I grant you your qualifier of “at or near”, but that still doesn’t seem like a “vast majority” to me…
Well, if we take the poverty line, and the next line measured (one above), we have about 60%. If we use the median household income for the US, 80% fall below.
and the (blech!) Guttmacher Institute really shouldn’t be expected to quote anything close to a minimum estimated number of “poverty abortions”…
Actually, the Guttmacher Insitution is the most widely quoted statistics authority on abortion from pro-choice and pro-life groups alike. It actually reports abortion numbers 50% higher than those of the CDC abortion survey project. If we take the CDC numbers instead of the Guttmacher numbers, legal abortion in the US, in total numbers, is only about 200,000 per year higher than it was the year
prior to Roe (15 states had liberalized abortion laws prior to Roe and legal abortions were counted at about 600,000 - the CDC survey now puts the number at about 800,000).
The Guttmacher studies include the CDC data and use a more extensive methodology to detect and calculate abortions overlooked by the Survey’s model (which remains unchanged, so that its current numbers can be meaningfully compared with its numbers dating back to the beginning).
I must admit, I still find the hand wringing and chorus a little surprising. After all, I am not, nor have I ever been, pro-choice. I have an ultra-conservative (Catholic wise) view of abortion, similiar to Mapleoak’s.
The biggest bone of contention is that I repeatedly quote the Church, in a Doctrinal Note, on voting and assert,
gasp, that Rome is the best authority on applying Catholic Doctrine in public life.
Last, but not least, I have the gall to expect measurable reality to match rhetoric. Decades of partisan political focus has brought us 5 GOP appointed Catholics on the Supreme Court (unless we are going to argue rather or not 5 is a majority out of 9) as well as a period of, literally, single party rule. Yet, our biggest ‘victory’ is a law that, at most, would have targeted 2000 abortions a year, but which the Supreme Court declared will ultimately stop 0. Meanwhile, nothing we can measure indicates that the strategy is having any positive effect on actual abortions at all.
Look above, there is a sneer about using one’s ‘rational mind’. But, if a strategy has exactly the opposite effect of what one states they want to achieve, there is nothing ‘rational’ about it. It is an action of faith, not reason. When someone acts on faith, at the expense of written Catholic doctrine, the sin of idolatry, which Pope Benedict recently spoke on, has to be at least considered.