FIGHTING FOR MORE ABORTIONS FROM A SMALLER POPULATION
The National Abortion Rights Action League, which now calls itself NARAL Pro-Choice America, is hoping for a foothold in Tennessee.
On the ground in the state since June, the organization that wants to expand already legal abortion rights in the state has been purchasing billboard space, buying ads, going door to door, and showing up at festivals, fairs, concerts and other cultural events.
Its resources in Tennessee, according to the national group’s states communications director, are concentrated in Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville, Chattanooga, Clarksville and Murfreesboro, the four largest cities in the state and the latter two cities with significant college populations.
If the group was truly interested in what it ironically calls reproductive rights, it would be less involved in abortion, which has dropped dramatically in the last 25 years, and more involved in what a recent study by the Guttmacher Institute and Columbia University found was “improvement in contraceptive use” among teens.
But NARAL Pro Choice America believes it has found a winning hand in the Supreme Court’s June ruling in which it said Texas clinics that supply abortions do not have to meet surgical center standards and abortion providers do not have to meet the criterion of having admitting privileges at local hospitals.
James Owens, the group’s states communication director, said the ruling was the most significant decision on the issue since the high court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion.
What an odd choice of words for a decision that could only result in poorer medical conditions for women rather than better.
For Tennessee, which passed laws similar to those in Texas in 2012 and 2015, the Supreme Court ruling will have some effect, though it’s unclear how much.
As David Fowler, a former Chattanooga state senator and president of the Family Action Council of Tennessee pointed out in June, “few states enforce laws once one state’s law is struck down because they realize they would lose if they get sued, but legally our law was not ‘ruled unconstitutional per se.’”
But NARAL’s state presence, called Tennessee Total Access, may want to have the Volunteer State law struck down. It also is clearly interested in affecting state politics and has targeted Marsha Blackburn, the fiercely pro-life and anti-Planned Parenthood Brentwood congresswoman.
It may have picked the wrong target, though. The Republican is heavily favored to win re-election to her seat in November, and despite Owens’ comments about her being “out of the mainstream,” she is in line with a majority of Tennesseans on abortion and on the scourge of Planned Parenthood’s tissue sales.
The group is not likely to find much support in Chattanooga, either, as the city’s last abortion clinic closed in 1993.
Teen pregnancy has fallen nationally, along with abortion, since 1991. The U.S. teen birth rate was 61.8 births for every 1,000 teen females in 1991 and 24.2 births per 1,000 in 2014.
The recent report by Guttmacher, founded as an arm of Planned Parenthood and hardly a conservative organization, highlighted a 25 percent drop in pregnancies between 2007 and 2011 and a 36 percent drop in births to teens ages 15 to 19 from 2007 to 2013.
Its apparent aim in the report was to downplay any drop in pregnancies as due to teens delaying to engage in sex, which is not so easily measurable, or having more abortions, which is.
Indeed, the headline on its website about the report is the indefensible “Declines in Teen Pregnancy Risk Entirely Driven by Improved Contraceptive Use.”
“By definition,” said Laura Lindberg, the study’s lead author and a Guttmacher researcher, “if teens are having the same amount of sex but getting pregnant less often, it’s because of contraception.”
However, the report was unable to pinpoint a singular method of contraception as more effective than another but fell back to citing the more frequent use of contraceptives, the combining of methods and the use of more effective contraceptives.
And since it used the superlative term “entirely driven,” it also did not cite other factors that might have influenced the drop in teen pregnancies such as faith, the increasing early viability of children and the knowledge of what an abortion is and does.
Either way, with fewer pregnancies and better contraception, NARAL has a smaller group of women to fight over. But its actions continue to prove that women’s health has little to do with its mission.