NYC41Percent, an initiative founded last year in part by New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan with the aim of calling attention to (and thereby reducing) the eponymous abortion rate in New York City, has just released statistics for 2010 [note: not 2011, as it takes over a year for stats to become available]. Although the rate ticked downward a notch from 2009, the results are still devastating. Along with the statistic that over 40 percent of city pregnancies end in abortion, some of the more specific numbers reveal nothing less than an epidemic ravaging entire communities:
- Among non-Hispanic blacks there were far more abortions than births, 38,574 to 26,635, or 60%. So for every 1,000 African-American babies born, 1,448 were aborted.
- Among Non-Hispanic black teens, the abortion rate was even greater – 5,956 abortions to 2,265 live births, or 72%. For every 1,000 African-American babies born to teens, 2,630 were aborted.
- The abortion rate among teens as a whole was 63% – 12,139 abortions to 7,207 live births. For every 1,000 babies born among New York City teens 1,684 were aborted.
You can find more information and see the report in its entirety by clicking here [opens a .pdf file].
Perusing the map presented by the website reveals just how commonplace and devastating abortion is in low-income neighborhoods, particularly in minority sections of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. But there is one sign of hope: the ZIP code with the lowest percentage of abortions (11219, a definite outlier with an 8% abortion rate) covers the Brooklyn neighborhood of Borough Park – a heavily Hasidic Jewish section known for both its strict religious observance and its strong communal support network. It appears to be a clear example of just how much good can be accomplished when religious communities step into these kinds of issues, as Archbishop Dolan has now done, as well.
Perhaps, given that nearly two-thirds of New Yorkers agree that the city’s abortion rate is too high, and that the most recent data available indicates that public funding for Planned Parenthood is in no short supply (income from public money totaled $305.3 million in 2005 and shot up to $487.4 million in 2010) lawmakers, either at the federal, state, or municipal levels, could undertake a very simple measure. Rather than continue to increase their contribution to groups like Planned Parenthood, why not simply cap funding for organizations that perform abortions at their current dollar amounts (hardly an extremist demand in this era of austerity) and instead use the extra money on a new strategy to reduce abortion rates – perhaps funding crisis pregnancy centers or maternal care wards in hospitals? I can’t imagine who might object, given the rhetorical commitment to making the tragedy of abortion “rare” by those who defend its continued legalization.
January 5th, 2012 | 2:15 pm
How did such a heavily-Catholic city become an abortion hotbead? The same question goes for the northeastern U.S.
January 5th, 2012 | 2:21 pm
[...] at First Thoughts: NYC41Percent, an initiative founded last year in part by New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan with [...]
January 5th, 2012 | 2:31 pm
How did such a heavily-Catholic city become an abortion hotbead?
Cbalducc,
First, Catholic women have abortions at the same rate (actually, slightly higher) as the general population. I wholeheartedly agree that the abortion rate in New York City is appalling, but it is not a great mystery. The city has a high concentration of groups—blacks, hispanics, poor people—who have abortions at a higher rate than the general population.
I have not looked up statistics on this, but I am sure that New York City has a higher rate of sickle cell anemia and Tay-Sachs disease than the country at large, not because of anything about the geography, but because New York City has larger than average populations of blacks and Ashkenazi Jews.
January 5th, 2012 | 4:40 pm
I don’t know how these statistics are gathered, but the number of abortions could well be higher because of the morning after pill which I assume is not counted. Those abortions would also probably be more likely to be among white middle class women. Chalduce’s concern is understandable. When was the last time anyone heard chastity promoted from a Catholic pulpit? In going to Mass almost everyday for the last twelve years, I have heard chastity mentioned twice. My pastor, a very eloquent Dominican, tells me that those who need encouragement to chastity (like me) can read about it. Is it any wonder that girls, many professing to be Catholics, in the crisis pregnancy center where I volunteer one day a week do not think that there is anything wrong with sex with their boyfriends. The same is true in my practice as a psychotherapist. A recent article in Commonweal makes it clear that sexual morality is not preached from Catholic pulpits, and it not about to be. I’ve been in a state of war with my Dominican parish in Greenwich Village for years now over this issue and have finally decide to give up and just steer clear of any contact with them. They are hopeless and my anger is not healthy.
January 5th, 2012 | 4:48 pm
At first I was a bit taken aback, after all every now and then I see on this blog posts about how abstinence is working. How can it be working if 63% of teens have had abortions….which certainly means a much higher % of teens must have had sex!
But then looking more carefully I notice the metric is based on pregnancies. If 99.99% of teens remained virgins, and 5 teens had sex, 3 got pregnant and 2 had abortions the calculation would be for that the abortion rate is 66%!
The 63% metric makes sense only if you’re POV is ‘babies trying to be born’….in other words a Buddhist or Hindu view of babies in some type of limbo waiting in line to get born. What are the odds that an ‘opening’ would get you to live birth versus abortion.
A better metric would be what % of teens had abortions or perhaps the number of abortions divided by the total population (since % of teens who had abortions would count a teen who had more than one abortion only once). That would be less alarmist than this calculation but it would be more accurate and less deceptive.
January 5th, 2012 | 4:54 pm
Boonton: “How can it be working if 63% of teens have had abortions”
This gets my vote of the stupidest statement of 2012. I know it is only January 5, but I can’t imagine anyone coming close before 12/31.
January 5th, 2012 | 5:19 pm
@Boonton,
You seem to be lost. New York City is not exactly a hot bed of abstinence programs, except, maybe, among the Hasidim who are doing very well. So your first paragraph makes no sense.
Your statistical paragraphs would make some sense, except that absolute abortion numbers are also given and the census has made the population counts available. So the percentages do not hide the numbers as you suggest they might. The bit of statistics that makes no sense is your suggestion to use the % of teens who had abortions. You can’t have an abortion unless you are pregnant. So that statistic would do the hiding you seem to dislike. Now the percent of teens who were pregnant would be an interesting statistic to compare among localities and may be of great concern. But that is not what is being examined here.
One thinks that Jerimiah 5:21 might apply.
January 5th, 2012 | 5:22 pm
Barry Arrington,
Did you stop reading Boonton’s message after the first paragraph? I think that is the only way to explain your remarks, since if there actually was a 63% abortion rate among teens having abstinence-only education, “How can it be working?” would be an excellent question.
January 5th, 2012 | 5:26 pm
Barry,
Did you bother to actually read my full comment?
January 5th, 2012 | 5:30 pm
Let’s consider my alternative…say just 5 teens have sex, 3 pregnancies result and 2 abortions happen. Pro-lifers would consider this an amazing victory. Instead of tens of thousands of abortions in NY, there’s only 2!
Yet from this metric it would be a setback. The rate would be going from 63% to 66%! It would be better for the current state of affairs with thousands times more abortions to remain!
This is a sure sign that the metric is faulty.
January 5th, 2012 | 5:49 pm
The bit of statistics that makes no sense is your suggestion to use the % of teens who had abortions. You can’t have an abortion unless you are pregnant. So that statistic would do the hiding you seem to dislike.
Well if your goal is to avoid abortions then the % of teens who had abortions is relevant. Yes a teen can’t get an abortion unless she is pregnant. But whether a teen avoids having an abortion by giving birth or avoiding pregnancy to begin with satisfies the condition that ‘abortion is avoided’ which is what I assume pro-lifers would want to see. In other words, a NY where 100% of teens have sex and all pregnancies go to term or a NY where 100% of teens are abstinent and as a result no abortions can ever happen would both be improvements from the pro-lifer’s view of things. In both cases abortion is 100% avoided.
You seem to be lost. New York City is not exactly a hot bed of abstinence programs, …
I’m not sure about public school abstinence programs but I think you’re letting your conservative sterotyping show here. NY swings liberal overall but its a very diverse city with a lot of ‘abstinence friendly’ types of demographics. For example, Catholics are nearly 45% of the city and nearly 14% of NYC students are going to Catholic schools. As you pointed out the City has many Hasidim but it also has many Orthodox and Conservative Jews, Muslims, and immigrants who would all lean heavily towards something like an ‘abstinence program’ even if their students are not formally getting a public school ‘abstinence program’. I think you may have a ‘Red State view’ of NYC and NY that thinks they are just like ‘red states’ except they swing uniformly left rather than right. Reality is quite different. NYC has both very serious liberals and conservatives.
January 5th, 2012 | 6:37 pm
The statistic that makes most sense is number of aborted people per population.
Teenage females do not have abortions all by themselves. Most abortions also involve a father, a doctor, violent and/or enabling parents, landlords who limit occupancy, teachers who make wisecracks when they teach abstinence, universities that do not accommodate unwed mothers, neighbors who complain about crying, media that call abortion a responsible choice, entertainment which ridicules chastity, celebrities who are bad role models, politicians who bash AFDC recipients, and multimillionaires who donate football stadiums instead of schools for unwed mothers.
Abortions per population is an estimate of how far the culture of death has advanced.
January 6th, 2012 | 8:56 am
“This is a sure sign that the metric is faulty.”
No, it’s a sign that a metric that applies across a population of millions is less useful when applied to five.
There’s no law of “useful metrics” that says that any metric that is applicable to a population of millions has to be equally applicable to my household in order to be valid.
January 6th, 2012 | 9:14 am
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January 6th, 2012 | 10:43 am
No, it’s a sign that a metric that applies across a population of millions is less useful when applied to five.
The problem with the metric holds even if you keep the populations large. If there’s a dramatic decrease in pregnancies, but the abortion rate remains the same (measured based on pregnancies), then you’re still reading a large decrease in abortions as a failure. Likewise imagine the number of abortions goes up but pregnancies and teen births go up even faster, that will appear to be a victory as the rate will fall. You don’t have to go down to just 5 or 10 people. What the metric is basically doing is offsetting an abortion with a live birth. This only makes sense if you think abortion’s wrongness is neutralized by other women having more babies. A perspective that makes sense if you’re thinking of babies ‘waiting on line’ in heaven or whereever hoping for ‘openings’ so they can get born faster, but not for any other context that I can think of.
There’s no law of “useful metrics” that says that any metric that is applicable to a population of millions has to be equally applicable to my household in order to be valid.
No but it’s pretty hard to say a metric is useful if it registers positive increases in welfare for changes that you define as decreases in welfare. Many metrics have problems like this, for example the unemployment rate ‘gets better’ if people stop looking for work because the job market is so bad they give up, but this metric seems esp. bad if your goal is actually decreasing abortion (but good if your goal is to generate headlines about abortion). When confronted with a metric that seems odd, I try to ‘stress test’ it by seeing how it would perform under extreme cases. If it fails under extreme cases, then see if it also fails if you’re just approaching an extreme case but still in an otherwise plausible possible case (i.e. an increase in pregnancies that go to birth while abortions remains the same or increases slower, a decrease in both pregnancies and abortions etc.)
Mike
Your statistical paragraphs would make some sense, except that absolute abortion numbers are also given and the census has made the population counts available.
Not really. We only are given the total pregnancies and births for non-Hispanic blacks and then are given the total for teens with a break out for non-Hispanic black teens. while the report itself may have more detailed population data, we can’t say anything about New York or New York City’s overall abortion rate. More importantly, the inclusion of a percentage usually leads one to focus on that first as a metric of success or failure while leaving behind the ‘background data’. Tossing in hard information around a bogus percentage only serves to give the author plausible deniability. If the percentage doesn’t make any sense, it shouldn’t be included to begin with.
Even more damming, the first thing that jumps out at me when I open the pdf is the abortion ratio fell from 44% in 1994 to 41% in 2009. Small changes of course but the alarmist 63% figure was plucked out clearly to make a rhetorical point rather than an honest one. NY’s total abortions fell from 103,900 in 1991 to 83,750 in 2009, a decline of 19.4%. Live births fell from 133,662 to 124,791, a decline of 6.7%. So since the true story here is fewer women getting pregnant but more pregnant women not having abortions. Since the author argues Planned Parenthood’s funding should be contingent on whether or not the abortion rate improves he must now come out in favor of increase PP funding….if he is to be coherent and consistent.
January 6th, 2012 | 10:58 am
Another thing that jumps out, the # of live births that makes up the bottom of the ratio seems potentially problematic as well. NY has a lot of major teaching hospitals which attract patients from outside NY and around the world. If the recession and more aggressive insurance companies caused fewer pregnant women to travel to NYC to have their babies at top class hospitals, you may be registering a decline in live births that isn’t related to fewer actual NY women getting pregnant, just less ‘medical tourism’ to NY. If the true number of ‘organic NY live births’ stayed more or less the same and the number of abortions fell, then the actual ratio is not only smaller than reported here but has been declining even faster!
January 6th, 2012 | 5:13 pm
@Boonton, So you didn’t bother to follow the links given. I’m not surprised. Percentages can be problematic, as newspapers prove everyday. That’s why the absolute values are necessary. But they are there in the links not hidden so your analysis is with blinders on, intentional blinders. What your objection breaks down to is that the content of the links should be in the article, which no more than an editorial quibble.
January 6th, 2012 | 5:18 pm
@Boonton, So you didn’t bother to follow the links given. I’m not surprised. Percentages can be problematic, as newspapers prove everyday. That’s why the absolute values are necessary. But they are there in the links not hidden so your analysis is with blinders on, intentional blinders. What your objection breaks down to is that the content of the links should be in the article, which no more than an editorial quibble.
I went looking for evidence of the 63% abortion rate for abstinence programs in the article. I couldn’t find. Perhaps Boonton or David Nichols could specifically point it out? And if the source is external, please share it. For now, it looks like a claim made without basis.
January 6th, 2012 | 9:36 pm
Mike,
The article as presented is stunningly deceptive. It gets a lot worse when you look beyond carefully reading exactly what % is being talked about above. NYC has seen the number of abortions fall from 103K in 1991 to 83.8K in 2009. That’s nearly a 20% decline. One would think pro-lifers would celebrate nearly 20,000 fewer abortions a year in a place that’s supposedly solidly pro-choice. But bashing Planned Parenthood seems to be more important so the percentages are massaged until a way is found to turn a 20% decline in abortions to a ‘tragic’ increase by manufacturing a metric that is totally meaningless for pro-lifers. See this is the sort of thing that says pro-choicers shouldn’t bother to look for any common ground in the abortion debate. No matter what reality is, at the end of the day for the mainstream pro-life groups its just an extension of GOP political maneuvering. Even if abortions go down, it will just be spun as an increase.
I went looking for evidence of the 63% abortion rate for abstinence programs in the article.
Read again more carefully. I said upon first glance the article seemed to say that 63% of teens had had abortions. If that was true that would be a stunningly high figure considering the other pieces I’ve seen on this blog praising abstinence programs and increased abstinence among teens. In order to get an abortion rate of 63% among teens, you need an abstinence rate of almost zero since many teens will be sexually active without ever having an abortion. Only after seeing the ‘first glance’ reading of the percentage couldn’t be real does more careful reading reveal the ‘abortion rate’ presented here has nothing really to do with abortions.
Percentages can be problematic, as newspapers prove everyday. That’s why the absolute values are necessary.
Absolute values are not the issue here. Yes they are good to refer too but ultimately the problem is not percentages but this percentage. This percentage is a highly flawed one. If you wanted to talk about the ‘abortion rate’ being too high you couldn’t talk about it intelligently with just absolute numbers, you’d need a percentage.
What your objection breaks down to is that the content of the links should be in the article, which no more than an editorial quibble.
No my objection is that the ‘abortion ratio’ presented here is absolutely meaningless in discussing whether “the abortion rate is too high”. Yes I can spend my own time going back to the original numbers to produce an honest analysis. But last time I checked, First Things ain’t sending me any checks to do that (don’t let that stop you First Things, my mailbox is always open!).
Now the question is why do people who care about the abortion rate being too high perform such a poor analysis of it? One possibility is a simple desire to lie. I think that’s probably too harsh. A more likely reason is that this ‘analysis’ is produced and accepted because it seems to confirm the biases many here already have. New York is supposedly ground zero for Godless liberalism therefore it must make sense that it’s nothing more than a massive abortion factory that only increases abortion year after year.
January 7th, 2012 | 4:21 am
I went looking for evidence of the 63% abortion rate for abstinence programs in the article. I couldn’t find. Perhaps Boonton or David Nichols could specifically point it out?
Mike,
I think the whole point is that it isn’t there! In any case, I am not quite sure why we are quibbling over statistics. I am certainly not firmly in the “pro-life” camp, but I agree the number of abortions in New York City (and almost everywhere) is shocking. The question is what to do about it, not how to analyze the statistics. Any way you look at them, they are terrible. Matthew Cantirino made a proposal that I think is not helpful at all and would not be of any help (in my opinion), but the issue is what to do, not how can we argue about the statistics.
January 7th, 2012 | 8:17 am
Boonton, why are you working so hard to develop numbers to a human tragedy. And how, in God’s name, can you claim abstinence education has even been introduced on any scale in New York City? This is no stereotype, I know New York City as well as you do. You cite abstinence friendly demographics, hoping no one realizes the population has no control over the public education monolith in the city. That monolith has never had any problem introducing their students to the Planned Parenthood industry.
January 7th, 2012 | 1:11 pm
Hinshaw: “Boonton, why are you working so hard to develop numbers to a human tragedy.”
Indeed, such a callous, irresponsible attitude.
200,000 pregnancies per year in 20 years means roughly 4 million pregnancies by teenagers. That’s about 1.8 million abortions and 2.5 million babies born to teenagers.
Planned parenthood for high-schoolers. It would be interesting to know the political ideology of these teens concerning sexuality.
January 7th, 2012 | 3:59 pm
[...] on the Catholic-leaning FirstThings.com website, Matthew Cantirino noted that a perusal of the interactive NYC abortion map put together by [...]
January 7th, 2012 | 6:01 pm
[...] on the Catholic-leaning FirstThings.com website, Matthew Cantirino noted that a perusal of the interactive NYC abortion map put together by [...]
January 9th, 2012 | 7:36 am
John,
Alone something like 14% of kids in NYC are educated in Catholic schools so are you going to tell me that Planned Parenthood dictates their sex education programs as well?
Anyway, why are you trying to argue that Planned Parenthood is a monolith in NYC? Do you realize you’re acting like the fool sitting on a tree branch sawing away at its base? Abortion has dropped 20% in NYC. If PP is such a huge monolith that has such massive control over every aspect of the system, well that just demonstrates that PP should get all the credit and none should go to anyone else.
Harriet
Indeed, such a callous, irresponsible attitude.
I think its pretty callous to spin a *reduction* of abortions of 20,000 a year as a failure. Keep in mind you’re defending a metric here whose built on the premise that one abortion is ok if it gets ‘offset’ with other women having live births. Last time I checked not did not square with the thinking of any notable pro-life thinker, organization or group. Yet it would seem that some on the pro-life side seem to think dishonesty is OK as well as ignoring 20,000 lives saved if it serves making rhetorical points against Planned Parenthood. That seems pretty callous and irresponsible to me. Callous, of course, because it ignores what is supposedly the main goal of the movement. Irresonsible because this strategy is premised on assuming the rest of society is too stupid to see thru such a deception and not begin asking if one is dishonest here, why trust any other point or position they take?
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