Number of Abortions Decreases by 1.9 Percent
In Germany compared to last year, that is, according to Destatis, the German federal statistical office (press release). The absolute number of abortions in 2012 was 106.800.
These two figures were widely reported this week (e.g. F.A.Z., Welt, dradio). What ticked me off about this piece of news was the total lack of context. By that I don’t mean moral guidance with regards to abortions, I mean a set of data that allows the reader to put their spontaneous reaction into perspective. Some of my first thoughts were “106.800 abortions is a lot”, “fewer women are opting for abortion”, “a 1.9 percent decrease sounds like good news”, but results may vary based on personal values.
On the Destatis website it takes about 30 seconds to find the number of lives births in Germany in 2011: 662.685 (last year data are available – for some reason it takes them less time to get the number of abortions than the number of live births). So for every six new borns there was one abortion.
In fact, the variation of the ratio of live births to abortions might tell us whether the choice for abortion changed over time. One has to be careful here, though, because the number of abortions might vary over time because people who don’t want (more) kids get better at avoiding unplanned pregnancies thus changing the demand for abortions even if the fraction of unplanned pregnant women who choose abortion is constant. Similarly those that want kids might become increasingly infertile and have fewer kids on average, which would also skew the number of live birth per abortion without any underlying change with regards to abortion. But for the sake of the argument have a look at the figure below.
So whatever the reason, after a bit of a boom in the early noughties, with those pregnant today abortions are about as (un)popular as they were in the mid-nineties . However, the absolute number of abortions back then was about 20 percent higher than today – as was the number of live births (see next figure 2). Of course correlation is not causation, so the parallel decline of the two figures could have totally unrealted causes for reasons discussed above.
This is where the last piece of the puzzle comes in: The number of those that get the majority of pregnancies going (men and women between the ages of 20 and 40) has been decreasing more or less continously over the period considered (see figure below) – in fact it has been decreasing by about 1.7 percent per year. So a decrease of 1.9 percent in the number of pregnancy is actually not really news – it is mostly simply what you would expect given the change in the number of people having sex and assuming they are being as stupid about it as ever – which is probably a pretty good assumption.
