Mark Kirk: “I reluctantly rise today to urge my colleagues to oppose this amendment. Recent research shows that voluntary family…”

“I reluctantly rise today to urge my colleagues to oppose this amendment. Recent research shows that voluntary family planning reduces abortion. Two separate studies, one by the RAND Corporation in Bangladesh and one by Princeton demographers in Kazakhstan, show the same conclusion: Abortion rates fall when contraception is prevalent. Mr. Chairman, across the former Soviet Union, abortion was the principal method of birth control under Communism. Princeton University studied Kazakhstan through the 1990s, looking at the effect of increased access to voluntary family planning. The results are clear. Contraceptive prevalence increased by 50 percent since the beginning of the 1990s, while abortion decreased by the same amount. 'The proposition that the occurrence of abortions can be reduced by increases in the use of contraception has been demonstrated again in the analysis of data from the 1999 Kazakhstan Demographic and Health Survey,' said Charlie Westoff, Princeton University's demographer. This amendment will not reduce abortion but the real way to reduce abortion is to increase voluntary family planning.”