Source: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/abortion-...
"Despite considerable declines in recent decades, the U.S. adolescent pregnancy rate, at 57 per 1,000 in 2010, is the highest in the developed world outside the former Soviet Bloc. The next highest rate is in New Zealand (51 in 2010)."
https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/adolescent-pregnancy-a...
That said, it probably has a lot to do with pregnancy rates. Singapore has a very low rate yet access is pretty wide open. Most of that a legacy due to fear of overpopulation (they had a “stop at 2” policy for quite and while and like China, are now panicking about low birth rates).
They're... not though? Your entire premise doesn't seem to have any basis here, see ex. [0]. The US rate doesn't look dramatically different than anywhere else. It's almost identical to Sweden or Australia. Plenty of Eastern European and Asian countries are higher. The US doesn't even make the top 10. France and England are lower but not dramatically so. And a lot of the countries that claim it's low in official stats are clearly full of it, with abortions merely happening illicitly with no report.
0: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/abortion-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_pregnancy#Epidemiol...
Unintended pregnancies (UPs) per 1000 women ages 15–44 years old by year and region:
- 1990-1994: 66 European average vs. 50 in North America
- 2010-2014: 41 European average vs. 47 in North America
Specific countries report numbers differently:
- Britain 2013 "16% of British pregnancies are unplanned, 29% are ambivalent, and are 55% planned"
- France 2008 "33% of pregnancies are unintended"
- Sweden 2013 "12% of pregnancies were fairly or very unplanned"
- USA "slightly less than half (45%) of U.S. pregnancies in 2011 were unintended".
Of course, UPs are not the same as abortions. Many abortions are due to an UP (USA: "Over 92% of abortions are the result of unintended pregnancy"), but not all UPs result in abortions (USA: "In 2001, 44% of unintended pregnancies resulted in births, 42% resulted in induced abortion, and the rest in miscarriage.").
Looking just at abortions, Estonia has the fourth-highest* rate with 33.3 whereas Belgium has the lowest at 7.3. Europe is all over the place (and it's not as if abortions are illegal or deemed immoral in Belgium, quite the opposite). USA is at 20.8. These figures are per 1000 women from https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/abortion-...
So are abortions "so common"? Dunno, it seems quite high when looking at a the area I'm from (max(NL/BE/DE)=10) but it's also not through the roof.
* Most countries don't have a known value for abortions though, like most of Africa/Latam/Southeast Asia and all of South America, so take "fourth highest" with a huge grain of salt.
Furthermore, birth control is not 100%. You can do everything right and still get pregnant.
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_statistics_in_the_U...
Some in the Republican party want states to be able to ban birth control as well. [1]
[1] https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/columnists/nancy-kaffer/...
EDIT: Link to PDF about sex education in Texas https://tfn.org/cms/assets/uploads/2015/11/Report_final_web....
Holy shit, that's even more backwards than my poor backwater Eastern European country where the Orthodox church still has big influence. Teaching sex-ed to kids and giving them free condoms is becoming the norm.
How is this possible in such a wealthy, educated and developed country?
No alcohol before 21, no sex before 18, etc., American kids must be going nuts over there.
This was unpopular enough with the rest of his party that he had to give up on it. One of the main objections was that since HPV is sexually transmitted protecting against it would encourage kids to have sex.
That is of course a ridiculous objection. You'd be hard pressed to find an actual horny teen couple for whom the risk that sex would lead to cervical cancer 30 years later would be something they would consider when deciding how far to go.
Regular birth control measures are available. You might not be able to afford it, though, for example: If you'd rather have birth control pills, you need to be able to afford a visit to a doctor first and that doctor may require a pelvic exam even though it isn't necessary for it. Condoms are sold at most gas stations, pharmacies, and grocery stores but I'm not aware if they'll send you condoms for free. You don't have a right to sterilisation (even after 25), so a doctor can simply refuse (it isn't unheard of for a doctor to tell a woman no if she doesn't have children - even if it will improve her health - or require her to talk to her husband about it).
You also have a situation with poor sex education. So while condoms are available, how to use them properly isn't as known. Instead of information, you generally get slut shamed and told you need to wait until marriage, and then the message is that birth control isn't an issue for you then. A lot of time was taken to tell us about diseases, too, but not necessarily that some are fairly easily treated or aren't as horrible as they made it seem.
"The United States ranks first among developed nations in rates of both teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. In an effort to reduce these rates, the U.S. government has funded abstinence-only sex education programs for more than a decade. However, a public controversy remains over whether this investment has been successful and whether these programs should be continued. Using the most recent national data (2005) from all U.S. states with information on sex education laws or policies (N = 48), we show that increasing emphasis on abstinence education is positively correlated with teenage pregnancy and birth rates."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_abortion_...
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/abortion-...
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/abortion-...
which does show many comparable countries, but it seems like much of the info is from ~10-15 years ago.
Here's a Google search result for per-capita data: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/abortion-....
The US is not noticeably better or worse than other countries supplying data; certainly in the same ballpark as the UK, Canada and Sweden. The US is much larger than those countries in absolute population, so the raw # is larger.
There's likely more variance, though, since some groups and individuals are much less likely to abort, whereas others are much more likely. The latter involves, partly: contraceptive perceptions, access, poverty, among others.