an effect on abortion, and some activists have attempted to defame the centers as deceptive, oppressive of women in their religiosity, and unscientific in their information. (In fact, it is the representatives for abortionists who obscure the early development of the child in the womb with terms like “a clump of cells,” or “a blob of tissue.” For an answer to the pro-choice criticisms of the centers, see Heartbeat International’s pregnancycentertruth.com. I am on the Board of Heartbeat.) Abortion is big business, and business is down. The reality is that most women do not want abortions. This is what women who come to pregnancy help centers say themselves. (They come to the centers “abortion-vulnerable” or “abortion-determined,” in the centers’ terminology.) For many, abortion appears to be a necessary evil, to be gotten through numbly, with as little thought and reflection as possible. The centers help them do what they admit they really wanted: to bear their children. Pregnancy medical centers have very high customer-satisfaction ratings. Hundreds of thousands, are deeply grateful for the help they have received at these centers, and their endorsements are simply unanswerable. While technically it may not be true that “no one ever says ‘Thank You’ to an abortionist,” the number would be minuscule by comparison.

If these centers are the main driver for dropping abortion ratios, then advertising the centers should drive ratios even further down. This, in fact, is what we have found in Pittsburgh (Allegheny County). From 2010 to 2018, non-profit Vision for Life advertised two local pregnancy medical center organizations, with five centers and two mobile units between them. Abortion ratios for residents dropped sharply in the first two years, remained relatively stable for several years more, and then dropped again in 2018. The decline overall was 26%. The ratios are the lowest they’ve been since the State began recording them in 1995, and likely the lowest in a half-century. There is no reason to think that ratios would not fall further with more advertising.

How long till no demand for abortion?

​Abortion is dying in America. The abortion industry is consolidating. Abortion is less available in many counties because the demand is just not great enough to sustain a business. In Pennsylvania, the numbers of “repeat” abortions (a woman’s second, third, or more, and about half of all abortions) have been decreasing for years, but first-time abortions have been falling faster. Without more first-time customers, a business is on the way out. The state is probably representative of the country here. The questions then becomes, How low can the U.S. numbers go? How soon will “abortion on demand” become “abortion: no demand”?

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3/23/2020

Fighting the Right War: A Message to My Orthodox Church Friends

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(While this article was written for The Word, the Antiochian Orthodox Christian magazine that I edit for Bishop JOHN Abdallah, and will appear in the June issue, readers from other church backgrounds may find it helpful.)

It is a commonplace among military historians that the Allied armies of the First and Second World Wars prepared in each case to fight the last war. The steady advance of troops towards the enemy made sense, before the First World War and the Maxim machine gun put an end to that. Trench warfare made sense, before the mechanized blitzkrieg, or “lightning war,” of the Second World War made lines of trenches useless.​
If you want to depict a really wicked enemy, you make him a Nazi
The same is true when we think of great evils, of moral conflicts in which many, many lives are lost. If you want to depict a really wicked enemy in some piece of fiction, someone whom everyone knows they should hate, you make him a Nazi, a relic of the past. In the Twentieth Century, Nazism and Communism both offered alternative views of human beings and societies, and justified atrocious crimes against humanity on grounds of an over-arching theory (a master race in the first instance, or a “new man” created by dialectical materialism in the second). These were the only serious social-political contenders against the European Christian view of man and society. Nazism killed about six million Jews, as well as others, and the Communist system under Stalin killed somewhere between 20 and 40 million people, while the Chinese Communist government killed about 65 million of its own people in the last century, and continues, for example, to run concentration camps, and to murder prisoners of conscience for organ transplants today.

These great evils have been nationalist ideologies. What of today, however? Are there Nazis anymore? Is there a comparable, great moral evil, at least in scale?
The rejection of God has opened the door to a “cafeteria” paganism and individualist subjectivism
To look for popular, dehumanizing, nationalist ideologies today, however, is to try to fight the last war. Over the last fifty years, the contender for the minds and hearts of the developed world has not been a replacement political ideology, but secularism (an attempt to “disinfect” society of religion). Not surprisingly, the rejection of God and of a Christian view of humankind in public expression has opened the door to a “cafeteria” paganism and individualist subjectivism. So Supreme Court Justice Kennedy, in the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision, wrote infamously that, “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and of the mystery of human life.” Here is subjectivism in a nutshell.
More individual human beings have been killed in abortion
than in any other way
In casting off the “shackles of religion,” secularism leads not merely to nonsense, but to dehumanization. Where are the victims, comparable to those of Nazism and Communism? It may be a surprise to learn that more individual human beings have been killed in abortion than in any other way, in all of history, and most of that killing has taken place in the last 50 years. (The bulk of that killing has taken place in China and India. Together they are responsible for 24 to 25 million abortions a year.)

Abortion, like genocide and other crimes, has been around a long time. The modern novelty has been technology. Mass killing by the Nazis was made possible by the railroad and road transport, and followed the example of the earlier Armenian genocide. The atom bomb dropped on Japanese cities was a technological marvel. Suction machines were first used to destroy unborn children in utero in Communist Russia in 1922, and spread to the West. Currently in the U.S. there are about a million abortions a year. Entrepreneurial abortionists have been able for decades to perform a series of such suction abortions in rapid succession. Now chemical abortion promises to make the self-induced abortion common, and more difficult to trace.

Note that our “enemy” in the new moral “war” is not a particular religion or ideology. As Orthodox Christians, we celebrate the unique conception of Jesus Christ, “incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary,” at the Feast of the Annunciation, on March 25. We also celebrate the conception of the Most Holy Theotokos on December 9,  and that of St. John the Baptist on September 23. We are predisposed by our faith to see things properly. We could make secular arguments, of course. We could argue that every individual human being began his or her existence in this world at his or her conception. Conception is the only neat point at which life can be said to begin.[1] (Here we have not a potential life, but a new life with potential.) If our imaginations have a hard time recognizing the very early individual life, at the blastocyst stage, say, as a new member of the human family, that is a problem of our imagination, not in reality. (The human being is never just a depersonalized “clump of cells.”) We could mention that the human heart starts beating about sixteen days after conception, about the time when mom is beginning to suspect she’s pregnant. We could say all these things, and we would be right: here is another one of us.
"And who is my neighbor?"
Still, being right is usually not enough to overcome the secularist mindset, in which the defenseless victim is an embarrassment or an inconvenience. “And who is my neighbor?” our interlocutor asks. “I don’t want to think about this silent, little thing in ontological no-man’s-land. I see what I want to see, and my will rules.” This is less a problem of the head than of the heart. It is not surprising that since 1997 the General Social Survey has found that public support for abortion on demand has hovered at around 40 percent. If education about pregnancy and abortion were enough to convince people, that number would have dropped.

We cannot fight the last war – Nazism and Communism as ideologies are dead. We can, however, look at how courageous men (and women) have stood up to evil, and be encouraged to emulate them. During the Nazi occupation of Greece, the Orthodox Archbishop of Athens and All Greece, His Beatitude Damaskinos, signed a letter addressed to the Prime Minister, who was collaborating with the Nazis. The letter was a courageous defense of the Greek Jews who were being rounded up and deported to Poland to be exterminated. When the Germans continued with the deportations, His Beatitude called the Police Chief of Athens, Angelos Evert, to his office and told him, “I have taken up my cross. I spoke to the Lord, and made up my mind to save as many Jewish souls as possible.”
"Our prelates are hung, not shot. Please respect our traditions!"
When S.S. General Jürgen Stroop, police official for Greece, found out about the letter, he threatened to shoot His Beatitude. The Archbishop (with historical oppression by the Turks in mind) told the German officer that “according to the traditions of the Greek Orthodox Church, our prelates are hung and not shot. Please respect our traditions!” His Beatitude would not be stopped. Chief Evert issued false identification cards and Archbishop Damaskinos ordered the churches to issue false baptismal certificates to those threatened with deportation. In Athens and the port city of Piraeus, Christians hid Jews in their homes. The result of their work was the rescue of 66 percent of the Jews of Athens.[2]

The courage of the past often looks simple to us: he saw what was right, and did it. That, however, is what happens when we look back from the present: we air-brush away the complications, the uncertainties, the betrayals, even the doubts. Did no one ask the Archbishop, “What will happen if they don’t shoot you, but take some priests off to Poland to die? What will you do then?” Did others say, “Why are we getting involved in politics? We should just keep our heads down and submit, as Christ did, to the authorities.” “His Kingdom is not of this world. This will all pass.” “Your business is our eternal souls, and the churches and the monasteries, not this trouble.” “Who cares about the Jews? In any case, they can take care of themselves.”
If we had been there, we would have known what to do,
​and done it
We are tempted to think that it was easy for the heroes of the past to know what was right, and to do it. If we had been there, we would have known what to do, and have done it, just like them. The Lord Jesus implied just this dynamic when He said, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, saying, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’” In Jesus’ time, the dreadful irony was that those who admired their prophetic predecessors would have been among those who killed them, if they had lived in that day. Our challenge is to see things clearly in our day, to do what we can in the moral war of our day, as the people we admire would have, if they were here now.

“I . . . made up my mind to save as many . . . souls as possible.” We can do the same, in our day. With abortion, we are not only saving the lives of the babies: we are preventing a soul-destroying act by the woman. We are already seeing success in America. Pregnancy help centers are the chief reason that abortion numbers have been declining since 1984. At those centers that have ultrasound machines, they can show the pregnant woman the child in her womb. The sonographer shows the woman the flicker of her baby’s beating heart, or the outline of his or her head, or his or her thumb-sucking. There can be tears. This is often enough, with care and support, for women to change their minds – about 85 percent do so. Truth and love have power, and hearts are opened to life.

Zoe for Life! is one Orthodox organization that is saving as many souls as possible, in Parma, Ohio (near Cleveland), and in Ann Arbor, Michigan. New chapters are starting in Binghamton, New York, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Go to https://www.zoeforlife.org for more information on Zoe.) Zoe for Life! is endorsed by the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States, and that is good.
We need to translate our good intentions into actions
But it is not enough. Like Archbishop Damaskinos, we need to translate our good intentions into action – time, energy, and money, devoted to saving the vulnerable. If there is no Orthodox organization in your area that is doing this, start one. If none is likely to start, work with other Christians to reach women in your community. Look up your local pregnancy medical centers. Meet their executive directors. Donate to the centers. Volunteer with them. Advertise them. (Vision for Life - Pittsburgh, of which I am the Executive Director, has seen a 26 percent drop in ratios of abortions to live births after we started advertising two local pregnancy medical center organizations. Thousands of babies have been born who would not have been, if we had not run our ads.)

Our hierarchs, too, could lead as did Archbishop Damaskinos, in practical, pro-life pregnancy help, at the very least with funding, and with the very public blessing of the centers. Our parish priests could put the names and phone numbers of the centers in their weekly bulletins, for, as the founders of Zoe were told, unmarried Orthodox women will seek an abortion rather than face embarrassment in their local parishes. A member of the Board of Zoe for Life! - Pittsburgh tells me that a priest’s daughter in another state became pregnant as a teen and was pressured by members of the parish to have an abortion, but she and her family were pro-life and decided to keep the baby. That baby is now grown up, married, and has a successful career.

Clergy and youth workers in every parish need to have the same open heart, the same courage and forthrightness, as had Archbishop Damaskinos when pressured by the Nazis. In terms of sheer numbers, we live in the Age of Abortion. As Orthodox Christians, clergy and lay, we can rise to the challenge and fight the right war. We can do something to “save as many souls as possible.” 
Rescue those who are being taken away to death;
    hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter.
If you say, “Behold, we did not know this,”
    does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?
Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it,
    and will he not requite man according to his work?
                                     (Proverbs 24:11–12)
[1] Some claim that the new, genetically unique individual human being is not a person before implantation in the uterus, because he or she is not a yet “person in relation” to his or her mother. (Persons, we are told, must be in relation, as are the Persons of the Trinity.) This claim is specious. By this standard, would we say that St. Mary of Egypt ceased to be a person after years in the desert? Is the seriously mentally and physically handicapped person, incapable of communication, still a person? If it is true that “not one [sparrow] is forgotten before God,” every conceived human being, at whatever stage of life, is known to Him (Luke 12:6). What purpose could this pernicious depersonalization serve? Could it be used to justify the use of abortifacients like the IUD, which prevent implantation, or potential abortifacients, like the morning-after pill, which may stop ovulation, but can prevent implantation of the newly conceived person?

[2] https://blog.acton.org/archives/77044-the-greek-orthodox-bishop-who-stood-up-to-the-nazis.html
​​​​​

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    Chris Humphrey has been involved in pro-life activity of one kind or another since the late 1970s, when he first looked at the subject of abortion in seminary in Canada. He has an undergraduate degree in English (University of Toronto), and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in religious studies (McGill). He has had a varied career as a pastor, chaplain in a psychiatric hospital, editor of academic and instructional publications, semi-professional photographer, and home renovator. He is a husband of over 40 years to Edith (a Professor of New Testament), father to three girls, and grandfather to seventeen grandchildren. He lives and works in the Stanton Heights neighborhood of Pittsburgh.

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