Part of it may be that there is mandatory counseling and women really are aware that there are supports available to them. I’m not sure what the protocols are now, but I know that unlike in the US, when the Scandanavian countries legalized abortion it wasn’t a walk in and sign up deal like it is in the US. I wrote up the findings of the 1955 PP conference on induced abortion. A Norwegian described the practices in his country thus:

“I would like to add a few words about our basic philosophy. We believe that when a woman wants an abortion, there must be something wrong either with herself or with her life situation or both, and frequently she represents not an individual social and medical problem only, but that of a whole family in need of some social or sociomedical treatment. Accordingly the woman’s whole situation must be analyzed with the aim of arriving at a treatment plan based on the collabortion of the woman and her family. Sometimes, unfortunately, and abortion must be a part of such a total treatment plan, and then we recommend it. We always attempt, however, with all the means we have at our disposal, to correct the underlying situation and to help the woman and her family without resorting to an abortion, whenever this is possible. And if an abortion is found necessary, we feel it should hav a therapeutic function as part of a larger social, psychiatric, and medical treatment plan. Very rarely is an abortion as such adequate therapy; as an isolated measure it is rarely of more than temporary and symptomatic help.”

How much is this still practiced? It’d be interesting to know. And if they’ve dropped it, how much impact does it have that generations of women were taught to treat pregnancy at a difficult time this way, as a crisis that leads you to re-examine your life and fix problems, rather than as just a cue to line up for an abortion?

A fair point, though most abortions don’t take place after 12 weeks, so that really can’t account for the large difference in numbers. I agree with you that the CDC has no particular interest in reducing abortions.

I think it would be interesting to find out what factors are at work in keeping the abortion rate low in those counties, and whether they are particular to the social dynamics of small, predominantly conservative Christian towns or whether some of those factors could be ported to the rest of the country.

I’d also like to see the government get involved in discouraging abortion in ways besides just legal restrictions; for instance, even under current law, I see no barrier to the government running public-service ads encouraging pregnant women to take care of themselves and their babies, publicizing resources that are available to help them, encouraging fathers to take responsibility for their unborn children, etc. Some of this happens now in a fragmented way, but there’s never been a huge anti-abortion campaign on the order of, say, the anti-smoking campaign.

A big secular and multifaith *amen* to your post.

We contraceptive-loving, sex-loving prolifers need to get ourselves organized somehow. Or just at least get our names & the fact of our existence out there…Any ideas, aside of course from what we’re already doing?…

When the Centers for Disease Control looked at abortion rates in Georgia and found that rural counties had low abortion rates, without any accompanying high rates of maternal or infant mortality, did they say, “Let’s see what these counties are doing right”? No. They proposed federal spending to “educate” women in the rural counties “as to the availability and safety of legal abortion”. Yup. They looked at low abortion rates with great dissatisfaction and started coming up with ways to drive them up.

When you have this at the highest eschelons of the public health service, you’re gonna have high abortion rates.