How important is education in reducing abortion rates?
My suspicion is it’s extremely important. Let’s take the case of Buffalo, a city that had so many years of protests and violence and where a doctor was shot. The abortion rate in Buffalo and Eerie County declined by 30 percent in the 1990s. Why did it decline? One of the reasons was stated clearly in 2002 by the Buffalo News, “Blunt sex-ed effort cuts teen pregnancy.” You had more after school programs that emphasized not just sexual abstinence but also talked about things like contraception and sex. That’s just a reality that has to be confronted if we want to be serious about reducing the number of unwanted and unplanned pregnancies, particularly to young people who did not grow up knowing what the consequences of sex may be. The irony in Buffalo is that in the late 1980s, you have these massive demonstrations to prevent women from going into clinics to have abortions, but simultaneously you have no comprehensive sex education in the curriculum of public schools and one of the highes
