Bishops’ Aide Shrugs Off Report on Abortion Rate

A spokesman for the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops this week dismissed a new study showing that Catholic women proportionately have as many, if not more, abortions than other segments of the population.

The study failed to “gauge the degree of active involvement in the church” by women seeking abortions, said Father John Gouldrick, director of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Office for Pro-Life Activities.

He said such surveys are inaccurate because Catholics “who have drifted away from the church often describe themselves as Catholic” while those of other denominations “define church membership strictly in terms of active religious conviction.”

Near National Average

The target of Gouldrick’s comments was a report issued earlier this month in “Family Planning Perspectives,” a research publication of the Alan Guttmacher Institute, which found that “the abortion rate among Catholics was close to the national average.”

“Women who identified themselves as Protestants were less likely to be having an abortion than were women generally,” the Guttmacher report said, adding that Jewish women “also appeared to have a below-average abortion rate, although the degree of uncertainty in the index for this group is high because of the small number of Jews in the sample.”

According to the survey, 32.1% of all American women are Catholic and 31.5% of all abortions in 1987 involved Catholic women. Protestant women, who make up 57.9% of all women, accounted for 41.9% of 1987 abortions.

Gouldrick cited a 1981 survey by Catholics for a Free Choice, an independent Roman Catholic group that supports the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing most abortions, which showed results similar to those of the Guttmacher Institute.

But, Gouldrick argued, in that survey, “further investigation revealed that most of the women initially identified as Catholics actually described themselves as ‘non-practicing’ Catholics or as ‘ex-Catholics.’ ”

‘Their Only Choice’

“We must also recognize the social and economic factors that may exert pressure on women to have abortions,” he said. “Poor women, many of whom are Catholics of Hispanic background, are often told that abortion is their only choice.”

The Guttmacher study did not deal with the question of whether any women are told that “abortion is their only choice” but its survey did find that Latino women, many of whom are Catholic, have a higher abortion rate than non-Latino women.

Gouldrick said what the Guttmacher study actually shows is that “those who set themselves loose from the moorings of a religious community’s moral guidance are more likely to equate what is legal with what is moral.

“Our legal system has been teaching for 15 years that abortion is a fundamental right, and many women, some Catholics among them, are more influenced by this teaching than by the teaching of the church in which they grew up.”