Member Since: 12/15/2011
Posts: 9,940
|
Christian lawyer: Gay marriage will cause abortion increase
Quote:
The Christian lawyer who unsuccessfully defended Utah's ban on gay marriage has said legalizing gay marriage will cause 900,000 abortions.
Gene Schaerr made the claim in an amicus brief filed with the US Supreme Court on behalf of '100 scholars of marriage.' The court will hear arguments on gay marriage from four states on 28 April.
"On the surface, abortion and same-sex marriage may seem unrelated. However, as explained in an amicus brief of 100 scholars of marriage, filed in the pending Supreme Court marriage cases and summarized here, the two are closely linked in a short and simple causal chain that the Supreme Court would be wise not to set in motion.
Even in the short time that same-sex marriage has been officially recognized in some states at home and abroad, man-woman marriage rates have declined.
In a nutshell: A reduction in the opposite-sex marriage rate means an increase in the percentage of women who are unmarried and who, according to all available data, have much higher abortion rates than married women. And based on past experience, institutionalizing same-sex marriage poses an enormous risk of reduced opposite-sex marriage rates."
Schaerr said legalizing same-sex unions would devalue marriage and cause fewer straight couples to marry.
This in turn would lead to a larger number of unmarried women, who have abortions at higher rates than married women.
'Nearly 900,000 more children of the next generation would be aborted as a result of their mothers never marrying,' he wrote in the brief. 'This is equal to the entire population of the cities of Sacramento and Atlanta combined.'
When questioned by a Washington Post reporter, Schaerr admitted that he could not prove the two were related but said there were 'theoretical reasons' such causation might occur.
'It is still too new to do a rigorous causation analysis using statistical methods,' he said.
|
READ MORE
|
|
|
|
