Abortion: The New Hip Birth Control

I was looking up some stats on Nation Master and as is often the case the data they have is amazing so you get lost. I was originally looking up some other health statistics, but then I saw a link to abortion and curiosity got the best of me and so I asked myself "who has the most abortions?" Based on a per capita basis it is Russia (ironically the country that has such birthing and demographic trends it will cease to exist in 50 years) with a shockingly high 19 abortions per thousand people.


I then saw below a link to another chart, Abortions per 1,000 births. ie-for every 1,000 births how many abortions were there. Thinking it would be around 10-19 or so like the abortion rate I was shocked to find the average was around 223 in the US (state data only was provided) and an amazing 706 abortions per 1,000 births in our beloved capital, Washington, D.C. ie-on average 12% of pregnancies in the US end in abortion and in DC over a third.


Now I genuinely have no skin in the abortion debate one way or another and if anything I am tacitly pro-choice (for reasons we shan't delve into here). But even though I am pro-choice, with 706 abortions per 1,000 births, it doesn't seem like abortion is being used as a desperate last resort, it seems it's almost the first line, conventional form of birth control. What appalls me about this is whether you're pro-choice or pro-life, you have to admit it is not "desired" to kill something that could feasibly be a human life. ie-that abortion is something you try to avoid and only use as a last measure. But apparently, a lot of people have no moral qualms or problems with having abortions. That there's no thought given to "gee, I don't know if it really is a human life. You know, maybe I should go on birth control or something so I never have to make the decision to have an abortion in the first place." Alas, this is not the case in DC and a couple other places where abortion just seems to be as morally equivalent to getting a tetanus shot. And dare I speculate, a much more expensive form of birth control than a condom?