COMMUNITY COLUMNIST: Choosing to seek solutions
By Stewart Shaw

One of the New Year’s resolutions that most of us would do well to make is a commitment to find out why other people believe what they do before we insist that they agree with us. Stephen Covey made this one of his Seven Rules for Highly Effective People: “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”

Too often we try to force an opponent to agree with us without trying to understand where he/she “is coming from.” If we really want to resolve disagreements on social issues, we need to understand the emotions and reasons that lead to other people’s beliefs.
The abortion issue divides us sharply into two opposing camps — “pro-life” and “pro-choice.” But the armies of citizens of both camps seldom try to understand why the civilian soldiers in the other camp disagree with them.

Most pro-lifers want to make almost all abortions criminal actions, punishable by fines or prison terms or both. Most pro-choicers adamantly insist that abortion should not be criminalized, but that a woman should be able to choose, without fearing punishment, whether to continue nurturing a fetus within her body, at least during the early weeks of pregnancy. For the most part neither camp tries to understand its opponents. Each side wins legislative or judicial skirmishes now and then, but neither wins the abortion war. And so it goes on and on — 35 years after the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade.

The pro-life side says that a human life starts at the moment of conception. The pro-choice side says that a human life begins considerably later. Proponents of each side fail to persuade the other because they have defined the beginning of life to support their own opinions. Both sides recognize that there is a problem, but they don’t see the problem the same way, and they rarely try to understand why they don’t agree. And consequently they fail to find common ground upon which to begin to find a resolution.

Although the rate has gone down, from a peak of 29.3 per thousand American women in 1980 to 21.1 per thousand in 2001 (the last year for which figures are available), almost everyone agrees that there are still far too many induced abortions. Worldwide, there are approximately 46 million of them each year. Researchers Lawrence K. Finer and Stanley K. Henshaw, employed by the Alan Guttmacher Institute (Planned Parenthood), estimate that there were 1,387,000 abortions in America in 2003. At current rates, about one-half of all American women will experience an unintended pregnancy and about one-third of those will have one or more abortions during their lives.

Pro-lifers, of course, believe that abortions are much too common. But there are many pro-choicers who also believe that there are more abortions than there should be. Their concern is with government involvement in their private lives.

Once we recognize that almost everyone agrees that there are too many abortions, we could work together on reducing the number of them. Abortions happen when women have unwanted pregnancies. We could reduce the number of abortions by reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies.

Abstinence from sexual intercourse is of course the perfect way to prevent unwanted pregnancies. But while that works well for people whose religious or moral convictions are strong enough to prohibit sexual activity for recreational reasons, the biological and social forces encouraging sexual activity are stronger. It seems unlikely that abstinence alone as a social policy can be accomplished. Enjoining adolescents and young adults to “just say no” won’t solve the problem.

In addition to encouraging abstinence, we can alleviate the other causes for feeling that a pregnancy is unwanted. According to a study called “Reasons Why Women Have Induced Abortions: Evidence from 27 Countries,” published by the Guttmacher Institute in 1998, abortion is being used as a method of birth control in 95 percent of all cases.

For the 25.5 percent of American women who choose abortion who want to postpone child bearing and the 7.4 percent who do not want to have any more children, we could reduce the number of abortions by agreeing to make contraceptives more easily available, cheaper and more widely understood.

The same study shows that the reason 21.3 percent of all women have induced abortions is that they cannot afford a baby. The abortion rate among women living below the poverty level is four times greater than that of women living at 300 percent or above the poverty line. We could reduce unaffordable pregnancies by making it possible for everyone to live well above the poverty line. By making child care much more available and less expensive we could reduce the 14.1 percent of abortions that result from fear that a baby will disrupt education or employment.

Working together we could encourage parents to provide counseling for their sexually active daughters and sons, and partners and parents to encourage the use of contraceptives — assisting the 12.2 percent of women who yield to pressure from parents or others who object to their pregnancy to have induced abortions and the 14.1 percent who are influenced by partners who do not want the pregnancy.

These are some of the ways we could all be winners, if we were willing to try to understand other points of view, seek common ground, and work together.

Stewart Shaw is a former Winona State University registrar who volunteers for several local organizations.

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