Ruth Institute Blog

by Michael J. New

Published March 15, 2010 in National Review.com.

Ever since the inauguration of President Obama in January 2009, he and his Democratic colleagues have known that abortion would be a key stumbling block to the enactment of health-care reform. There are several reasons for this. First, most Americans oppose government funding of abortion. Second, the Democratic party has recruited many pro-life candidates to run in conservative districts, and these Democrats would find it politically difficult to support health-care reform that includes public subsidies for abortion. Finally, President Obama and other Democrats sound disingenuous when they say they want to reduce the incidence of abortion, but then subsidize it through health-care reform.

As such, in a number of forums, President Obama and various surrogates have made concerted effort to either address or downplay the concerns of pro-lifers. But it seems that supporters of Obama’s health-care reform are now changing their approach and going on the offensive. In an editorial that ran in the Washington Post on Friday, author and journalist T. R. Reid argued that universal health care will lower the abortion rate in the United States. Using data from the United Nations, his argument relies on the fact that several European countries with universal health care also have lower abortion rates than the United States does.

However, Reid’s analysis is superficial and unconvincing. First, abortion rates in the United States are lower than what the UN statistics indicate. In 2005, the most recent year for which data is available, the U.S. abortion rates reported by the Alan Guttmacher Institute and the Centers for Disease Control are 19.4 and 15, respectively. As such, the incidence of abortion in the United States is comparable to that of many European countries with universal health care, including Great Britain, France, and Sweden. Furthermore, even though Australia and New Zealand offer more generous public health benefits than the United States does, their rates of abortion are similar to ours.

More importantly, simply comparing the U.S. abortion rate to abortion rates in countries with universal health care is misleading. The United States has a far more racially diverse population than many of these European countries, and statistics show that a number of minority groups have higher-than-average abortion rates.

Furthermore, the experience of states that have offered more generous provision of public health benefits is instructive. For instance in 1974, Hawaii passed legislation requiring all employers to provide relatively generous health care benefits to any employee who works 20 hours a week or more. Since that time, Hawaii has consistently had one of the lowest rates of uninsured adults in the country. However, according to data from the Alan Guttmacher Institute, Hawaii’s abortion rate consistently exceeds the national average

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