In his New York Times column this week, Ross Douthat examined the thesis of the recently released book Red Families vs. Blue Families, which argues that, with all their emphasis on no sex before marriage, families in Red States are “trying to sustain an outdated social model” that leads to “teen childbirth, shotgun marriages and high divorce rates.”
But is that the whole picture? Douthat looks at one major contributing factor behind Blue States’ lower rates of teen pregnancy and divorce: abortion.
Conservative states may have more teen births and more divorces, but liberal states have many more abortions.
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
Sign up to get Crisis articles delivered to your inbox daily
Liberals sometimes argue that their preferred approach to family life reduces the need for abortion. In reality, it may depend on abortion to succeed. The teen pregnancy rate in blue Connecticut, for instance, is roughly identical to the teen pregnancy rate in red Montana. But in Connecticut, those pregnancies are half as likely to be carried to term. Over all, the abortion rate is twice as high in New York as in Texas and three times as high in Massachusetts as in Utah.
So it isn’t just contraception that delays childbearing in liberal states, and it isn’t just a foolish devotion to abstinence education that leads to teen births and hasty marriages in conservative America. It’s also a matter of how plausible an option abortion seems, both morally and practically, depending on who and where you are.
That’s some trade-off. Read the rest here.
Â