"A total of 854,122 legal induced abortions were reported to CDC for 2002 from 49 reporting areas, representing a 0.1% increase from the 853,485 legal induced abortions reported by the same 49 reporting areas for 2001."

Extrapolating from the data in the CDC and AGI reports, it is estimated that more than 47 million unborn children have been killed since the 1973 Roe. V. Wade ruling.

"Every year, on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, pro-lifers add up the fetuses killed since Roe and pray for the outlawing of abortion. And every year, pro-choicers fret that we're one Supreme Court justice away from losing "the right to choose." One side is so afraid of freedom it won't trust women to do the right thing. The other side is so afraid of morality it won't name the procedure we're talking about.

It's time to shake up this debate. It's time for the abortion-rights movement to declare war on abortion.

...The problem is abortion - the word that's missing from all the checks you've written to Planned Parenthood, Naral Pro-Choice America, the Center for Reproductive Rights and the National Organization for Women. Fetal pictures propelled the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act and the Unborn Victims of Violence Act through Congress. And most Americans supported both bills, because they agree with your opponents about the simplest thing: It's bad to kill a fetus.

They're right.  It is bad....

...When the question is "what" instead of "who"-morality instead of autonomy-pro-lifers win.

The lesson of those decades is that you can't eliminate the moral question by ignoring it. To eliminate it, you have to agree on it: Abortion is bad, and the ideal number of abortions is zero."

Editor's note:

While we disagree with Mr. Saletan's asserted solution, namely, more and "better" contraception, it is good to finally see the elephant in the pro-choice living room identified. ~Karl John Shields

Very few of the children of mothers imprisoned for drug offenses have experienced life in an intact family.  The imprisoned mothers are likewise usually strangers to healthy family life.  The intergenerational family chaos that typically surrounds mothers incarcerated for drug abuse receives much-needed attention in a study recently published in The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse by a team of scholars at the Social Research Center in Baltimore.

Parsing data for 167 Baltimore mothers incarcerated for drug offenses, the researchers find few with marital ties:  more than two-thirds (69%) were single, and almost one-fifth (17%) were either separated, divorced, or widowed.  Less than one-eighth (14%) were "either married or involved in a long-term relationship."

But the family disarray in which these drug-abusing mothers have lived began at least a generation earlier.  The researchers highlight "two generations of family influences having a bearing on [the] development and subsequent adjustment" of these drug-abusing women.  That is, not only have these women failed to form stable families, they themselves were "victims of adverse circumstances in their lives related to a breakdown in the integrity of their families of origin and a consequent degradation of the parental guidance and emotional support they received during their early development."  The researchers stress that almost two-thirds (62%) of these drug-abusing mothers were born to "natural parents [who] had either separated or had never lived together."

More than two-fifths (41%) of the these women grew up with their mother as "the sole supporter" of the family, and more than a quarter (26%) had "no father figure [at all] in their lives."  And sadly but predictably, the women in this study have not been able to escape the malign influence of growing up in such fractured homes; consequently, "the family circumstances now faced by their children are remarkably similar."  "As were their mothers," the researchers remark, "the children are also exceptionally vulnerable to negative influences outside the home, the protection from such risk ordinarily provided by the family having been compromised."

Americans have all too much reason to fear that for the children of these drug-abusing mothers, two generations of family chaos will soon become three generations of such chaos.  Certainly, it is hard to be optimistic about the future family prospects of children raised by mothers who know more about prison officials than about husbands or married parents.