By Dave Andrusko
Greg Pfundstein Executive Director of the Chiaroscuro Foundation.
The Chiaroscuro Foundation Tuesday contributed once again to its yeoman work showing how prevalent abortion is in New York City. The Foundation, a not-for-profit organization that supports alternatives to abortion, released a detailed breakdown of abortions by zip code, based on ten years worth of detailed data provided by the New York City Department of Health.
The backdrop is New York City’s 40% abortion rate which is nearly double the national average, a fact to which the Chiaroscuro Foundation has drawn attention since the 2009 data were released in January of 2011. (See here.)
“We believe this new map is an even more powerful tool for concerned New Yorkers to understand and begin to address the problem on the most local level,” said Greg Pfundstein Executive Director of the Chiaroscuro Foundation. Full data tables are available at nyc41percent.com.
In a release the Foundation found that the zip code with the highest ratio at any point in the period was in a lightly-populated Queens area “with 16 abortions and 6 live births for a ratio of 72.7%.” In addition, “Several sparsely populated zip codes had ratios well above 60% on several occasions in the 10 year period, but zip codes with substantial populations and larger numbers of both abortions and births tended to top out at about a 60% abortion ratio and go down from there toward the citywide ratio of 41-43%.”
Another important finding is that in every year in the period, more than half of all abortions were repeat abortions,” ranging from a low of 52.83% in 2007 to a high of 57.41% in 2001, with an average of 55.49% over the period,” according to the Foundation.
The Chiaroscuro Foundation is hoping to lower the number of abortions in New York City over time by working with New Yorkers and organizations who agree that the rate of abortion in New York is too high. “Sixty-four percent (64%) of New Yorkers believe the abortion rate is too high in New York City – including 57% of pro-choice women – according to a poll conducted by the polling firm McLaughlin & Associates for the Foundation earlier this year,” according to the release. “Seventy four percent believe that the overall 60% abortion rate in the African American community is too high.”
Your feedback is very important to improving National Right to Life News Today. Please send your comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com. If you like, join those who are following me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/daveha