What Is The Guardian Coming To?

This appears today:

George Monbiot's argument against the Catholic church's stance on abortion and contraception is wrong on virtually every point (Face facts, Cardinal. Our awful rate of abortion is partly your responsibility, February 26). There is a large amount of evidence that easier access to contraception has very little impact on the number of abortions.

Monbiot is particularly misinformed when he quotes a study which reported that "Rising contraceptive use results in reduced abortion incidence" - over 60% of women having abortions in Britain report that they had been using contraceptives. The journal Obstetrics and Gynecology recently published a meta-analysis of 23 research articles examining the impact of increased access to emergency birth control on unwanted pregnancy and abortions, concluding: "To date, no study has shown that increased access to this method reduces unintended pregnancy or abortion rates."

Monbiot claims there is "a clear relationship between sex education and falling rates of unintended pregnancy". There is not. Most papers (including the one in the British Medical Journal that Monbiot cites) find that sex education programmes have little or no impact on rates of teenage pregnancy or abortion. Sweden's programmes in sex education, and promotion of contraceptives, have been an admired model - yet total abortion rates there are now higher than ours.

In contrast, there is clear evidence that even modest legal restrictions can help to cut abortion rates. Some US states now require parental notification before minors can get abortions. This has led to lower underage abortion rates without necessarily increasing underage births.

Referring to a Lancet article, Monbiot says: "When the figures are broken down, it becomes clear that, apart from the former Soviet Union, abortion is highest in conservative and religious societies." The big problem with Monbiot's argument is that the abortion rates from more religious countries are generally based on conjectural estimates of illegal abortions, and there is a long history of pro-abortion groups deliberately inflating such estimates. The case of Mexico provides a good example. Monbiot cites an estimate of 25 abortions per 1,000 women for Central America. Applying this figure to Mexico suggests about three quarters of a million abortions each year. In fact we now have real data for this country - due to the legalisation of abortion in Mexico City last year - which makes it highly unlikely that there were more than 70,000 illegal abortions a year. This equates to 2.1 per 1,000 women - one tenth of that quoted by Monbiot and far less than in countries where abortion is legal.

In Ireland abortion is illegal and contraception has (at least until recently) been much harder to access than in the UK. Based on the numbers of Irish women having abortions in the UK, their abortion rate is about one third that of England, and there is no evidence of significant numbers of illegal abortions.

Monbiot claims that, with his stance against abortion, the Pope "condemns women to death". In the same Lancet issue he referred to earlier, another article gives the latest estimates of maternal mortality rates. Ireland comes out best in the world with a rate of 1 death per 100,000, vastly superior to countries where abortion is legal such as the US (11 per 100,000) and the UK (8 per 100,000).

· Michaela Aston is a spokeswoman for the charity Life
info@lifecharity.org.uk

More joy in heaven, and all that.

Labour and trade union activists in the Twenties fought tooth and nail against the (so to speak) nascent campaign to abort, contracept and sterilise out of existence the Left's working-class and ethnic-minority electoral base, to conscript women into wage-slavery, and to make them permanently available for the sexual gratification of men. It is good to see the Guardian finally catching up.