Abortion Myths and Facts

Two interesting tidbits about abortion in the news recently:

In American pop culture, the face of abortion is often a frightened teenager, nervously choosing to terminate an unexpected pregnancy. The numbers tell a far more complex story in which financial stress can play a pivotal role. Half of the roughly 1.2 million U.S. women who have abortions each year are 25 or older. Only about 17 percent are teens. About 60 percent have given birth to least one child prior to getting an abortion. Read more.

Second, as abortion rate drops (as we all know they have), use of RU-486 is on rise, as WaPo's Rob Stein reports. On the market since 2000, more than 840,000 U.S. women have used mifepristone since it was approved, according to Danco Laboratories, which sells it. More than half of abortion providers now offer the option, a 70 percent increase from the first half of 2001, according the Guttmacher Institute. Yep, thirty-five years after the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision, a pill that has largely faded from the rancorous public debate over abortion has slowly and quietly begun to transform the experience of ending a pregnancy in the United States. Read the rest.

(Thanks again to CCF for the heads up.)