Birth Control Flop Precedes Most Abortions, Study Says Choice To Abort Knows No Group Lines, Survey Of 10,000 Finds

Most women who have abortions act only after their birth control method failed, and they do so across all racial, religious and socioeconomic groups, according to a large national study of who has abortions in the United States.

The findings, from a nationally representative survey of nearly 10,000 women who had abortions in 1994 and 1995, were released Wednesday amid an intensifying controversy over attempts to moderate the strict antiabortion plank in the Republican Party platform expected to be adopted at its national convention, which starts this weekend.

The study, by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a private non-profit research organization in New York, is the first national study designed to determine who has abortions and why since the group did a similar survey in 1987. Although Guttmacher receives 6 percent of its funding from Planned Parenthood, the government often cites its abortion figures as reliable supplements to the meager federal data.

Highlights of the study, being published in the current issue of the journal Family Planning Perspectives, include:

- Women who have no religious identification have a higher abortion rate than those who say they do, but women of all religious affiliations have abortions. As in the earlier study, Catholic women have a higher abortion rate than Protestants.

- Minorities, poor women and women who are separated or never married are twice as likely to have abortions as women in the general population.

- Abortions are now more common among women age 20 to 24 than among younger women. The percentage of teenage girls seeking abortions has dropped since 1987, possibly because more teenagers are using condoms to protect themselves from AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.

- The majority of women who have abortions - 66 percent - intend to have more children, and 58 percent had been using contraception in the month that they became pregnant. That statistic is up from 51 percent in 1987, suggesting that more women overall are trying to use birth control.

“I think this shows that women who seek abortions are not irresponsible,”said Gloria Feldt, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, which operates more than 900 family-planning clinics across the country. “They are women who are trying to be responsible and prevent unwanted pregnancies.”

While opponents of abortion rights dismissed the survey as “nothing new,” abortion rights supporters said the findings will lend support to efforts by moderate Republican leaders to ease the anti-abortion language in the plank.

“This study lends support to the notion that the majority of Americans are pro-choice at least with regard to themselves,” Feldt said. “It makes absolutely clear that many of the very people who are picketing in front of clinics that provide abortion services make use of these services when they feel it is the right thing to do for themselves and their families.”

Christian Polking of the National Right to Life Committee said all of the committee’s spokesmen were in San Diego for the GOP convention and were not available to comment on the study.

Guttmacher researchers said one of their most intriguing findings was that women of all socioeconomic, age, racial and religious groups turn to abortion to limit and space their children. Despite the Catholic Church’s staunch opposition to abortion, Catholic women have abortions at a rate 29 percent higher than Protestants, the study found. The 1987 survey reported similar findings.

The researchers speculated that this consistently higher rate may be due to the fact that Catholics tend to use less effective methods of contraception because of church teachings against condoms, the pill and other forms of artificial birth control.

A Catholic church official said, however, that the findings were skewed because the wrong questions were asked.

Barbara Thorp, director of the pro-life office for the Archdiocese of Boston, said: “I think that if they had asked these women whether they were regular churchgoers, you would have seen rates among Catholic women similar to the lower rates among born-again or evangelical Christians.” The study found that one in five women who had an abortion was evangelical, compared to nearly one in three abortion patients who were Catholic.

“While Catholics often identify with their religion in a cultural context, they may no longer be practicing as adults,” Thorp added.

As in the 1987 study, the rate of abortions is highest among minority women and those from lower socioeconomic groups. Black women have the highest rate, followed by Hispanics.

“Characteristics associated with higher abortion rates suggest a lack of financial and social resources, and perhaps, a lack of control over one’s life,” the researchers wrote.