Giuliani's 'implied' link between increase in adoptions, decrease in abortions 'unsupportable,' opinion piece says

The link "implied" by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R), who is running for the Republican presidential nomination, between an increase in the number of adoptions and a decrease in abortions in the city is "unsupportable," Cory Richards, senior vice president and vice president for public policy at the Guttmacher Institute, writes in a Los Angeles Times opinion piece.

According to Richards, Giuliani in a speech last week to social conservatives stated that when he was mayor, New York City "increased adoption by 133% over the eight years before [he] came into office." Guiliani added that the city "found that abortions went down by 18% during that period of time" and that he believes such figures can be achieved nationwide, according to Richards (Richards, Los Angeles Times, 10/29).

Giuliani has also said that adoption rates rose during his eight years as mayor because of tax credits and programs such as adoption fairs and "Adoption Saturdays," which recruited judges to help finalize adoptions on weekends (Kaiser Daily Women's Health Policy Report, 8/7).

The increase in adoptions Giuliani refers to is children in the city's foster care system and "not in the rate at which women were continuing unwanted pregnancies and placing their infants for adoption rather than having abortions," Richards writes. Efforts to facilitate adoptions deserve "strong support," but they do "nothing to affect the abortion rate," Richards writes, adding, "To assert that it does is either ill-informed or simply cynical, and it should stop."

According to Richards, increasing the "rate of completed adoptions ... is irrelevant to the abortion rate," because even if voluntary infant "relinquishments doubled, and each of them represented an averted abortion, it would make hardly a dent in the abortion rate" in the U.S. "Behind virtually every abortion is an unintended pregnancy," Richards writes, concluding, "The sooner politicians accept that the only way to meaningfully achieve fewer abortions is to do better in helping women and their partners prevent unintended pregnancies in the first place, the better" (Los Angeles Times, 10/29).