Eastland on Abortion

What amusement park ride bounced Larry Eastland's brain loose , and how did he get the folks at the Wall Street Journal to get in with him? (The article alleges that liberals are aborting themselves out of existence.)

BoingBoing pointed it out.

This is high level discussion? Every question possible was begged. [Fowler: Fowler defines "begging the question" as the "fallacy of founding a conclusion on a basis that as much needs to be proved as the conclusion itself.]

I didn't know where to start. Fortunately, I found someone who is a lot better prepared than I am.

The Church of Critical Thinking responded with Case of the Missing Democrats (FAQs on CCT: And who exactly are you, anyway? I'm just a guy with a computer who is fed up with the status quo.  So I set up this website. David, the rector of the CCT, and his commentators think that critical responses to Eastland's piece are not being allowed on the site

My position on birth control and abortion: I am strongly in favor of looking at what the Scandinavian countries do, and figuring out how we can emulate it. Somehow, they manage to have teens who are sexually active and who do not become pregnant.

Of every 1,000 Swedish women aged 15 to 19 in 1965, 50 became pregnant. By 1995, the rate dropped to 10 pregnancies for every 1,000 women in that age range, according to research Milsom presented at the conference here.

In comparison, the pregnancy rate among women aged 15 to 19 in the US during that same time period dropped slightly from 70 pregnancies per 1,000 American women to 60 per 1,000.

I believe that safe, effective contraception--for men and women--should be widely and easily available. Choosing to terminate a pregnancy is always a sad decision. For a number of reasons, I believe that safe, available, affordable chemical and surgical pregnancy termination should be widely and easily available. I heartily wish that every baby is a wanted baby.

Comments

[dem]

Very well put. Similar debates rage over in the UK. WIthout getting all journo (as if I could!) and hunting down stats, we have the worst teenage pregnancy rates in Europe. Generally the perceived solution to this is a kind of imposed puritanism and a battle to keep sex and young people as far apart as possible for as long as possible. Elsewhere, they have younger and in some cases staggered/bracketed ages of consent, policies of empowering with information and choice and much lower teen pregnancy rates. I often think the worst of it for the UK is that we just can't handle our sex drives - dysfunctional denial of desire giving way to guilt-ridden submission.