For a brief period as a teenager, I had an online relationship with another teenager. Her name was Vicki and she was from Georgia. Near Atlanta, but definitely not in Atlanta; she lived in rural Georgia, in a place where literalist Christianity was the norm and overt racism was completely acceptable. I visited once; suffice to say, I was very thankful that Jewishness, unlike Blackness, isn’t visible.
I stayed in touch with Vicki, in a friendly manner, on-and-off for a number of years, as each of us grew up, got married, had kids, etc. Around the time that my wife and I decided to try for our first child, I mentioned this to Vicki, that we were “trying,” that we’d chosen to start a family. Vicki was completely perplexed by the concept. Trying? She asked. Who “tries” for a pregnancy? You just have sex and eventually you get pregnant and then you’re parents.
She earnestly believed this is the way it must be. Although Vicki’s parents were married, they had never intentionally gotten pregnant, or at least, this is what they told their kids. Vicki was a “mistake,” as were her older sister and younger brother. Happy mistakes, but mistakes nonetheless. To her, that was not only the norm — it was the only way procreation took place.
This cultural gap isn’t one that we talk about a lot, but it definitely became starkly apparent to me from this conversation (one of the benefits of meeting people online is exactly this: learning about cultures outside one’s own — in this case, rural Southern culture). In my milieu, that of upper-middle-class NYC Jews going to private schools and private colleges, pregnancy is almost always planned, often meticulously. Where I come from, many women in their 20s freeze their eggs, spending huge amounts of money on keeping them safe, a decade or two before deciding to have children. That is the degree to which pregnancy, in my world, is planned.
And it isn’t just pregnancy that we plan; it’s many of the basic biological experiences relating to both life and death. I have fathered exactly two pregnancies, both of them intentional (one of which took a fair amount more trying than the other). In both cases, the birth itself was induced; doctors believed that we needed to deliver (safely at 37 weeks), and so that cliche “rushing to the hospital because your wife is going into labor” is one I never experienced. Instead, both births were, effectively, planned and managed and controlled. Similarly, I have, to date, had two grandparents die, and in both cases, they were removed from life-support — that is to say, a choice was made to let them die. In the case of the two most personal births and the two most personal deaths in my life, the timing and nature of the event was chosen, by family and doctors. I know this is hardly the case for everyone, and that Fate often plays a far greater role in both life and death than it has in my experience so far; still, I imagine that in some regions of the country (and the world), my story is far less common than in others.
With this in mind, I decided to look into the data around planned pregnancies. The CDC actually collects this data; they keep information on “the percentage of women with a recent live birth who did not want to become pregnant or wanted to become pregnant later.” The national average from 2021 is around 30%, but with some digging I was able to find and sort the state-level data.
Here are the 5 states with the fewest per-capita unplanned pregnancies in 2021: Vermont (20%), New Hampshire (21%), Utah (22%), Minnesota (23%), Oregon (23%), and Hawaii (23%). Yes, I know that’s six, but there was a tie, what can I do? The question, of course, is what sets these states apart, and it’s not an obvious answer. Vermont and New Hampshire are geographically close but culturally very different; one is conservative, the other liberal, and NH has twice the population density of VT. Utah, of course, speaks for itself; say what you will about the Church of Latter-Day Saints, but this would seem to be in line with their worldview (even if what it really means is that Mormon girls simply are coached to want to become parents sooner). The more traditional liberal states, MA and CT and CO, all have rates similar to these; some of the “blue” states that trend a little higher are RI (29%), PA (32%), and oddly enough, DE (35%). (If I had one of those “I did that!” Joe Biden stickers, I might put it here, but sadly half the country wouldn’t get that it would be sarcastically).
But unsurprisingly, here are the five states with the most per-capita unplanned pregnancies: Alabama (38%), Tennessee (38%), Louisiana (41%), Florida (42%), and of course, Mississippi, with a whopping 47% of pregnancies being unplanned. These numbers are a lot, lot higher than what you find in most of the country. Again, this is no surprise, but it’s good to have the data to back it up (for 10 states, the data is sadly unavailable; frustratingly, this includes Ohio, Texas, and California).
It might seem that the lesson here should be, as it’s often been in the liberal media lately, “Oh, how sad, woe are we, and woe are they, the women being abused in these states.” That would be a just feeling, but I think there is a far more important conclusion to be drawn from this unsurprising data. There is, apparently, a cultural difference at play; it’s not only about access to abortion, but whether or not it is normal in one’s culture to plan pregnancies at all. If we take the MIssissippi data at face value, it means that if you know someone who’s pregnant in Mississippi, odds are almost 50/50 that she didn’t plan on becoming pregnant. And these statistics, by the way, would almost definitely leave out many “accidents” that happen in marriage; that is, a married couple that already has kids, messes up on birth control, gets another pregnancy and chooses to keep it. While such pregnancies are likely to be carried to term even by radical liberals in radically pro-choice states, they’re still part of a culture of “unplanned” pregnancies, and if they’re happening around you when you’re growing up, then you, like Vicki, will think that they’re normal, and that this is just how procreation happens: Randomly, according to God’s plan, and without the ability to plan it, much less prevent it.
And if you grow up in that environment, not only is unplanned pregnancy normalized, but the odds become increasingly likely that you yourself are the product of an unplanned pregnancy. And this really is the crux of the issue, and the current culture war, that I think we’re not considering. How many Republican anti-choice voters were, themselves, unplanned births? Anti-choice advocates are always talking about the embryo, the fetus, as if it’s already a person, and deserves rights (more rights than the mother) “from the moment of conception,” and we dismiss their concerns as religiously-based, morally and scientifically invalid, and irrelevant to the condition of a mother forced to provide life support without her consent and at great danger to herself. Yet we are perhaps missing one of the main motivations, even if it’s a subconscious one, for this feeling: That if you, and many of the people you know, were once that “unwanted” embryo, it’s easier to identify with the embryo than with the mother — especially with a mother who would choose not to be pregnant, which again is a choice that few, if any, people that you know have made.
I submit, simply, this: That the culture of affluent or aspirational America is one where control over one’s life is paramount. We choose our colleges, we choose our careers, we choose our mates, and we choose when to have children (and if, and how many). Many of us may also choose, in some way or another, when and how to die. Our lives are defined by these choices, by our freedom to choose and our freedom to be who we are, to express our individuality, our sexuality, our own personal idea of what a family, and what a life, should look like. But not all Americans live, or think, this way at all, and it’s not because they’re evil or hateful (well, yes they are, but they don’t start out that way). It’s because they have never seen or imagined living like that. They are surrounded by accidental birth and accidental death, by marriage out of necessity, by going to state college if any college, by falling into whatever job was available. If you lack the freedom to make your own choices, for your whole life, it would make sense that you wouldn’t understand, and might even be repelled by, the philosophy that everyone should be free to make such drastic and fundamental choices about their lives. And if you, yourself, only exist because that choice was made for your mother, and not by her, I think that the whole conversation about abortion has a far different, and far more personal, implication.
I’m not trying to imply that everyone who was the product of an unplanned pregnancy is likely to be anti-choice, or the inverse; obviously, the data does not support the overly-simple conclusion that Blue and Red states are diametrically opposed in this way. It’s not so much about the individual person’s heritage or home state as it is about the culture one is born into. I think that planned pregnancy, planned family, and planned life in general is still a very foreign concept to tens of millions of Americans, and like my old friend Vicki, it’s unimaginable to the point of being almost insulting that one could choose to “plan” things that are supposed to be left up to God to plan.
For all of this wistful pontificating, do I have a prescription? Yes, but you’re not going to like it, mostly because it’s horrifically slow. My hypothesis is simply this: That people who have the experience of choice over the course of their lives, and who were born by choice to happy parents and raised with the ideal of choice, are far more likely to be pro-choice. The eventual solution to this culture war, like so many others, is to raise an entire generation with more (even if only incrementally more) choices than the one before. This, of course, means that the progressive legislation we’ve long wanted — more affordable schooling and housing and healthcare, better pay and benefits, etc. — remains key, and remains hard to achieve, but the tactical point that I’m making is that the culture-war issues, despite being horrific and deadly at this very moment, are not the root of the problem, and will take care of themselves if we right the economic imbalances that force people to normalize a lack of choice in their own lives. If we make abortion legal again by brute force (as we did in 1973), there will still be this powerful undercurrent, a huge portion of the country that lives without choice and can’t even wrap their heads around how life choices even work, much less why they are good.
The data on Mississippi, where half of all pregnancies are unplanned, comes from before Roe was overturned. That is to say, the legality of abortion notwithstanding, many people in this country would never consider abortion, and until they are able to at least consider it for themselves, they damn sure won’t consider it for others. We need to improve their lives, not argue with them about a culture they can’t change. If the next generation is raised in a culture of fear and poverty and choicelessness, none of these problems will go away. Our goal must be to ensure a safer, more secure, more open next generation, because after we’re gone, they will be the ones choosing the direction of the nation and the world — or, as the case may be, suppressing choice altogether.
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