By Jennifer Vogt-Erickson

Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.

Do people know that Roe vs. Wade wasn’t the start of abortions? Rather, it virtually marked the end of women and girls dying from abortions.

In 1930, abortion was listed as the cause of death of nearly 2,700 women. By 1960, the number of official deaths had dropped to less than 200 — thanks to better medical care and antibiotics, not a decrease in abortions. Poor and minority women were a disproportionate number of the dead.

And that was the worst of the carnage. Women and girls also experienced uterine perforation, sepsis, hemorrhaging and permanent infertility.

What drove hundreds of thousands of women to seek illegal abortions or self-induce abortions every year even though they faced serious, life-threatening risks? This is what we need to understand in order to reduce demand for abortion.

First, can we agree that everybody in the mainstream wants fewer abortions? Some pro-lifers say that pro-choice people “celebrate” or “applaud” abortions. Both Jay Nordlinger and Jake Curtis used this language in the National Review Online earlier this month.

Jake Curtis stated, “We can give in to the pressure from the Left and celebrate the act of ending innocent life, or we can focus on supporting those women who are willing to sacrifice so much to bring into being the next generation.”

This is a false dichotomy, which Lauren Barbato rejects in her pledge to Catholics for Choice, a campaign supporting public funding for abortions. She states, “There aren’t ‘bad’ women who have abortions and ‘good’ women who are mothers. They are the same women.”

Even more pernicious, using the term “celebrate” is, whether intentional or not, a nod to extreme pro-lifers who link abortion procedures with witchcraft and ritual child sacrifice. Historic fear of women who question patriarchal authority (a behavior equated with disobedience to God in the Bible) often bubbles into the rhetoric.

Thus, a key difference between pro-life and pro-choice positions really comes down to whether women possessing complete control over their bodies is the source of the problem or the answer to the problem of abortion.

Even though we only have estimates of abortions before they became legal nationwide in 1973, there are possibly fewer abortions taking place now than 50 years ago. This is in large part due to contraceptives being more effective and more widely available.

To continue reducing abortions from their peak in 1990, we should try to follow the example of countries like Switzerland, which has one of the lowest rates of abortion in the world. Swiss women can easily access abortion in the first 13 weeks of pregnancy. What keeps their rates so low when they have so much control over their uteruses?

The answer — and this is pivotal — is simply low rates of unintended pregnancy. (In the US, 4 in every 10 unintended pregnancies end in abortion.) Swiss health experts point to sex education, access to effective contraception and low poverty as the reasons for their success in reducing unwanted pregnancies and therefore abortion.

We can fully implement the first two things fairly easily. Reducing poverty will be tougher. Even if a woman isn’t in poverty when she becomes pregnant, having a baby can easily put her and her baby in poverty.

This is the main reason African-American women in Minnesota are more than twice as likely as white women to have an abortion — not because they’re “targeted” by the so-called “abortion industry” but because they are more likely to be poor.

Here are some of the things we could offer in order to reduce poverty for women:

• Affordable or free child care

• Raise the minimum wage

• Equal pay for equal work

• 3 to 6 months of paid maternity leave

• Free prenatal, birth and postnatal care

• Free health care for children

Increase affordable housing (It’s a major foothold for economic stability, and only 25 percent of households who qualify get it.)

The U.S. has another serious problem that could be ameliorated by these same efforts. Maternal mortality rates are ticking up. Most of the U.S.’s peer countries are under 10 deaths per 100,000 live births, whereas the U.S.’s rate is nearly 18. Black women in the U.S. have a rate of over 40.

Pro-life politicians are so focused on blocking women’s access to reproductive services that women who want to keep their babies are dying more frequently — easily 400 more women dying per year than what we should expect if we equaled our peers. Many of these women leave behind babies and older children.

If voters want to reduce abortions and maternal mortality, we know from our peer countries how to get the best outcomes. Democrats’ policies are most likely to produce these “pro-life” results.

Making abortion illegal will not stop abortion, but it will block many women — especially poor women and women of color — from access to safe abortions and other reproductive care.