AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION, A POUND OF MANURE
Charu Gupta Late last month, state Democrats introduced the Ohio Prevention First Act. Its basic assumption: increase access to and funding of contraception, and watch the numbers of unintended pregnancies and abortions fall. Statistics repeatedly prove that women with easy access to birth control have fewer unintended pregnancies. Poor women of color, however, disproportionately choose methods that fail. It's this latter fact that opponents of Ohio's first sensible abortion-reduction bill keep folding into their argument: more contraception doesn't always mean less abortion. When the Free Times first wrote about this bill ("Wrong Again," February 28, www.freetimes.com/stories/14/45/wrong-again), it was being proposed by Senators Sue Morano and Teresa Fedor, and Rep. Tyrone Yates. Ohio Right to Life's Denise Mackura, who wanted nothing to do with the bill, said she could be persuaded if the numbers proved its case. So the Free Times called up the researchers whose data Mackura was citing. "Those states that do invest in contraception [with the exception of California] are all in the low teens [for abortion rates] - contrary to the claim that Ohio Right to Life is making," said Rebecca Wind, the spokeswoman for the Allan Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit data analysis center that emphasizes reproductive choice. Still, Mackura wants none of it. "I disagree with the person you spoke with at the Guttmacher Institute," she says. Besides, Mackura says, the whole abortion quagmire goes beyond contraception anyway. She's also upset by Ohio Prevention First's inclusion of access to the morning-after pill and because it only lets pharmacists refuse to fill birth-control prescriptions on professional grounds, not moral or religious ones. Why can't abortion opponents just admit that it's not ending pregnancies that freaks them out, it's sex?
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