To the editor:

Anyone watching the news lately knows that the subject of abortion has been a hot item due to the Supreme Court’s decision to void the Roe vs Wade ruling and transfer the responsibility for regulating abortions to the individual states.

I decided to throw my two cents into all of the discussion and controversy by writing an article about it. I didn’t like my first draft and realized that, as a male, I lacked proper perspective and asked my wife, two daughters, a niece and a son to help me. Their thoughts compose a significant part of this paper. This is my fourth attempt.

There are so many issues related to abortion and its close relative, unwanted pregnancies. Sometimes conflicting issues are involved such as the very serious world population problem; individual rights; health concerns; gender equality; morality and the very sad and social damaging situation of a glut of unwanted children being dumped into Child Protective Services each year for placement.

Unplanned pregnancies constitute an epidemic in the United States. Over 3 million of them occur, and over 1.5 million induced abortions are performed each year. Women of minority races, those with less than 12 years of education; women who are not married but cohabitate with a partner and women who live in poverty are at high risk of having unwanted children. Fear of complications (not the complications themselves) is the most powerful deterrent to women’s use of contraception. Much of this fear is due to bad press. About 90% of all women in the United States use some method of birth control and of course a large percentage of unwanted pregnancies are caused by the other 10%.

The good news is that the number of unwanted pregnancies has declined each year since 2008, but is still out of control.

There have been unwanted pregnancies since the beginning of time. The best we can do is to try to reduce them. I think we should learn something from China’s experiment to control their population in the last half of the 20th century by using draconian methods, such as legally regulating the number of children each family could have; giving financial and social incentives for not having children and punishment such as fines, imprisonment and even sterilization. None of it worked, but caused a lot of problems and social unrest.

Abortion is a touchy issue. It’s such an ambiguous question that I don’t think that either the federal or state government can legislate it and it’s futile to try. It should certainly be available to women who seek it for medical necessity, impregnated by rape or incest or innocent young women who made a mistake, seek an abortion, suffer, learn from it and never seek another one. It should never be used after the first trimester unless for medical emergency, should never be used as birth control as is sometimes done today and shouldn’t be an issue of legal or illegal.

It probably would best be handled by the medical profession supervised by their regulatory boards; a situation between a woman and their doctor handled with sensitivity and complete confidentiality.

In conclusion, we’re never going to solve the issue of unwanted pregnancies and the related issues of abortion; substance abuse, single parent families and rampant crime until we solve the underlying problems that cause them such as real or perceived racism and poverty. Perhaps this is redundant, but the government as in so many other things should just stay out of it. Fear of punishment, as in our criminal justice system does not work.

Don McCullough

Manhattan