By Dave Andrusko
Editor’s note. My family and I will be on vacation through September 6. I will occasionally add new items but for the most part we will repost “the best of the best” — the stories our readers have told us they especially liked over the last five months. This first ran August 12.
The news from North Dakota just keeps getting better and better.
The latest numbers from the state Department of Health reveal that the Red River Women’s Clinic in Fargo, the state’s lone abortion facility, performed 98 fewer abortions in 2015 than it did in 2014—1,166 as compared with 1,264.
That represents an 8% decline and the lowest figure since record keeping began in 1981.
Previously the lowest number of babies lost to abortion was in 2013—1,182. In 1982, the number was almost unimaginably high: 3,076.
“Of the abortions performed in North Dakota last year, 822 of the women were from North Dakota, 280 were from Minnesota, 55 were from South Dakota and nine were from other states,” according to Mike Nowatzki of Forum News Service.
According to Nowatzki,
Medora Nagle, executive director of the anti-abortion group North Dakota Right to Life, said she believes efforts to educate women about alternatives such as adoption and the “brutal” nature of abortion procedures have contributed to the decline in abortions.
Speaking as president of the North Dakota Catholic Conference, Bishop John Thomas Folda of Fargo said in a statement that 6.77% of pregnant women in North Dakota had abortions in 2015 — the lowest percentage since 1998, the year that statistic started to be tracked.
Bishop Folda, Nowatzki reported,
said the downward trend “is a testament to the hard and often difficult work of pregnancy centers, adoption agencies, maternity homes which have expanded and touched so many women and children during these years. It is also a testament to the commitment of North Dakotans to the culture of life at every level.”
The Associated Press provided demographic breakdowns. Except for women over 40, teenagers had the lowest number of abortions with women ages 20-24 accounted for the most abortions in North Dakota.
“The health department said 974 of the women who had abortions last year were not married,” the AP’s James McPherson reported. “More than half of the woman who had abortions had at least one living child, and most have at least a high school education, data show.”