Religion & Law

My wife and I moved to New York City while she was pregnant, and we were struck by a couple of incidents.  At her first doctor's appointment, the receptionist asked upon check-in whether my wife planned to proceed with the pregnancy.  And at a McDonald's playland, another mom whom she had just met asked if she was planning to "have the baby."  The apparent absence of a strong, though usually unspoken, presumption against abortion was jarring.  The statistics bear this out, as laid out by William McGurn today in a WSJ column:

After crunching the latest statistics from New York City's Health Department, the foundation reported that 41% of pregnancies (excluding miscarriage) in New York ended in abortion. That's double the national rate.

So again the question: As a society, does this figure say anything about the choice between a baby and abortion? Even for those who believe the choice for an abortion belongs to a woman alone and ought to be unfettered by city, state or federal law, is there any ratio such a person would say is too high?

The question becomes even more compelling when broken down by race. For Hispanics, the abortion rate was 41.3%?i.e., more than double the rate for whites. For African-Americans the numbers are still more grim: For every 1,000 African-American live births in New York, there were 1,489 abortions.