Reproductive Health: Programs and policies that could actually lessen the need for abortion.

Here, from an article on RH Reality Check, are a few simple actions that if taken would be guaranteed to result in fewer untimely pregnancies, and hence fewer abortions:

1. Make long-acting, effective reversible birth control methods like IUDs available free of charge to any women who want them. These birth control methods are effective for 5 to 10 years and don’t require a woman to remember to do anything in order to be protected from pregnancy. They can be used by women of any age. If a woman wants to get pregnant, she simply has the IUD removed and her normal fertility returns. This birth control method is widely used in Europe, but quite expensive and less frequently used in this country.

2. Cover all reproductive health care including all methods of birth control, infertility, tubal ligation, and vasectomy, under affordable health insurance.

3. Create excellent and affordable childcare so that women who want to have children can also make a living to support them.

4. Make sure young people learn how to create successful relationships as well as how to be responsible with their sexuality. That will give them the tools to create healthy families and be good parents with enough resources to care for their kids when the time is right.

5. Promote vasectomy as a very safe and inexpensive method of permanent birth control for men. This would be especially helpful for couples who have completed their families so that a late and unexpected pregnancy doesn’t throw everyone into emotional turmoil.

6. Increase research into developing safer, more effective and long lasting methods of birth control.

7. Make sure the Morning After Treatment is easily available, inexpensive, and covered by health care insurance.

8. Require by law that all pharmacies either fill prescriptions for birth control and Morning After Treatment, or else inform over the phone, in advertisements, and by posted signs that they are Anti Choice Pharmacies, and the location of the nearest pharmacy that respect a woman’s choices.

These sensible proposals have little chance of becoming policy because so many  anti-abortion leaders are more interested in imposing their crabbed moral vision on the society at large than they are on helping unwed mothers and unwanted children. As Barney Frank once said, the anti-abortion movement's concern for "life" begins at conception and ends at birth.

The  rest of the story: The Anti-Choice Hoax of the Century by Charlotte Taft (RH Reality Check 2010-09-15).