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J_Taylor comments on Politics Discussion Thread August 2012 - Less Wrong
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People who are pro-life in the abortion debate should also be pro- free birth control pills (those not requiring a co-pay).
If pro-lifers were more pragmatic, they would rank the issues that they care about from least-bad to worst. Most would agree that abortion is worse than pre-marital sex. Therefore, they should support efforts to eliminate the need for abortions (not just seek to eliminate the ability to have an abortion). As access to birth control reduces the likelihood of the need to have an abortion, free birth control pills would reduce the overall number of abortions, thus supporting the pro-life stance.
Also, if you agree with the analysis done by Steven Levitt in the book Freakonomics (availability of abortion services led to a drastic decrease in crime), by the same logic, free birth control should lead to a decrease in the crime rate as well.
The catch: That pro-lifers have to believe that they will not be able to get everything that they want politically, and must prioritize their goals.
Birth control pills are only as reliable as the people who take them. This intervention could very well cause an increase in abortion.
That is a mechanism by which availability of birth control could theoretically increase abortion; do you have any empiricism handy?
Absolutely none whatsoever.
Edit: Confound these Lesswrongers, they drive me to research.
Anyways, to make a brief attempt using data from here, it seems that I was either overestimating p(oops|pill) or underestimating p(oops|condom). Of course, the hypothetical pragmatic pro-lifer really should be advocating for Dreaded_Anomaly's suggested methods as opposed to free pills.
Still, I give substantially more credence to the statement:
(Note: I was not giving much credence to begin with.)
Long lasting birth control exists and the various methods have much lower failure rates than the once-a-day pill.
Here's a large analysis from the Guttmacher Institute about rates of contraception use vs. rates of abortion. Increased contraception use along with improving methods dramatically reduces the abortion rate.