by Jayden Harlow

Created on: January 24, 2009

The issue of whether or not abortion should be legalized is one of the most devisive issues in American society. Opinions on the topic fall across the spectrum, from those who believe it should be legal in all instances to those who to those who believe it should be banned entirely. From the passage of Roe v. Wade, the question of abortion has been a hot-button political topic as well, with legislation ping-ponging back and forth based on which party is in office at any given time. However, despite how it appears, the question of abortion is not really about abortion at all. Rather, it's about the desire of religious conservatives to legislate the private moral issue of premarital sex.

The reality is that we, as a nation, are likely united in the understanding that something has gone very wrong when an abortion is sought. If the issue truly was abortion, then right-to-life organizations would lobby for comprehensive sex eduation, better health care for women, and more research into effective methods of birth control, including those for the prevention of pregnancy in the immediate aftermath of a rape. They would seek, in short, to end abortion by making it obsolete - an archaic medical practice that goes the way of leeches. They would seek to ensure that men and women have sufficient control over their reproductive process that every pregnancy is a wanted one. But this isn't the case. Rather, the same organizations that lobby against abortion ALSO lobby against the very programs that would reduce the need for it. They press for abstinence-only sex education, attempt to relabel certain forms of birth control as abortion, and often ignore general issues of women's health entirely.

They do all this because the movement against abortion is not about the right to life of an unborn child. Rather, it is about the moral question of whether or not people should have sex before marriage. In legalizing abortion, modern medicine has robbed religious conservative groups of their greatest weapon against premarital sex: the unwanted pregnancy. A few forced unhappy marriages and embarrassed pregnant teens in any church were once enough to frighten the majority into waiting until they married (which they did very young) to have sex. With the evolution of birth control and abortion, women could choose when and if they had children, and religious groups lost their leverage in the battle of sexual morality. In attempting to render abortion illegal and/or unavailable, conservative religious lobbying groups are seeking to restore that power by increasing, not reducing, the number of unwanted pregnancies.

The end of abortion cannot come through legislation. Rather, it must come through the development of education and medicine geared towards giving both men and women the knowledge and ability to prevent unwanted pregnancies. So long as conservative religious groups continue to deliberately comingle the issues of abortion and premarital sex, we cannot move toward what should be a unified goal: the quest for a world where no woman finds herself pregnant with a child she did not plan.

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