The Scholars And Lawyers Who Believe Gay Marriage Causes Abortion

Candida Moss

An amicus brief filed by conservatives opposing gay marriage is ridiculous, but there is a link between same-sex nuptials and abortion—it’s just not what you think.

On April 2, a group of 100 conservative lawyers and university professors filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court arguing, in part, that marriage equality will cause 900,000 abortions over the next 30 years. The claim may come as a shock to those who completed seventh grade and are under the impression that pregnancy was the result of sex between a man and a woman.

The argument, as summarized by former Antonin Scalia clerk Gene Schaerr, who served as the brief’s author, is that “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.”

The brief is accompanied by swaths of empirical evidence demonstrating that, in fact, in countries where same-sex marriage is legal, opposite-sex marriage declines. The problem, Christopher Ingraham points out in a piece in The Washington Post, is that the “chain of logic does not prove causality.” The decline in marriage rates in states where same-sex marriage is legal, which is adduced as proof that it is harmful, ignores the fact that marriage rates are on the decline everywhere and have been for decades.

Even if the statistics were indisputable (and Ingraham points us in the direction of some important counter-evidence), there’s no real way to link the legitimization of same-sex marriage and abortion. Correlation, as everybody’s high school history teacher used to say, is not causation.

more
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/26/the-scholars-and-lawyers-who-believe-gay-marriage-causes-abortion.html