Abortion is never a popular topic; it tends to be avoided at cocktail parties and social gatherings for one thing, nor has it been brought up at Davos despite its obvious implications for economic, social and human development. Furthermore, it is one of those topics that immediately brings out the fundamentalist in all of us: there is no middle ground, no concessions, no possibility of a reasoned and reasonable debate in all but the rarest of exceptions. I would be a rich man if I had a dime for every epithet thrown my way, for every time I was put under the harrow by someone for taking up this issue, even people I know well and who share many of my own social viewpoints and ideology[1].

In other words, it is a perfect topic for Common Sense.

I wanted to share four graphs I found to be interesting and relevant on the topic of abortion. I present them from a practical point of view of “what might be done to mitigate the number of abortions or the impact of restricting the number of abortions performed.” I leave out the right or wrong of abortion itself since my own views have been presented in previous articles.

My first graph is taken from the Center for Disease Control and shows the percentage of the US population aged 15 to 44 years, with some degree of non-surgical infertility. In the case of women, “impaired fecundity” refers to all females that have some difficulty conceiving or carrying a child to term. “Infertile married” refers to those married women who have had unprotected intercourse at least once during every month of the twelve months prior to the survey with their spouses and have failed to conceive. The male categories are self-explanatory. For a more detailed explanation of how those categories are medically defined, visit the CDC website.

In other words, there are anywhere from 1.5 million to 6.7 million women in the United States who are of child-bearing age and who might have significant or determinant difficulty in having a child. The data does not suggest what the overlap is between male and female infertility in the same couple, but given the low percentages involved, it is probably safe to assume that the overlap area is small. That means that there are also an additional 3.2 million men that would have difficulty impregnating their partner, should they find themselves in a long-term relationship with a woman. Let us assume that life-long bachelors, homosexual males and couples that do not desire children represent 30% of the population: that means that there are still 2.1 million heterosexual men whose current or future partners would like to have children.

The other piece of data that is lacking is the inflow and outflow from this cohort: how many men and women enter the 15 to 44 year old demographic every year and how many leave it? If we look to the Census Bureau, they provide us with the necessary information:

If we apply the same rates of impaired fecundity to future populations as we do to today’s, that gives us an average of 8,900 men and women with procreational difficulties entering child-bearing age every year for the next ten years.

Next, the Child Welfare Organization (US government) gives us data on persons seeking to adopt. Some significant portion of these we can assume to also be in the impaired fertility categories above, though by no means all. Notice the very large gap between those people who indicated to the surveyors that they had considered adoption (18 million) and those that had actually taken concrete steps towards adoption (2.6 million). There is an even more important fall-off, for our purposes at least, between the 2.6 million that had considered adopting and the 614,000 that actually completed the adoption process in 2002.

Graph number three also comes from the Child Welfare organization. It is the percentage of children born who are voluntarily given up for adoption by their birth mothers. There has obviously been a steep decline since Roe vs. Wade became the law of the land, though it is interesting to note that the percentage did not fall immediately to zero in the period after the Supreme Court decision, nor is it zero now.

It is worth noting that half of American pregnancies are unintended and that four in ten of these are terminated by an abortion[2].

How many abortions are carried out in the United States every year? The number is declining both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the population, but it is still above 1 million per year:

If there are still 1 million abortions per year, yet 2 million interested couples per year abandon their attempts at adoption, out of a total of perhaps 7 to 9 million infertile men and women in the United States, it seems to me that there is an opportunity to both decrease the abortion rate and increase the adoption rate without adversely affecting anyone. Quite the contrary, everyone would benefit: infertile couples would experience the joys of raising a child, pregnant mothers would be spared the psychological trauma of killing their own children, and up to a million unborn fetuses would enjoy their right to life.

It is not my intention, at this time, to explore in greater details the reasons behind this unfortunate failure to meet the needs of these groups. Greater flexibility in adoption laws and procedures, greater funding of adoption services, more education and social services: all of these might have a role to play. But I think it is a conversation worth having, not in red-faced hysteria, but practically and rationally. There are too many lives at stake to avoid it for the sake of convenience.

Sources and Notes

 [1] “Abortion” on Common Sense

[2] Finer LB and Zolna MR, Shifts in intended and unintended pregnancies in the United States, 2001–2008, American Journal of Public Health, 2013, doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2013.301416, accessed Jan. 22, 2014. Taken from the Guttmacher Institute website.