Not that I disagree with someone's sentiment (and any comment quoting Monty Python is a-ok in my book), but I see why one would react in that way...

"The basis of optimism is sheer terror" - Oscar Wilde

"You may be right. After all: "Just because you are a character doesn't mean that you have character." That still begs the question, however: which is more important?"

Your criticism should be directed to back to him unless feel it is acceptable to poke fun at my son.

NB: Figures/stats when quoted should be footnoted.  If the HTML for a URL is outside one's comfort zone, then pasting in the raw URL is next-best. But as to these putative explanations for the alleged decline...

Religious belief, certainly -- particularly when that religious belief involves bombing abortion clinics, murdering doctors who provide abortions, defunding state/fed programs that would pay for medical services including abortion, disseminating disinformation that exaggerates the risk of abortion, including wild claims that it causes sterility and suicidal tendencies [this plays oddly with claims of frivolity and lack of remorse among abortion-seekers], and so on.  But what am I thinking -- this atmosphere of threat, disinformation and prurient/punitive oversight of (particularly young unmarried) women couldn't have anything to do with the higher  incidence of teen pregnancy in the red states, of course.

"While organizations such as the National Abortion Federation and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives also collect information on crimes against clinics, the FMF annual survey provides the most extensive information on victimization and intimidation of abortion clinics and staff of any source in the nation and is the most comprehensive publicly available data set on this topic," Pridemore said.

The reported victimizations involved many forms of violence, harassment and intimidation, including physical violence, bombing, arson, death threats, bomb threats, facility invasion, burglary, break-ins, broken windows, glue in locks, nails in driveways, graffiti, clinic blockades, stalking of staff or physicians, home picketing, posting of "wanted" posters and harassment via the Internet.

Abortion-related crime and violence have a broad array of consequences, Pridemore said. In addition to direct harm to victims and physical damage to clinics, these politically motivated crimes intentionally create a climate of fear that affects abortion providers across the nation.

Because of the resulting physical threat and emotional toll, some providers have stopped performing abortions, reducing the availability of the option of abortion for many women. Eighty-seven percent of U.S. counties, representing more than one-third of the female population aged 15-44, have no abortion providers, and 31 percent of the nation's metropolitan areas do not have a provider, Pridemore said.

But no, the only reason why fewer abortions are performed is that young people these days are smarter and/or more religious (and/or more into sodomy);  the harassment, intimidation, and terrorism practised against the clinics leading to their gradual disappearance from 87 percent of our counties and 30 percent of our metro areas has nothing to do with it!

they were treated like any other medical condition and I certainly did not experience anyone having second thoughts about it ... it strikes me that if the writer's attitude to women then was as controlling, unsympathetic and judgmental as it appears to be today -- based, I admit, only on the discouraging content of this thread and therefore far from a complete picture -- the possibility does occur that his women friends might not have been exactly leaping at the chance to confide in him and share their most personal and intimate 3am feelings on the subject :-)  in any case, in my limited anecdotal database, women most always turn to female friends and family members for emotional support before, during, and after.

Ironically I, too, would prefer a world where it was rare for women to seek abortions (a painful and invasive procedure as noted above) --  not because they were threatened with prosecution, but because affordable, safe, and reliable contraception was readily available worldwide, because rape was no longer commonplace, because girl children were no longer considered a "failure" requiring a retry, because more men were taking responsibility for their semen, because RU-468-like "morning after" pharma remedies were cheap and easily available, etc.  Perhaps membership in anti-abortion groups should be restricted to those who can provide proof of a tubal ligation (either gender's version) to demonstrate the sincerity of their desire to make abortion really, truly obsolete -- a relic of the bad old days of women's second-class citizenship -- rather than merely illegal?

Alas, that happy obsolescence date grows farther off, not nearer, thanks to the rampup of the religious Right's stealth campaign against contraception itself:

Take the current debate about pharmacists "religious choice". Now, on the surface, this sounds fine. No one should be forced to violate their religious beliefs. John Kerry got sucked right into this code word argument. But what it really is an attack on Griswold, which was the case which created the right to have contraception. Condoms had been sold as a disease prevention device, but the pill, which was designed to prevent pregnancy, was a very different matter.

While the right has been quite vocal about abortion, their campaign against birth control has been a stealth one. They rarely talk about their plans to eliminate birth control, but it's as much a part of the "right to life" movement as their war against abortion. Now, pharmacists are deciding on their own to not fill birth control prescriptions. Married women, wanting to control the size of their families, are finding pharmacists who will not fill their scripts for the pill.

This is no more about religion than bombing clinics. It's a concerted attack on reproductive freedom.

Texas has 254 counties. You can get an abortion in six of them.

This stealth attack on contraception is seeking to do the same thing, to limit the availability of birth control for women.

The judge who decided the Schiavo case was forced to leave his church because the pastor didn't like the way he ruled. How many small town pharmacists can withstand the social pressure to continue to fill prescriptions for birth control? The social pressure will explode once this is permitted.

This is the power of code words. No one will say that they don't like contraception, they will hide behind the words "religious choice". Now, wellmeaning people don't see the intent of these ideas and think this is a reasonable discussion when it is anything but.

The object of the great game appears to be to give males the ultimate control over pregnancy:  superior size and strength (plus financial/material dominion) make rape and coercion ever-available strategies for impregnating women against their will and/or best interest, and the erosion of all options for women to prevent or terminate pregnancy leaves control exclusively in male hands -- just another form of Enclosure really.

When my grandmother was a girl, women who procured abortions -- or doctors who provided them  -- ran the risk of life imprisonment or hanging.  The result was not exactly a kinder, gentler society;  it was a society in which women "knew their place" or faced barbaric punishments.  And there were a lot of unwanted children even so.Here is a time travel ticket back to those 'good' old days...

All politics is about control:  someone trying to throw off the yoke of control by another, or someone trying to fasten the yoke of control on another.  Abortion politics is about the struggle over who controls women's reproductive capacity and hence women's bodies and intimate bodily processes -- women, or men?  or so I read it.  The rest is window dressing, smoke, and mirrors.  Anti-abortion and anti-contraception initiatives are not just anti-something, they are pro-something:  they are pro-forced-pregnancy, which imnsho does indeed earn them a place in the Dewey Decimal System a couple of shelf units away from our rock-throwing burqa-enforcers in the neo-dar-al-islam.

The punitive aspect of USian culture, already referenced above, seems to me to play an enormous role here... I sometimes think the next target of the neotalibs might as well be oncology:  after all, heavy smokers who develop lung or bladder cancer deliberately did something immoral and risky -- indulging in an addictive vice, a frivolous abuse of the body G-d gave them -- so how dare they seek medical intervention in order to evade the wages of their folly and sin?  They should carry their cancers to term, and accept their punishment as just.  The vindictiveness and mean-ness of such a position don't strike me as all that dissimilar... but of course, many white rightwing xtian men smoke cigs -- so we won't be hearing any calls to bar smokers from receiving oncological services any time soon :-)

Well I'm done with this.  It seems incredible that in this day and age it should even be a debate.  I didn't think the Nineteenth Century was all that great the first time around :-)  and as a warmed-over re-run it's definitely  unappetising.  which is one of many reasons why I am leaving (read 'fleeing') the US, or trying to.    much as the USSR was in its early decline, it feels like living in a time warp.  It's always Groundhog Day.  We're still worshipping C19 economists, mining coal, fighting the Viet Nam war and rescheduling the Scopes trial... and arguing about whether women should or should not be forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...