Pre-Roe Reality
Teenagers—especially those who are poor and uneducated—are by far the group having the most elective late-term abortions. If we truly wish to protect the young and vulnerable, promote a “culture of life,” as President Bush said so grandly in his signing speech, then we must make teenage girls a top priority. Make sure they don’t get pregnant in the first place, and not just by preaching “abstinence only.” If they do get pregnant, don’t throw a net of fear, confusion, and complication over them that will only cause them to hide their conditions for as long as they can. Because that’s exactly what they’ll do. You could argue that “partial-birth” abortion is the price a society pays when it calculatedly keeps teenage girls ignorant instead of aggressively arming them with the facts of life and, if necessary, the equipment to protect themselves from pregnancy.
