Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Lord Saletan, Again.



He's tiresome. His most recent opinion piece on abortion sets the stage with a neatly biasing trick:

Eight years ago, the Alan Guttmacher Institute surveyed over 10,000 American women who had abortions. Nearly half said they hadn't used birth control in the month they conceived. When asked why not, 8 percent cited financial problems, and 2 percent said they didn't know where to get it. By comparison, 28 percent said they had thought they wouldn't get pregnant, 26 percent said they hadn't expected to have sex and 23 percent said they had never thought about using birth control, had never gotten around to it or had stopped using it. Ten percent said their partners had objected to it. Three percent said they had thought it would make sex less fun.

This isn't a shortage of pills or condoms. It's a shortage of cultural and personal responsibility. It's a failure to teach, understand, admit or care that unprotected sex can lead to the creation — and the subsequent killing, through abortion — of a developing human being.

Note that by using a study which looked at women and not at men Saletan can then concentrate his rants largely on women. Had he started with a study about men who don't use condoms, say, the conclusions might have been different. Not like this, for instance:

Our challenge is to put these two issues together. For liberals, that means taking abortion seriously as an argument for contraception. We should make the abortion rate an index of national health, like poverty or infant mortality. The president should report progress, or lack thereof, in the State of the Union. Reproductive-health counselors must speak bluntly to women who are having unprotected sex. And as Mr. Obama observed last year, men must learn that "responsibility does not end at conception."

The bolds are mine. It may seem silly to point this out, but many of those abortions could have been avoided if the men had used condoms.

Lord Saletan is an arrogant asshat, by the way.